Submission (21 page)

Like most men, probably, I skipped the chapters on religious duties, the pillars of wisdom and child-rearing, and went straight to chapter seven: ‘Why Polygamy?’ The argument was original, I have to say: to realise His sublime plan in the inanimate world, the Creator of the universe used the laws of geometry (a non-Euclidean geometry, to be sure, a non-commutative geometry, but still a geometry). When it came to living beings, however, the Creator expressed Himself through natural selection, which allowed animate creatures to achieve their maximum beauty, vitality and power. And for all animal species, including man, the law was the same: only certain individuals would be chosen to pass on their seed, to conceive the next generation, on which an infinite number of generations depended. In the case of mammals, if you compared the female, with her long gestation period, to the male, with his essentially limitless capacity to reproduce, it was clear that the pressures of selection would fall principally on the males. If some males enjoyed access to several females, others would necessarily have none. So this inequality between males should be considered not a negative side effect of polygamy but rather its goal. It was how the species achieved its destiny.

These curious considerations led directly to chapter eight, ‘Ecology and Islam’. It was a less controversial chapter. As Rediger saw it, halal food was like a kind of improved organic diet. As for chapters nine and ten, which had to do with economics and political institutions, they seemed to have been written specifically in support of Mohammed Ben Abbes.

In this work, which was meant for a very broad readership, and which found one, Rediger made lots of concessions to the humanist reader. He spent a long time comparing Islam with the brutal herding civilisations that preceded it. He argued that Islam had not invented polygamy but rather had helped regulate it, that Islam was not the origin of stoning or female circumcision, that the Prophet Muhammad had urged masters to free their slaves, and that by establishing the principle that all men were equal before their Creator, he had put an end to racial discrimination in every land he conquered.

I knew all those arguments, I’d heard them a thousand times, though that didn’t mean they were wrong. But what had struck me during our meeting – and struck me even more now as I read his book – was that sense of hearing a
well-rehearsed speech
, which inevitably made Rediger sound like a politician. Politics hadn’t come up that afternoon on the rue des Arènes; but a week later I wasn’t surprised to see that, thanks to some minor ministerial reshuffling, Rediger had been named secretary of universities – a post they’d revived just for him.

In the meantime, I’d had occasion to discover that he was decidedly less cautious in his articles for more specialised magazines, such as the
Review of Palestinian Studies
or
Oumma
. The lack of curiosity displayed by journalists really was a blessing for intellectuals: all of these articles were easily accessible on the web, and in certain cases, it seemed to me, would have been worth the trouble of digging up. But I may have been wrong; over the course of the twentieth century plenty of intellectuals had supported Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot and had never been taken to task. For the French, an intellectual didn’t have to be
responsible
. That wasn’t his job.

In an article for
Oumma
, Rediger raised the question whether Islam had been chosen for world domination. In the end he answered yes. He hardly bothered with Western societies, since to him they seemed so obviously doomed (liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birth rate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion). He had more to say about India and China: if India and China had preserved their traditional civilisations, he wrote, they might have remained strangers to monotheism and eluded the grasp of Islam. But from the moment they let themselves be contaminated by Western values, they, too, were doomed: he detailed the process and offered a preliminary timetable. The article, cogent and well sourced, clearly betrayed the influence of Guénon, who drew the same basic distinction between traditional societies, considered as a whole, and modern civilisation.

In another article, Rediger made a case for highly unequal wealth distribution. Although an authentic Muslim society would have to abolish actual destitution (alms-giving was one of the Five Pillars of Wisdom), it should also maintain a wide gap between the masses, who would live in self-respecting poverty, and a tiny minority of individuals so fantastically rich that they could throw away vast, insane sums, thus assuring the survival of luxury and the arts. This aristocratic position came directly from Nietzsche; deep down, Rediger had remained remarkably faithful to the thinkers of his youth.

He was similarly Nietzschean in his sarcastic, withering hostility towards Christianity, which according to him was based on the decadent, antisocial personality of Jesus. The founder of Christianity enjoyed the company of women, he wrote,
and it showed
. He quoted Nietzsche’s
Anti-Christ
: ‘“If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so; Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with
men
…”’ The idea of Christ’s divinity, Rediger went on, led directly to humanism and the ‘rights of man’. This, too, Nietzsche had already said, and in harsher terms, and for the same reasons he would certainly have signed on to the idea that Islam had a mission to rid the world of the pernicious doctrine of the incarnation.

As I got older, I also found myself agreeing more with Nietzsche, as is no doubt inevitable once your plumbing starts to fail. And I found myself more interested in Elohim, the sublime organiser of the constellations, than in his insipid offspring. Jesus had loved men too much, that was the problem; to let himself be crucified for their sake showed, at the very least,
a lack of taste
, as the old faggot would have put it. And the rest of his actions weren’t any more discerning, like when he absolved the adulterous woman, for example, with arguments such as ‘let him who is without sin’, etc. All you’d have had to do was get hold of a seven-year-old child – he’d have cast the first stone, the little fucker.

