There are officially four million Muslims in France today. The real figure is almost certainly higher, probably between six and seven million believers. Islam is already France’s second largest religion, with 1,430 official mosques. Its followers are young, whereas practicing Catholics are old. If demographic trends are taken into account (a steady, uncontrolled flow of immigrants and a higher birth rate) Islam will become the dominant religion in France as early as 2015, if nothing is done to prevent it. France currently has more Muslims than Albania and Bosnia combined. In the European Union, the number of Muslims is estimated at fifteen million. It is growing in all European countries.

To claim today that France could never become an Islamic republic or even a Muslim country is as risky as someone denying in the 1980s the possibility of German reunification or the demise of Communism in the USSR.

None of my remarks will be hateful toward Islam, though it does not always reciprocate. On the other hand, I do indeed consider Islam a grave threat and an enemy, since this conquering religion is engaged in a massive and deliberate settlement of Europe. You do not despise an enemy; you combat him. And in attempting to understand your enemy, you should not descend to the naivety of contemporary intellectuals, who reflexively declare Islam tolerant, without ever having studied it.

It is perfectly possible to share values in common with your enemy. His character as enemy arises, in this case, only because he has first imposed himself on you as an occupier. We can, in agreement with Islam, resist or deplore the West’s materialism and its exaggerated, deranged individualism, but nevertheless regard the establishment of Islam in Europe as an act of war, according to the Koran’s own rigorous teachings. Carl Schmitt’s warning aptly applies to all Europeans who remain naive and tolerant toward Islam: “You don’t decide who your enemy is; he decides. You can easily declare him your friend, but if he decides that he is your enemy, there is nothing you can do about it.”

Contrary to the opinion of Islamophiles, Islam is not simply a “universal faith” like Christianity; it is also a community of civilization ( umma), which aims at expansion. The implicit project of Islam is quite simply the conquest of Europe, both religiously and ethnically, as the Koran stipulates. We are already at war. Westerners, unlike the Russians, have not yet grasped this fact.

For even if Islam conveys transcendent values and proposes an individual and a collective doctrine of life —imposing high, intangible standards on its believers, thus endowing their lives with meaning—it nevertheless corresponds to nothing in the European soul and temperament. Its massive introduction into Europe would disfigure a European culture already damaged by Americanization. An assertive dogmatism, an absence of the Faustian spirit, a fundamental denial of humanism (understood as the autonomy of the human will) in favor of an absolute submission to God, an extreme rigidity of social obligations and prohibitions, a theocratic confusion of civil society, religion, and the political State, an absolute monotheism, a profound ambivalence toward artistic freedom and scientific inquiry—all these traits are incompatible with traditional European patterns of thought, which are fundamentally polytheistic.

Those who believe that Islam can be Europeanized, can adapt to European culture, can accept the concept of secularism, make a dreadful error. Islam, essentially, does not understand compromise. Its essence is authoritarian and bellicose. It is the religion par excellence of a desert people. Put differently, with the colonizing introduction of Islam into Europe, two dangers arise: disfiguration or war.

Excerpted from chapter IV of Faye’s La colonisation de l’Europe: Discours vrai sur l’immigration et l’islam (Paris: Aencre, 2000), 69-70. Trans. Irmin. The English edition is available from www.Arktos.com.