Michel Houellebecq’s shifting representation of Islam

Introduction

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), published on the very day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, has generated public outcry and a ‘war of interpretations’ ¹ engaging writers, literary critics and philosophers. The fierce debate around the significance of Submission is the last episode of the Houellebecq affair: his use of polemic representations of Islam and Islamophobic humour has even led to legal battles. ² However, literary critics and commentators have generally overlooked the fact that Houellebecq’s representation of Islam has shifted significantly. He turned from an unmitigated secularist vision hostile to Islam to regarding it as the religion of the future.

In this article, I propose an interpretive reconstruction of Houellebecq’s shifting portrayals of Islam by teasing out their implicit socio-theoretical assumptions. I distinguish between two stages of Houellebecq's representation of Islam: in earlier novels, Islamic monotheism is pitted against capitalism and is fated to die out (Platform, 2003); The Elementary Particles, 1998a; The Possibility of an Island, 2007). This vision has an ambivalent relation to mainstream secularist assumptions: the death of God does not generate the inexorable decline of religion in modernity; to the contrary, an ongoing spiritual mutation leads to a godless religion positive (Auguste Comte). ³ The new religion overcomes Islam as it gives a better expression to the dynamic of capitalism, and is able to recast the religious longing for immortality through the promise of genetic revolution.

In Submission and his latest interventions, Houellebecq has turned to a ‘post-secular’ vision ⁴ opposed to Enlightenment and secular modernity, and has re-evaluated Islamic monotheism as a way out of personal crisis and Europe’s decline. This new scenario has humorous and parodic elements, yet it is not a dystopian warning against the rise of an authoritarian political theology. The post-secular and anti-modern turn is, to an important extent, paradoxically driven by the radicalization of positivist ideas based on evolutionary biology: radical positivism leads Houellebecq to rejecting modern values (individual freedom, human rights, equality) as illusions, and to re-evaluating Islam from the perspective of its socio-evolutionary advantages. ⁵

In the following, I proceed in three steps that correspond to Houellebecq’s novels in which Islam plays a substantive role (Platform, The Possibility, Submission). Platform and The Possibility represent the first stage of Houellebecq’s trajectory: they build an antagonism between Islam and global capitalism, and posit a difficult quest for mutual love and freedom as individual ‘redemption’ beyond religion. In a third step, I argue that Submission proposes a counter-Enlightenment vision of Islam, and not a subversive Orwellian dystopia cautioning against the advent of Islamist political theology (III).

I The first scenario: Between capitalism and Islam (Platform)

Islam makes its first substantial appearance in Houellebecq’s Platform. ⁶ Platform is an ‘autofiction’ centred on Houellebecq’s typical middle-aged man in crisis due to aging and vital decline. He has an anodyne job in the mid-1980s France ‘at the time when the illustrious Jack Lang was distributing wealth and glory to the cultural institutions of the State’ (Platform [hereafter cited as P]: 33). The protagonist whose name remains unknown ⁷ is growing ever more estranged from work, family and society. His crisis is set, according to Houellebecq’s common procedure, against the decay of the western capitalist society: as Cruickshank notes, the crisis scenario of Platform conveys the anxiety in front of globalizing capitalism, and the changing role of France in this process. ⁸

Houellebecq nicely captures the protagonist’s alienation: ‘(a)nything can happen in life, especially nothing’ (P: 265). Still, something of significance does happen. He decides to go on a trip organized by the travel agency ‘Nouvelles Frontières’ [New Frontiers] where he meets and falls in love with Valerie. Valerie works as manager and strategist for the tourist industry, and builds a successful career. The novel’s exploration of the capitalist tourist industry is important for the question of Islam: the background context against which the novel’s plot develops is the antagonism between the forces of global capitalism and Islam. In Houellebecq’s vision, today capitalism is epitomized by the tourist industry: ‘Nouvelles Frontières – born at the dawn of the leisure society – might stand as a symbol of the new face of modern capitalism. In the year 2000, for the first time, the tourist industry became – in terms of turnover – the biggest economic activity in the world’ (P: 37). The tourist business personifies the central paradox of the western capitalist society: it is hugely successful and capable of spreading worldwide, but it represents a failure as a societal project, generating alienation and the unravelling of social relations. The novel’s protagonist reflects: ‘For the West, I do not feel hatred; at most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what’s more, we continue to export it’ (P: 460).