Rediger was a good writer. He was clear and concise, and occasionally humorous, as for example when he derided a colleague – no doubt a rival Muslim intellectual – who had coined the phrase ‘imams 2.0’ to describe imams who made it their mission to reconvert French youth from Muslim immigrant backgrounds. It was time, Rediger countered, to launch imams 3.0: the ones who’d convert the natives. Rediger was never funny for long; he always followed up with an earnest argument. He reserved his bitterest scorn for his Islamo-leftist colleagues: Islamo-leftism, he wrote, was a desperate attempt by mouldering, putrefying, brain-dead Marxists to hoist themselves out of the dustbin of history by latching on to the coat-tails of Islam. Conceptually, he wrote, they’d stolen everything from the so-called Nietszcheans of the left. Rediger was obsessed with Nietzsche, but I didn’t have much patience for his Nietzschean mode – no doubt I’d read too much Nietzsche myself. I knew and understood Nietzsche too well to find him charming. Bizarrely enough, I found myself more drawn to Rediger’s Guénonian side. René Guénon is boring, if you try to read him straight through, but Rediger offered an accessible version – Guénon lite. I especially liked an article entitled ‘Geometry of the Link’, in the
Review of Traditional Studies
. There Rediger reconsidered the failure of communism, which was, after all, an early attempt to combat liberal individualism. He argued that Stalin was wrong and Trotsky was right: communism could triumph only if it was global, and the same held true for Islam: either it would become universal, or it would cease to exist. But most of the article was a strange meditation, rather kitschily Spinozan – there were scholia, numbered propositions, etc. – on the theory of graphs. Only religion, the article tried to show, could create a total relationship between individuals. Think of an X–Y graph, Rediger wrote, with individuals (points) linked according to their personal relationships: it is impossible to construct a graph in which each individual is linked to every other. The only solution is to create a higher plane, containing one point called God, to which all of the individuals can be linked – and linked to one another, through this intermediary.

All that stuff made for very good reading; even though geometrically his proof didn’t make any sense, it took my mind off my plumbing. Otherwise my intellectual life was at a standstill: I was making progress on the footnotes, but I still couldn’t get started on the preface. Oddly enough, it was an Internet search on Huysmans that led me to one of Rediger’s most remarkable articles, this one in the
European Review
. He mentioned Huysmans only in passing, as the author who best exemplified the dead end of Naturalism and materialism; but the whole article was one long appeal to his old comrades, the traditional nativists. It was a passionate plea. He called it tragic that their irrational hostility to Islam should blind them to the obvious: on every question that really mattered, the nativists and the Muslims were in perfect agreement. When it came to rejecting atheism and humanism, or the necessary submission of women, or the return of patriarchy, they were fighting exactly the same fight. And today this fight, to establish a new organic phase of civilisation, could no longer be waged in the name of Christianity. Islam, its sister faith, was newer, simpler and more true (why had Guénon, for example, converted to Islam? he was above all a man of science, and he had chosen Islam on scientific grounds, both for its conceptual economy and to avoid certain marginal, irrational doctrines such as the real presence of Christ in the eucharist), which is why Islam had taken up the torch. Thanks to the simpering seductions and the lewd enticements of the progressives, the Church had lost its ability to oppose moral decadence, to renounce homosexual marriage, abortion rights and women in the workplace. The facts were plain: Europe had reached a point of such putrid decomposition that it could no longer save itself, any more than fifth-century Rome could have done. This wave of new immigrants, with their traditional culture – of natural hierarchies, the submission of women and respect for elders – offered a historic opportunity for the moral and familial rearmament of Europe. These immigrants held out the hope of a new golden age for the old continent. Some were Christian; but there was no denying that the vast majority were Muslim.

He, Rediger, was the first to admit the greatness of medieval Christendom, whose artistic achievements would live forever in human memory; but little by little it had given way, it had been forced to compromise with rationalism, it had renounced its temporal powers, and so had sealed its own doom – and why? In the end, it was a mystery; God had ordained it so.

Not long afterwards I received Rigaud’s
Dictionnaire d’argot moderne
(Ollendorff, 1881), which I’d ordered weeks before and which helped me clear up certain questions that had been nagging at me. As I had suspected,
claquedent
was not a coinage original to Huysmans; it was slang for a whorehouse, just as a
clapier
denoted any place of prostitution. Nearly all of Huysmans’ sexual relations had taken place with prostitutes, and his letters to Arij Prins were exhaustive on the subject of European brothels. As I perused these letters, I suddenly got the feeling that I had to go to Brussels. I wasn’t sure where this feeling came from. Of course, Huysmans had been published in Brussels, but then, nearly every important author of the second half of the nineteenth century had, at one time or another, been forced to engage the services of a Belgian publisher in order to get round the censors, the same way Huysmans did, and when I was writing my dissertation I hadn’t seen any compelling reason to make the trip. I had gone a few years later, but that was mainly because of Baudelaire. What struck me most about Brussels was the filth and sadness of the city, and the ethnic hatred, which was even more palpable than in Paris or London. In Brussels, more than in any other European capital, you felt on the edge of civil war.

