In 2010 I started to co-write a humor book called Eurabia 2050: An Infidel’s Travel Guide. It posed as a harmless Fodor’s atlas of the “Eurabian Union,” which arose after a massive wave of Muslim immigration to Europe. It was full of passages such as the following:

There is so much to learn in the countries loosely bound together in the Eurabian Union — so much history, culture, and natural beauty. Important architectural works survive in many Eurabian cities from the European jahiliyya (age of ignorance) — for instance, some magnificent pre-Islamic worship spaces that have now been beautifully restored and redecorated as mosques. Other architectural marvels of jahili Europe remain untouched by the period of unrest that is now mercifully a part of Eurabian history, and are in surprisingly good condition. Still other monuments of ancient “Christendom” remain as ghosts of a mythical, mystical past, akin to the Indian burial mounds or Aztec pyramids that remain in the Americas.

Visitors to Rome will marvel at the massive Mosque of Victory, with its grandiose “Baroque” architecture made all the more impressive by its stark, whitewashed walls. They can tour the crowded streets of the Christian Ghetto, wash down the now-rare Roman specialty sandwich the “porchetta” (pork sandwich) with a glass of (pricey imported!) red wine, and even visit the charming New St. Peter’s, the quaint chapel that serves as the “basilica” for the Christian pope! There you can to meet and chat with the pope himself as he putters about, unlocking the church door and lighting the candles for one of his religious services, or sweeping up after the conclusion of one of these charming rituals straight out of another era!

New St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome’s historic Christian Ghetto.

The book would have gone through each of the countries in Europe, highlighting its pre-Muslim past, and recounting the myriad ways in which the new Islamic majorities had imposed sharia upon the dwindling, aging remnants of Christian Europe.

I couldn’t find a publisher. Perhaps it seemed too fantastical, too gloomy and alarmist. Of course, if I tried to put the book out now, no one would see it that way. In fact, it might be passé. Note to political scientists: When crackpot satire turns into humdrum reportage in less than ten years, it’s a sure sign that the elites in charge of society have completely lost their minds.

Is the Byzantine Past the European Future?

Hagia Sophia, 2016 (iStockphoto)

Of course, we don’t need to imagine St. Peter’s Basilica turned into a whitewashed mosque to get the flavor of what a Eurabian future would be like. All we need to do is read about Constantinople — once the vibrant capital of half the Christian world, it was ground down after centuries of dogged struggle and conquered by the Turks in 1453.

Those Sunni Muslim conquerors took the most magnificent church ever constructed, the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom — named for the Holy Spirit) and after sacking the place transformed it into a mosque. The Christians in Constantinople, and then throughout the Balkans, in one conquered land after another, were turned into quasi-slaves. (Read Bat Ye’or’s The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam for the grim details.)

Their churches couldn’t ring bells, they couldn’t hold public office, they had no voice in government, they were subject to crushing taxes — and every few years, Turkish soldiers would come and “harvest” all the baby boys in Christian villages, stealing them to raise as eunuchs or Muslim soldiers. For more than 400 years, Christian peoples in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Romania and other lands were trampled into the dust — in between periodic massacres, when Turkish soldiers got out of control. Twice the Turkish armies besieged and almost conquered Vienna. Had they done so, the tide of sharia would have washed over Western Europe centuries ago.

The anti-rationalism of Islam, and the tribal cronyism that mired the Ottoman government in hopeless inefficiency, very gradually shifted the military advantage to Christian countries. By the 18^th century, the Ottoman Empire was a byword for backwardness and tyranny. The Habsburg Empire and Russia clawed back little pieces of Christendom, and the beaten down peoples of each occupied country began to fight for their independence — which they paid for in torrents of blood, as Turkish troops butchered them by the hundreds of thousands, only stopping when British or Russian gunboats sailed into view.

As the Ottoman Empire declined and shrank, and fought on the losing side of World War I, fervent Turkish nationalists schemed to take over the government. They also planned for genocide against “disloyal” Christian minorities, such as the Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, and Chaldean Christians in regions the Turks still controlled. When the nationalists, led by Kemal Ataturk, took power in 1923 they set about smashing the institutions that they had seen holding Turkey back — principally, the suffocating power of Muslim institutions. They banned the hijab, abolished the Caliphate, kicked clerics out of power, started educating women, and left power firmly in the hands of a militantly secular army. And Turkey began to make progress. Its economy grew and diversified. It joined NATO, and seemed like a natural candidate to enter the European Union.

Sharia Returns to Europe

But that was before the resurgence of radical Sunni Islam around the world, funded by massive subsidies from oil-rich Saudi Arabia — which has acted like a Communist International for its totalitarian version of radical Sunni Islam (Wahabism). Saudi money built mosques, and staffed them with carefully vetted Wahabi radicals, all around the world — from Turkey to South America. The dirt-simple, thuggishly plausible Islamist answer to post-modern questions began to sway the disaffected masses in the poor parts of Turkey. And so in the 1990s, with U.S. support for “democratic” reforms, the Islamist parties began to creep back toward power.

The current president, Tayyip Erdogan, is a full-on radical Muslim. Women have been forced back into the clothing that marks their subservience. The ground-down, tiny minority of residual Christians in Turkey has been prevented from rebuilding churches. Christian pastors are getting arrested. Turkey is rediscovering and celebrating its brutal Ottoman past. Turkey is blackmailing Europe with the threat of millions more colonists (“refugees) from the conflict it helped stoke in Syria.

And now we learn that Hagia Sophia, which the Young Turks made a museum, open to visitors of every faith, is being turned back into a mosque, as PJ Media reports.

But Europe’s elites — including many of its Christian leaders — respond to the upsurge of angry, Islamist aggression by lashing out at those Europeans who dare to speak up for the freedom and safety of their children. Thousands of such patriots are now on government watch lists, banned from posting on social media, prevented from getting on airplanes. Some even face the threat of imprisonment. They are being silenced as Solidarity was silenced in Poland in 1980, by governments that know they are betraying their own people. Let us pray that the people kick them out of power before it’s too late.

I’d better get back and finish my satire book before it ends up as Non-Fiction.