The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?

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1 The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?

There is an excessive fears of an Islamic threat that have spread throughout America and Europe and threaten our basic values.This book by Doug Saunders offers a brave challenge to these ideas, debunking popular misconceptions about the effects of Islamic immigration, the beliefs, activities and growth rates of these new arrivals. He demonstrates how exactly the same arguments and political reactions greeted earlier religious-minority immigrant groups, especially Jews and Catholics. Above all, he provides a set of concrete proposals to help absorb these newcomers and make immigration work. Rather than responding to our neighbours with fear and resentment, this book shows us how we can make this change work to our advantage.

Since September 11, 2001, a growing chorus has warned that Western society and its values are at risk of being overrun by a tide of Islamic immigrants. The “Eurabia” movement has popularized a set of assumptions about Muslim immigrants to the West: that they are disloyal, that they have a political agenda driven by their faith, that their high reproduction rates will soon make them a majority. These beliefs are poisoning politics and community relations in Europe and North America–and have led to mass murder in Norway. Rarely challenged, this movement’s claims have slipped into mainstream politics.

In this book ,Saunders examines the real lives and circumstances of Muslim immigrants in the West: their politics, their beliefs, their observances and their degrees of assimilation. His work will become a vital handbook in the culture wars that threaten to dominate North American and European elections and media discussions, and will provoke considerable debate over the nature and best ways of engaging with our polyglot societies.

Content :

ONE: POPULAR FICTION

In the scribblings of a terrorist, the entire history of an idea: How a set of obscure ideas and fringe misconceptions exploded after Sept. 11 into a popular myth that overtook media, publishing, activism and mainstream politics.

TWO: THE FACTS

A dispassionate look at the realities of Muslim immigration: The numbers, the growth rates, the successes (and failures) at integration, the causes and consequences of extremism and terrorism. Drawing on voluminous new research, this offers a set of facts to inform arguments — even if those facts sometimes contradict this book’s thesis.

Population 38
– Integration 61
– Extremism 82

THREE: WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

Every time a large wave of religious-minority immigrants reaches the West, the same things happen. When Roman Catholics from Southern Europe and Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe reached Western Europe and North America, they encountered the same difficulties with integration, and almost exactly the same political and literary responses: They, too, were an impossible-to-assimilate alien civilization supposedly bent on takeover.

– The Catholic Tide 113
– The Jewish Tide 125

FOUR: WHAT WE OUGHT TO WORRY ABOUT

To say that immigration poses no threat is not to say that all is well. Rather, we should turn our attention to the genuine problems and challenges of immigration, culture, religion and the progress of the world. That these challenges are not a deluge or an onslaught does not make them any less real.

– The Invention of the Muslim People 139
– The Problem of Integration 144
– The Privatization of Religion 150
– Escaping the Prison-House of Culture 158

The details of this book has been obtained from the official website of muslimtide

About Doug Saunders

His first book, Arrival City, has been published in eight languages. It was the winner of the $35,000 Donner Prize for public-policy books, and was one of the five finalists for the Lionel Gelber Prize, honouring the world’s best book on international affairs. He lives in London, England.He writes a weekly column devoted to the larger themes and intellectual concepts behind international news, and has won the National Newspaper Award, Canada’s counterpart to the Pulitzer Prize, on four occasions.