Now the Muslim Party of Belgium had just won the national elections. This was generally considered big news for the balance of European politics. Of course, the Muslim parties already occupied government seats in Britain, Holland and Germany, but Belgium was the second country, after France, where the Muslims had won an outright majority. The stinging defeat of the European right had a simple explanation, in Belgium’s case: although the Flemish and Walloon nationalist parties enjoyed overwhelming support in their native regions, they’d never managed to work together, or even to engage in any real dialogue, whereas the Flemish and Walloon Muslim parties, with their shared religion, had no trouble forming a coalition.

Ben Abbes had immediately issued a warm statement hailing the victory of the Muslim Party of Belgium. As it happens, the secretary general, Raymond Stouvenens, had a personal history not unlike Rediger’s: before he converted to Islam, he’d been a high-ranking member of a nativist organisation, though he’d kept his distance from its openly neo-fascist wing.

The buffet car on the Thalys to Brussels had two menus, one traditional and one halal. That was the first transformation I noticed – and the only one. The streets were just as filthy, and the Hotel Métropole, even if its bar was closed, had preserved much of its old splendour. When the train got in, around nine thirty, it was even colder than in Paris. The pavements were covered in blackish snow. I was sitting in a restaurant in the rue de la Montagne-aux-Herbes-Potagères, trying to decide between a chicken
waterzooi
and an
anguille au vert
, when all at once I was gripped by the certainty that I understood Huysmans completely, better than he had understood himself, and that I was finally able to write my preface. I had to get back to the hotel and make some notes, and left the restaurant without ordering. (The room-service menu offered chicken
waterzooi
, which settled that.) It had been a mistake to give too much importance to Huysmans’ glib talk about ‘debauches’ and ‘dissipation’. That was just a Naturalist tic, a contemporary cliché, part of the need to scandalise, to shock the bourgeoisie. In the end, it was a career move; and the opposition he set up between carnal appetite and the rigours of monastic life was equally beside the point. Chastity wasn’t a problem and never had been, not for Huysmans or anyone else. My brief stay at Ligugé had only confirmed this for me. Subject man to erotic stimuli, even in their most standardised form – something as simple as low necklines and short skirts (or in the apt Spanish phrase,
tetas y culo
) – and he will feel sexual desire. Remove said stimuli and the desire will go away, and in a matter of months or even weeks he won’t even remember his sexuality. In reality this had never posed the least difficulty for monks, and in my own case, as the new Islamic regime pushed women’s clothing in the direction of decency, I had felt my own sexual impulses gradually diminish. I sometimes went whole days without thinking of sex. With women it might be slightly different, since for women erotic stimuli were more diffuse and thus harder to overcome, but I really didn’t have time to go into that right now, I was taking notes in a frenzy (after I finished my
waterzooi
I ordered a cheese plate), not only had sex mattered less to Huysmans than he thought, but in the end the same was true of death. Existential anguish simply wasn’t his thing, what had really struck him about Grünewald’s famous Crucifixion wasn’t Christ’s agony but rather his physical suffering, and in this Huysmans was just like everybody else. People don’t really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible. Even in the realm of art criticism, Huysmans got it all wrong. He had passionately sided with the Impressionists when they ran up against the academic precepts of their time, he had written admiring pages on painters like Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon; but in his own novels, he identified less with Impressonism or Symbolism than with the much older pictorial tradition of the Dutch masters. In the end, the dream visions of
En rade
, which actually did recall the strangeness of certain Symbolist paintings, were a failure. At least, they leave a much less vivid impression than his warm, precisely detailed descriptions of meals with the Carhaix in
Là-bas
. That’s when I realised I’d left my copy of
Là-bas
in Paris. I had to go back. According to the website, the first Thalys left at five. By 7 a.m. I was home and I looked up the passages where he described the cooking of ‘Maman Carhaix’. Huysmans’ true subject had been bourgeois happiness, a happiness painfully out of reach for a bachelor, and not the happiness of the haute bourgeoisie (the cooking celebrated in
Là-bas
was instead what you might call good home cooking), much less that of the aristocracy. Huysmans had nothing but contempt for the ‘titled fools’ he ridiculed in
L’oblat
. His idea of happiness was to have his artist friends over for a
pot-au-feu
with horseradish sauce, accompanied by an ‘honest’ wine and followed by plum brandy and tobacco, with everyone sitting by the stove while the winter winds battered the towers of Saint-Sulpice. These simple pleasures had been denied him, and only someone as crude and insensitive as Bloy could have been surprised to see him weep over the death, in 1895, of Anna Meunier, his one lasting female acquaintance, the only woman he had ever been able to live with, briefly, until her nervous malady, incurable at the time, sent her into the Saint-Anne asylum.