Europe's 'Cultural Purity' is Pipe Dream in Face of Muslim-Refugee Influx

Europe, which was essentially defined by Islam, is being redefined by it again: the so-called “cultural purity” of Europe is falling to pieces in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx, according to American historian and political analyst Robert S. Kaplan.

In late antiquity, it was Islam which divided the Mediterranean world in two, the historian explains in his article for The Atlantic magazine

“Early in the fifth century A.D., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece,” reads his article.

“But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force.”

A Muslim man stands outside the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge as a pedestrian walks by (File)

© AP Photo / Robert F. Bukaty

Since then, he further acknowledges, “all European history has been a great emigration toward the North.”

The Muslim religion defined Europe culturally, by “showing Europe what it was against” thus giving way to the concept European unity: a Christendom as an “inevitable opposition” to Islam.

“Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery,” the author says.

“Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and —most crucial —inferior.”

And it is Islam, which is now helping to undo what it once helped to create, the author states, referring to the Muslim-refugee influx, which Europe is now experiencing.

“A classical geography is organically reasserting itself, as the forces of terrorism and human migration reunite the Mediterranean Basin, including North Africa and the Levant, with Europe,” he says.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have no desire to be Christian are filtering into economically stagnant European states, threatening to undermine the fragile social peace and erasing distinction between the imperial centers and their former colonies.

“The cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.”

What Europe must do in the face of the growing threat, the author says, is to find some way to “dynamically incorporate the world of Islam without diluting its devotion to the rule-of-law-based system that arose in Europe’s north, a system in which individual rights and agency are uppermost in a hierarchy of needs.”

“If it cannot evolve in the direction of universal values, there will be only the dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalisms to fill the void,” says.

This would signal the end of “the West” in Europe.