Houellebecq’s most recent (and most infamous) novel, Submission, about an Islamic takeover of France, is supposedly an anti-Islamic warning story. Yet in fact it is an admiring account of Islamic militancy, seen as a plausible alternative to the vitiated forms of modern liberalism. All the most eloquent spokesmen in the book are religious minded and in favor of theocracy. The struggle of the twentieth century, the narrator explains, was between two failed humanisms—the hard humanism of communism and the soft humanism of liberal capitalism, each in its way “horribly reductive.”