The protagonist enters, however, the ‘capitalist game’ by helping Valerie to design market strategies. Valerie adopts his unscrupulous idea of shifting mainstream tourist strategies towards the local sex industry; she is generally successful but this strategy fails in Muslim countries. Islam is presented as an ‘absurd religion’ (P: 319) – a life-denying religion that restricts sexual pleasure. In a business trip to Egypt, he meets an Egyptian biochemist; he records in detail the biochemist’s tirade against Islam:

Above all, he wanted to convince me, Egyptians were not Arabs. ‘When I think that this country invented everything!’ he exclaimed gesturing broadly towards the Nile valley. ‘Architecture, astronomy, mathematics, agriculture, medicine’…‘Since the appearance of Islam, nothing. An intellectual vacuum, an absolute void…Islam could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do – pardon me – than bugger their camels. (P: 320)

The portrayal of Islam and capitalism in Platform constitutes the large canvas on which is painted the love story between the protagonist and Valerie. This unexpected love is a life-changer: he decides to quit his job in Paris, to leave France for good, and to move to Thailand with Valerie. Love is the remedy of his existential crisis: ‘Strangely, and without in the least deserving it, I had been given a second chance. It is very rare, in life, to have a second chance; it goes against all the rules. I hugged her fiercely to me, overwhelmed by a sudden desire to weep’ (P: 407). While he seems to himself a product of a society in inexorable decline, love gives him the possibility of personal ‘redemption’: ‘It was far from certain that society could continue to survive for long with individuals like me; but I could survive with a woman, become attached to her, try to make her happy’ (P: 426).

But there is no way to insulate personal existence from society: the dream of ‘redemption’ and happiness is short-lived. The clash between the two social forces – capitalism and Islam – encroaches on their lives in Thailand. As their blissful life on the Pattaya beach is connected to the sexual tourist industry, Muslim terrorists attack the beach’s tourist establishment, and Valerie is murdered. The terrorist act retaliates against the tourist strategy of the Aurore group (Valerie’s employer), which encouraged prostitution, including the prostitution of minors. ⁹ The main character’s first reaction to Valerie’s murder is sheer hatred:

Islam had wrecked my life, and Islam was certainly something which I could hate; in the days that followed, I devoted myself to trying to feel hatred for Muslims…Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child or a pregnant Palestinian woman had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm at the thought that it meant one less Muslim. Yes, it was possible to live like this. (P: 446)

Platform offers little more than spite against Islam, though it alludes to an ongoing ‘spiritual mutation’ (P: 384). Platform’s scenario is built on a triadic ‘field of forces’ (Islam, capitalism and Romantic love), which shapes the construction of Houellebecq’s next novel, The Possibility of an Island. The Possibility builds a more complex image of religion and Islam by fully developing Houellebecq’s insight that we are on a threshold of a spiritual mutation. ¹⁰

II The second scenario: Capitalism, Islam and ambivalent secularism (The Possibility of an Island)

The Possibility follows a familiar Houellebecqian narrative scheme: it is centred on a middle-aged man (Daniel) fixated on his inexorable vital decline; his destiny is pursued against the backdrop of a broader civilizational crisis of Europe. Like Platform, The Possibility takes aim at the crisis of global capitalism, yet it gives a central place to religion both at the personal level (as an answer to the quandary of decay and mortality) and the social (as necessary for any durable societal project). ¹¹

Daniel is a showman, comedian and occasional filmmaker; he becomes a controversial public figure and makes a small fortune out of his performances. It is in relation to these performances and their ‘light Islamophobic burlesque’ (The Possibility [hereafter cited as PoI]: 55) that the question of Islam first surfaces. ‘Light burlesque’ is a severe understatement: ‘We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts’ and ‘Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine!’ are examples of Daniel’s gross parodies. He decides to introduce ‘a touch of anti-Semitism’ in these shows to compensate for their ‘anti-Arab nature’: ‘it was’ – he explains – ‘a wise route to take’ since this led him to making

