Here’s my book review of Submission by French novelist Michel Houellebecq.

Submission is a cautionary near-futurist tale about the quiet takeover of the French government by a new political faction led by the Muslim Brotherhood. The book is both fact-based and speculative. Following in the genre of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the year is 2022. The book’s narrator Francois is a middle-aged professor of literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. In his personal life, he’s lost interest in most people and things, and he is a member of his community. He is both politically apathetic and spiritually atheist. He represents the bored, educated class, which lacks nothing in material comforts and feels detached from any form of social participation.

The Islamist takeover occurs when the routine electoral process goes haywire. In the parliamentary system of France, as in many other democracies, multiple political parties are both sizeable and factional. As a result, it is rare for any single party to garner more than half the popular vote. So after the election, the candidate with the most votes must negotiate with the leaders of the opposing parties to build a consensus – a working majority in a process called forming a government.

And that’s what happens here, except that the Muslim Brotherhood now has about 20% of the electorate, a share comparable to the predominant right-wing party and to the Leftist progressives. The progressives want nothing to do with the other two. And so they link up and in a parallel that will not be lost on anyone in Europe or the United States.

It turns out that, other than religion, the Islamists and the Rightists have a lot in common. They both want to return to patriarchy, reassertion of family values with the wife’s role primarily as homemaker, and mistrust if not hatred of nonbelievers. And that’s just what France gets in their new leader, Mohammed bin Abbas, whom the narrator describes as looking like a kindly fat grocer. But bin Abbas is not only an Islamist. He’s also a crafty politician, a capable and pragmatic diplomat, and an ambitious dictator with an ego the size of Napoleon’s.

His backers. It turns out, include the Saudis, who proceed to buy up even more of European state assets, including the Sorbonne itself. Professors must now convert to Islam, as historically they had to profess Catholicism. If they do, their salaries are tripled, and matchmakers are appointed to find them multiple teenage wives, recruited from the student body. Women are forbidden to hold jobs in the state. This attracts them back into the home by paying generous stipends based on the number of children. Unemployment plummets as more men return to the workforce. Crime also drops and the economy improves.

That should be enough to get your least curious and unlikely story.

Perhaps not (if you think it can’t happen here – and not necessarily precipitated by Muslims).

Follow Kenyan current events in the run-up to the general elections in August of 2022. Names changed to protect the guilty!