








im presence in the former colonial powers of France and England has long been much more pronounced. And indeed, it is the Muslim factor, first and foremost, that arrests the attention of many Europeans. For them, transfixed by the ancient rivalry between Musselman and Christian, Europe s very identity hangs in the balance.
The anxiety is nothing very new. Surely such a Manichean vision infused the peculiar prophecy that Ernest Renan, France s pre-eminent theorist of nationalism, offered in the fateful year of 1848.  Since the Aryan race and the Semitic race ... are destined to conquer the world and restore unity to the human species,  he wrote,  the rest of the world counts, alongside these races, only as experiments, obstacles, or auxiliaries. 	 
Almost a century and a half later, Patrick Buchanan, a leading spokesman for American nativism, made a similar prediction in characteristically apocalyptic tones.  For a millennium, the struggle for mankind s destiny was between Christianity and Islam; in the 21st century, it may be so again For as the Shiites humiliate us, their co-religionists are filling up the countries of the West. 	6
The old story, with new twists
And so the question naturally arises: will these concerns be un abated 150 years hence? Will the nativists  direst prophecies be
fulfilled? At this point, it might be worth distinguis tween two, not wholly consistent, sources of concern.
First, there is the charge that these immigrants a truly integrated into western societies, so inimical are t res and collective allegiances. They are happy to take vices and benefits of their prosperous host countries warned, but foil to extend their loyalties to them. As i mond, an Oxford historian, expresses the apprehensii one thing to deal with immigrants, even great masses who see the new host society as admirable and the plac future prosperity, as scores of millions of new arrivals last 200 years have viewed the United States; it is quite to come to terms with newcomers who reject many of tenets of the society into which they are entering. 
It will not do to dismiss these concerns out of hai would be mistaken, I think, to make too much of their allegiances? Of coufse but this is hardly anything m manufacture of the modern nation. Gascon or Frenc or British? Catalan or Spanish? The answer has nc been obvious; for some, it still isn t.
Then, too, the terms of argument about the  Mt tor  are reminiscent of the language in which the  Jeu tion  was debated in England a century and a half ago Babington Macaulay s swingeing 1831 essay,  On the < abilities of the Jew," can be read today with a sense oi  It has always been the trick of bigots to make theii miserable at home, and then to complain that they relief abroad; to divide society, and to wonder that united; to govern as if a section of the state were the w to censure the other sections of the state for their patriotism. 
One thing to remember; most of those third-world who are in the West chose to be there. Intruders in o The 1989 Gulf war provided a test whose results shot lost on us. It was a time when French officials survt large Arabic population, with so many unemployedyt worried about violent acts of protest, sabotage, terroi fears proved groundless. A perfect proving ground seilles, a city where 100,(XX) residents are classified t grants , and where unemployment among young ad hovers around 40%. Both support for Saddam Hu opposition to the war ran high among its Arab popul the crisis passed without so much as a demonstratic
But if some fear that the West's new Muslim cor will prove to be social immiscibles gravel in the ethi for others, it is the prospect of integration itself th Since integration, historically, is a two-way street, ger gration would seem toentail the transformation not' immigrant, but of the  host  nation as well. This is l sort of concern we face, and, I think, a deeper one.1 Charles Moore gave voice to an undoubtedly widesp ment when he wrote in a Spectator editorial in 1991. basically English-speaking, Christian and white,  starts to think that it might become basically Urdi and Muslim and brown, one gets frightened and ah this speaks to the West s growing identity crisis: to th of who  we  are and will be.
Undoubtedly the Islamicisation of the West, to that it happens, will usher in changes. But they wt r the sort that conservatives fear. Most immediate y. rennial Kulturkampfbetween foith and secularism, oflslam will fortify the side of faith the side wi w
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49. Blood and Irony
cultural conservatives in the West have allied themselves. In this sense, the Muslim from South Asia or the Maghreb has more in common with his God-fearing Christian opposite from the Home Counties than with his secular compatriot.
An unexpected pattern of alliances, then, may be in store. In American cities, many Muslims of third-world origins staunchly support vouchers for private school tuition and an array of key  family-values  issues, including opposition to abortion, pornography, homosexuality and sexual promiscuity. So the mordant irony is that cultural conservatives like Mr Buchanan may find their best hope for expanding their political base lies with those brown-skinned Muslims whose growing numbers they find so unsettling.