…a porn film, or rather a parody of a porn film – a genre that, it’s true, is easy to parody – entitled Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler). The actresses were authentic Arab immigrant girls, guaranteed to originate from the hardest Parisian suburbs – sluts but veiled, just the right type; we had filmed the outside shots at the Sea of Sand, in Ermenonville. It was comical – a rather elevated form of comedy, that’s true. People had laughed; or at least most people. (PoI: 55–6)

Daniel speaks of his radical and frank atheism (Pol: 328), yet he resonates with an ongoing spiritual mutation: the decline of the belief in God is supplanted by an atheist religion adapted to capitalism and centred on genetic engineering. Houellebecq’s insight about the coming of a religion without God breaks with mainstream secularist assumptions, namely with the belief that modernity causes the gradual disappearance of religion. Echoing Houellebecq’s Comtean credo, Daniel reflects that no societal project is sustainable without religion (PoI: 233). As Comte argued, the modern age needed a new scientific religion (‘the positive religion’) that broke with the dogmas, the blind faith and the prejudices of pre-modern religion. Houellebecq and his literary alter ego (Daniel) repeatedly invoke Comte and his ideas about the continuous salience of religion: first, religion is not a lie but a ‘necessary fiction’ (Pol: 350), indispensable for sustaining any social project across generations. Second, religion gives voice to an essential human need: the desire for a ‘second chance’, and for overcoming mortality. This need is, for Houellebecq, at the core of religion, and a central reason for its permanent significance. Rather than causing the dissolution of religion, scientific modernity breathes new life into this age-old yearning for a ‘second chance’ (PoI: 452) through the idea of genetically engineered rebirths. The cult of Elohim gives voice to this idea; it combines initially unauthorized genetic research into human rebirth and the religious belief in resurrection with the goal of realizing the age-old promise of salvationist religions: immortality as the infinite extension of bodily life.

Islam emerges in this context as an intermediary stage between the fall of Christianity in Europe and the gradual takeover of Elohimism. At first, atheism becomes widespread in a Europe in the grip of individualist capitalism and the collapse of Christianity. Islam is the counter-force to capitalism and new is the cult of Elohim; the clash between Islam and capitalism echoes Platform, yet now Islam is represented not as an ‘absurd religion’ but as a religion of austerity. This image is not necessarily derogatory: Islam is the last stronghold against the glorification of the body and materialism in capitalist societies. Still, in order to fight capitalism and its religious expression (the cult of Elohim), Islam has to create a compromise niche for sinners who do not live up to its norms of austerity, and adapt to the logic of consumerism:

…the expansion of Islam was only made possible thanks to the introduction of a series of compromises, under the influence of a new generation of imams who, inspired by Catholic tradition, reality shows, and American televangelists’ sense of spectacle, developed for the Muslim public an edifying script for life based on conversion and forgiveness of sin, two notions that were, however, relatively foreign to Islamic tradition. (PoI: 446)

Elohimism is, in opposition to Islam, constructed as a parodic ‘positive religion’: it is perfectly adapted to a ‘leisure civilisation’ (PoI: 459) for the cult of Elohim is an ‘amoral’ and utilitarian religion that fuses the triumph of unconstrained consumerism, the hope of salvation, and technological development. Although its promise of immortality is not immediately realized, after a number of generations scientific research succeeds in creating a genetically improved species – the neo-humans – on the basis of DNA storages. In Houellebecq’s dystopia, the neo-humans are zombie-like creatures living lonely, humour-less yet calm and safe lives. They do not go out of their solitary flats and are freed from the restlessness of desires leading to suffering and destruction (PoI: 481).

Not unlike Platform, The Possibility points towards meaningful experiences that transcend the opposition between Islam and capitalism (including Elohimism as the religious expression of techno-capitalism). The title of the novel itself designates metaphorically this ‘transcendence’ as ‘the possibility of an island’. Daniel and his last neo-human reincarnation (Daniel 25) search for mutual love, and ultimately rebel against religion’s promise, revealing it – in a scenario tributary to secularist premises – as a form of alienation and unfreedom. Daniel longs for love in his relationships with Isabelle and Esther: Isabelle offers him love but not sex (an essential ingredient of it), while Esther offers him sex but not love. Although Daniel ultimately fails, the search for a worldly ‘redemption’ is vital for him. Likewise, Daniel formally converts to Elohimism but he is recalcitrant to religious regimenting. True to himself and his convictions, Daniel assumes with courage the last consequences of his physical degradation, and commits suicide. The reaffirmation of individual freedom emerges from the confrontation with one’s mortality. ¹²

This scenario gives a more nuanced vision of the significance of religion than Platform. In his interviews in this period, Houellebecq assumes, like Daniel, the death-of-God thesis; however, he also pursues Comte in breaking with the secularist belief that modernization generates the inexorable decline of religion. Religion is, for Houellebecq, vital for the maintenance of modern society. But while religion is necessary for collective life, it remains a form of alienation for the individual. In Houellebecq’s dystopian vision in The Possibility, individual freedom, truthfulness and love are opposed to religion. As in Platform, the individual is estranged from religion and social life. Worldly ‘redemption’ is constitutive to personal freedom, yet it remains only a possibility or yearning in conflict with society and religion. The Possibility is at once the culmination of Houellebecq’s exploration of the transformation of religion after the death of God, and the crisis of this scenario: religion is socially necessary but ultimately revealed as a form of unfreedom.

The scenario of Submission tries out a different path that pretends to end the fracture between individual and society: in this radically changed vision, Houellebecq abandons completely the secularist assumptions as well as his Comtean belief in the positive religion. Not austerity, but submission is the key feature of Houellebecq’s new scenario centred on Islam. An anti-modern version of Islam becomes the religion of the future capable of overcoming the crisis of capitalist society.

III The third scenario: The post-secular turn and Islam as a ‘second chance’ (Submission)

The significance of the scenario of Islamization in Submission taking aim at the crisis of laïcité and capitalist modernity has generated opposed interpretations. Submission is, for some, a brilliant dystopia of our times. ¹³ The novel represents, from this viewpoint, a timely warning: Houellebecq would convey his anxiety about a new danger – Islamic theocracy – just as George Orwell was concerned with the rise of communist totalitarianism. At the opposite pole, Submission is interpreted as another episode in Houellebecq’s long-term hostility to Islam. The novel is, from this perspective, an expression of Islamophobia epitomized by Platform (see section I). ¹⁴ Nonetheless, these hypotheses are not fully convincing. The representation of Islam in Submission is, I submit, based on post-secular premises: Houellebecq completely abandons the secularist assumptions about the death of God in modernity as well as the notion of religion as a form of alienation and unfreedom. In the new script, modernity collapses and is superseded by the belief in God in its Islamic form. Far from being dystopian or even politically neutral, Submission builds the tableau of a society pivoting around a fictional total Islam capable of providing the exit from personal and social crisis.

This tableau is significantly different from the representation of Islam as an essentially stupid and violent religion denying life (Platform), or as a religion of austerity absorbed by capitalist modernity (The Possibility). However, Submission starts from a similar problematic: the personal/civilizational crisis. The novel tells the story of a middle-aged man in crisis (François) looking for a ‘second chance’; his trajectory is set against the background of the European decline. François is a literature professor at the prestigious Sorbonne in Paris who specializes in Joris-Karl Huysmans. He senses that, once in his forties, bodily strength is diminishing and vital energy is waning. He is losing faith in his intellectual vocation as a literary scholar, and even the desire for sexual pleasure is decreasing: radical solitude and the loss of the will to carry on are looming large. Still, François puts up a fight against his crisis; he searches for a remedy by emulating Huysmans, his literary hero who actually went through a similar quandary, and converted from decadent aestheticism to Catholicism. Following Huysmans, François gropes for something to believe in, and for a renovatio of his life. He leaves Paris, his home, and goes to the ‘abbey of Ligugé, where Huysmans had received the oblature’ (Submission [hereafter cited as S]: 78). Yet his stay at the monastery proves uninspiring and vexing: the food was poor; he could not smoke in his room. ¹⁵ He perceives Catholicism as the vestige of a consumed past: spiritual transformation is out of reach. François’ failure results in radical estrangement and suicidal thoughts.