There are other ways in which anxious westerners misapprehend the likely impact of Muslim immigration. Again, though, it is important to proceed carefully, for there are dangers on both sides. One is to overestimate the assimilative capacity of western culture; the other is to underestimate it. We should grant that a blithely triumphalist view of western culture simply is not born out by history. It will not do to ignore the obduracy of cultural differences; yet to exaggerate their obduracy would be equally mistaken. Those who spend time among the Muslim communities of France s cities find that while the older generation tend to be poorly educated and devoutly religious, their children, the young women especially, are inclined to be as irreligious as their  western  counterparts. Most of France s second-generation Arabs seek protection against discrimination, not sponsorship of Muslim worship. What these unlikely evolues want, first and foremost, is to be allowed to be French.
What is more, western apprehensions of the impact of Islam on the West tend to be blinkered by an unduly monolithic, static conception of Islam itself. For in the longer term, there is reason to think that Islam is poised to undergo significant internal changes, changes that must prompt a re-examination of the putative clash between Islam and liberal democracy.
Actually, many Muslim intellectuals have been arguing for  Islamic modernism  since at least the mid-19th century; but increasingly, these modernists are moving away from the framework of the traditional sharia, which was developed between the 7th and 9th centuries, and seeking instead to develop a new, more humane, version of sharia based on new interpretations of Islamic texts. These clerics and intellectuals know that secularism is doomed to irrelevance for most Islamic societies, and that the most important project they can pursue is the reformation of Islam from within.
 An Islamic reformation cannot be a belated and poor copy of the European Christian model,  argues Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na im, executive director of Africa Watch, a humanrights group, and a major theorist of this movement. It will have to be an indigenous and authentically Islamic process if it is to be a reformation at all.  Dr An-Na im courageously carries on the reformist project ofhis teacher, M. M. Taha (executed by the Sudanese authorities in 1985 for his opposition to sharia), and he is joined by growing numbers. They go about their work quietly, without fuss; they issue no fatwas, capture no headlines. Maybe these are not the  Islamic spokesmen  favoured by the western media, but their message of tolerance may carry
more weight in the long run. For all the undoubted strength of the fundamentalist revival, they are making headway too. Islam will remain Islam: but the transformation of Islamic tradition cannot long be deferred.
Now, what Muslims are to Europe, Hispanics are to the United States. They have, we are told, demography on their side: between birth rate and immigration, they are the single fastest-growing component of the population. For large parts of the country, the doomsayers insist, English will become an extinct tongue: it is just a matter of time.
So what must come as a surprise to them-and what confounds nativist stereotypes is that the overwhelming majority of Hispanics in the United States actually believes that the country permits too much immigration. (Of course the impulse to close the door behind you makes a kind of economic sense: the competition for labour that immigration poses is most acute for those who have just immigrated themselves.) An even greater majority of Hispanics believes that all residents of the United States should learn English. On key issues, the newcomers are more nativist than the natives.
The nationalism vaccine
Noneofthis is meantas an adjuration to,asitwere, stop worrying and love the population bomb. What western intellectual and political leaders can properly concern themselves with is not the conservation of complexion, but the preservation, indeed, expansion, of democratic Culture. And while transnational flows can be regulated responsibly, harshly exclusionary policies the creation of  Fortress Europe -would be extremely hazardous to that culture s health. If nationalism we must have, and in some measure we must, let us plump for a modulated, liberal, embracive, self-conscious nationalism-debilitated but therapeutic, like the virus in a polio vaccine. Surely nationalism red in tooth and claw is not the only kind.
Indeed, what is striking about the dark conviction of Charles Moore and his co-religionists that national cohesion requires the preservation of racial homogeneity is how utterly unhistorical it is. In the last century, Ernest Renan went so for as to venture that  the noblest countries-England, France, lt-alv_are those where the blood is most mixed. Germany is no exception.  And in the first century of American independence the great advocates of American exceptionalism, from Crevecoeur to Margaret Fuller, found the diversity of its interminded tribes to be its foremost asset. Mixing ana hybridisation what French thinkers like to call metissage is the future, as it was our past.
At the end of the day, we cannot long escape the simple logic ofdemography. While Africa, for example, has an annual birth surplus of 15m, the European Community has an annual birth deficit of 1.2m. According to un estimates, in just 30yea the copulation of sub-Saharan Africa will exceed the com bineTpopulation of all western nations.  Most men in this world are coloured,  the great black Amencan intellectual   E. B. Du Bois once observed.  A belief in humanity means _ belief in coloured men. The future 