François’ predicament is interconnected with Europe’s broader crisis. In Submission, Houellebecq develops this leitmotif with meticulous detail, mostly through Rediger’s theories and François’ scattered musings. Rediger is a recent convert to Islam: he is a theorist capable of religious experience and, at once, an opportunist quick at taking advantage of the conveniences of his new station. Rediger repeatedly invokes Nietzsche to explain the causes of the crisis and propose a remedy. Claiming to tap into Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modern decadence, Rediger argues that Europe has become weak and incapable of asserting its own will; Christianity, a long-term cause of Europe’s decay, is the religion of the weak – ‘women’s religion’. The Christian faith is centred, for Rediger, on a ‘decadent, marginal personality’ who indulged in and was deeply influenced by the ‘company of the women’ (S: 326). Nietzsche would, in Rediger’s view, have supported the Islamization of Europe as a cure to the feminine decadence brought about by Christianity and its offspring, modern humanism, democracy and universal human rights:

This aristocratic position [Rediger’s] came, this time, directly from Nietzsche; Rediger had stayed remarkably loyal at heart to the thinkers of his youth…‘If Islam despises Christianity,’ he [Rediger] would say, reprising the author of The Antichrist, ‘there are a thousand reasons for it; Islam places men first…’ The idea of the divinity of Christ, reprised Rediger, was the fundamental error, inevitably leading to humanism and ‘human rights.’ Nietzsche had also already said this, and in stronger terms, so he would no doubt have also agreed with the idea that Islam’s mission is to purify the world by ridding it of the noxious doctrine of the incarnation. (S: 326)

In this process, the Sorbonne becomes an Islamic university and professors like François are thrown out for not being Muslim. François witnesses the Islamization of the university and society at large with detachment and indifference. And yet François – despite his previous failure to connect to Catholicism – ends up converting to Islam. The trigger of François’ puzzling conversion to Islam is his encounter with Rediger, the new convert and rector of Sorbonne. Neither Rediger’s Nietzsche-inspired theory of civilization nor his religious insight is decisive in François’ conversion. This is ultimately due to the impact of Rediger’s comfortable and pleasurable lifestyle – surrounded by obedient younger women, living in a luxurious house, tasting exquisite food and drinking first-class wine. The perspective of Rediger’s attractive material life and his magnetic energy draw François out of existential lethargy. François describes the moment when he confirms to Rediger his decision to convert:

He (Rediger) would lightly exaggerate his own joy, most gently, so as to seem surprised and that I would find him to be an impartial judge. For I knew that he would be so very pleased about my acceptance, when truly he had already taken it for granted for some time, perhaps even since that afternoon when I stopped by his place on Rue des Arènes – I had never sought to hide the effect that Aïcha’s endowments had on me, nor Malika’s warm little morsels. (S: 335)

This scenario is, despite its humorous touch, not a dystopia or full-fledged parody cautioning against the danger of a new authoritarianism. Orwell’s dystopias are literary critiques of the rise of a new totalitarian power that destroys individual freedom and equality. In turn, Submission is severed from these vital principles of Enlightenment and political modernity. It is symptomatic that François is actually content to give up autonomy and responsibility so as to join the new comfortable life: ‘[F]uck autonomy, I had to admit that I had given up all responsibility of professional or intellectual nature without difficulty, and even with a great relief’ (S: 270). François is opaque to moral doubts or considerations: it does not occur to him that having sex with his very young students is a repeated abuse of authority. When he and many of his colleagues are abusively thrown out of work for not being Muslim, he does not respond with moral indignation and resistance. If anything, he feels relieved. No questioning occurs of other violent impositions of the theocratic regime. Submission does not raise the question as to whether the patriarchate’s comeback is desirable and fair to women, or whether it could ever be built without massive violence against them. Women are submissive and devoid of rights, individual freedom and identity – they are passive and voiceless instruments of man’s pleasure.

Houellebecq’s view of Islam as the religion of the future should be connected to Houellebecq’s recent proclamations against Enlightenment and modernity. It is true that Houellebecq questions the values of Enlightenment and modernity from his first novel onwards; his first novel, Whatever, is already an indictment of the way modern liberalism and individualism bring about atomization and alienation. ¹⁶ However, in Submission and his latest interventions, there is a double novelty: Houellebecq radicalizes his earlier criticism by proclaiming the death of Enlightenment, laïcité and political modernity; furthermore, he proposes an Islamic monotheism as a way out of this crisis. Houellebecq’s belief in the death of modernity is, ironically, largely driven by one fashionable modern ideology – biological and evolutionary scientism. This positivist reductionism is crucial to Houellebecq’s abandoning of the death-of-God thesis and the one-sidedly hostile image of Islam. The positivist ideology absolutizes the explanatory power of biology and evolutionary theory: from its standpoint, the principles of individual liberty and rights are nothing more than intellectual illusions. They are comforting inventions that camouflage what is really at stake: biological and evolutionary mechanisms. Moreover, these inventions are damaging since they undermine community, religious life and the family. ‘Modern society’ and ‘modern religion’ become, from this novel perspective, oxymoronic: the modern attack on communal, religious and family bonds leads to the undoing of social relations; ‘modern society’ and ‘modern religion’ produce atomism and atheism, and ultimately destroy the basic will to biological self-reproduction. As Houellebecq states in analysing the consequences of the modern project: ‘Atheists are condemned to disappear. Those who live without religion do not reproduce themselves…Reproduction is, rationally speaking, impossible to justify in an individualistic life…we deduce that our individualistic society will cease to reproduce itself.’ ¹⁷

Islam provides the proper counterweight to this suicidal drive of modern Europe: ‘Persons reproduce when there is a structure that pushes or obliges them to do so…Islam's victory is simply predictable for demographic reasons.’ ¹⁸ Islam has the advantage of keeping God ‘safe from reason’, ¹⁹ that is, from the quest for certitudes. It is precisely the modern quest for rational certainties that undermines the belief in transcendence, and gives a fatal blow to religion and social cohesion. The modern project of society has contaminated European Christianity; this has let in the Trojan horse of modernity (science, individual rights, equality, etc.) and is vertiginously declining. But since no society is, for Houellebecq, sustainable without religion, ²⁰ an anti-modern religion becomes a necessity for Europe’s survival.

Houellebecq’s anti-modernism reflected in Rediger’s belief system has deep affinities with the tradition of reactionary and organicist thought inaugurated by Joseph de Maistre. De Maistre saw Enlightenment and humanism as an arrogant rebellion against God and nature generating chaos and threatening social order. As a reaction, he advocated a return to the patriarchal society built around Christian religion, tradition and family. In Houellebecq’s scenario, Islam takes the role Christianity had for old reactionaries in reversing the ‘repugnant decomposition’ of western Europe (S: 330). Echoing de Maistre, Rediger claims that arrogance is at the core of the modern project and its Christian source. The Trojan horse of modernity has been born and bred within the Christian civilization: ‘there is’ – says Rediger – ‘at the heart of atheist humanism a pride, an incredible arrogance. And even the Christian idea of the incarnation, at heart, speaks to an almost comical pretension. God is made man…Why wouldn’t God incarnate himself as an inhabitant of Sirius instead, or of the Andromeda galaxy?’ (S: 302).

In Submission, Islam represents the opposite to the arrogance of Christianity and modernity: its ‘spiritual’ orientation is – advocates Rediger – captured by the meaning of ‘Islam’: submission. Submission does not merely refer to the individual relation to das ganz Andere. Submission shapes worldly social practices in the light of the relation to God. In the new Europe, submission is to permeate all layers of life – social, political, personal, given that it cements social relations, and gratifies members of society. ²¹ In contrast, for Houellebecq, the sexual revolution, the ‘liberation’ of women, and the equal individual rights generate perverse consequences: deep frustration and bitterness in both men and women, and the undoing of social relations. The consequences of modern emancipation represent a theme that Houellebecq explores in Whatever, The Elementary Particles and The Possibility; yet in Submission Houellebecq draws a radical and new conclusion: since modern emancipation is a total fiasco and religion is necessary for the functioning of society, Islam acquires – as the religion of submission – a new positive role. As Houellebecq argues: ‘Islam works well in France. The woman is obedient and this facilitates the life of men as well as that of women. This thing works.’ ²² Since submission is a central nerve of good social functioning, Islam cannot but be adequate for the preservation of society and its basic cell, the family. Islam as the religion of submission becomes the religion of the future.

Houellebecq acquiesces to François’ adaptive conversion to the new Islamic hegemon. ²³ Houellebecq portrays François’ new life as centred around his easy access to women or, to be more precise, ‘girls’ [filles]. There is, in this picture, a characteristic touch of provoking and parodic humour. But humour neither plays the role of critical unmasking (as in The Possibility) nor is it simply Islamophobic (as in Platform). It signals, first, a distance between François and Islamic belief and values: he does not turn into a faithful reactionary (as de Maistre), as he does not take religion completely seriously. Islam matters not as a specific faith worthy in itself, but as the external form of the collective drive of self-assertion. Deflationary comicality does not debunk the conversion as a farce any more than François’ opportunism turns it into a failure. Conversion is a successful adaptation: incapable of spiritual transformation, adaptation is as far as François’ search for a ‘second chance’ can go.

François’ life as a Muslim is, like his conversion, a caricature of sorts: his Muslim life boils down to the stereotypical reverie of a man surrounding himself by obedient and satisfied teenage girls: ‘Each of these girls, as beautiful as she is, will feel happy and proud to be chosen by me, and honoured to share my bed. They will be worthy of being loved…’ (S: 325). The ‘difficult freedom’ (Levinas) in a pluralist society is, in Submission, exchanged for an escapist fantasy of a homogenous pre-modern community; in this new community, the decadent bourgeois turns into a small sultan with his harem. In this fantasy, women are associated with weakness, obedience, impurity and Christianity, while men with strength, rule, purity and Islam. Houellebecq is, characteristically, relishing provocation; his politically incorrect humour and images goad left-wingers, feminists and progressive Muslims and advocates of a modernized European Islam. But the repetition and amplification of clichés do not have the function of subverting them. Far from building a critical dystopia, Submission upholds a conversion garnished with ageing male phantasies and clichés. Paradoxically, Houellebecq commends Islam as the religion of the future by means of Islamophobic and sexist imagery.

Conclusion

In Houellebecq’s earlier novels, Islam is portrayed either as an absurd and violent religion (Platform), or as a religion of austerity (The Possibility). Despite the complexity of the scenario of the future transformation of religion in The Possibility, this is built on secularist premises: religion is necessary for society but ultimately represents a form of individual alienation.

The scenario of Submission is, in contrast, built on implicit post-secular assumptions: Islam as a religion of submission ‘reconciles’ the individual and the society through the abandonment of the illusion of individual freedom. In Submission, the secularist dichotomy religion/individual freedom is dissolved with the aid of a positivist ideology that draws on evolutionary biology. Houellebecq’s vision remains stuck into unsustainable paradoxes. First, he defends the salience of Islam as the religion of the future by means of Islamophobic images and a caricature of Islam’s complex relation to modernity and gender. Second, the scenario of Islamization is premised on the paradoxical mix of positivism and an anti-modern political theology. This anti-modernism defended with radical-modern tools allows Houellebecq to turn on its head the classic dystopian vision of totalitarian power and annihilation of individual freedom. Radical positivism reveals, in this way, its de-humanizing consequences.

In the final analysis, while Houellebecq is very keen on proclaiming the death of laïcité, his vision mirrors the impossible laicist dream of a homogenous polity hostile to religious freedom and pluralism. Rather than a representation of the likely future of Islam in a pluralist Europe, Submission is the symptom of radicalization of a double crisis: the crisis of an ageing man incapable of spiritual transformation that is characteristic of Houellebecq’s literature, and the crisis of a laïcité hostile to Islam.