Synopses & Reviews
The London and Madrid bombings, the French riots, the uproar over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, foiled plots at Heathrow Airport, in Frankfurt Germany and Copenhagen--these events all underscore the volatile relationship between Muslims and their European hosts. Who are these angry Muslims? How did so many come to Europe? What does this mean for the United States?
Covering eight countries and thirty cities, but focusing primarily on Britain and France, Europe's Angry Muslims provides an authoritative and engaging account of how Islam came to 20th century Europe and altered the continent's cultural, political, and security landscape. This balanced book combines first hand reporting, based on interviews of former radicals, scrutiny of court records, and historical analysis to capture the complex phenomenon of European Islam. Leiken cites actual speeches and testimony from radical imams such as Abu Hamza, now under arrest. He also takes us to the streets of East London where veiled women shop in medieval market stalls, where arranged marriages are standard, and jihad videos are available under the counter. We visit the Paris housing projects after the French riots of autumn 2005, with a local hero, a sincere Muslim and ex-rapper, who admires America. Perhaps most important, the book describes how good intentions and bottom lines, cheap labor and cheap grace paved the road to terror and social dislocation. It unravels the connections, real and imagined, between immigration and terrorism. In charting the path of radical Islam into Europe, the book examines how home grown terrorists linked up with radical mentors, deepening and reconfiguring the "clash of civilizations" debate.
Europe's Angry Muslims is the first book to provide an in-depth look at the emerging Islamic threat in Europe in an objective and comprehensive way, combining sharp-eyed reportage with a provocative, engaging narrative.
Review
"Timely and provocative, this is an important addition to the literature on Islamic terrorism." - Publisher's Weekly
Review
"Mr. Leiken is a largely reliable guide to the varieties of Islamic belief and politics that are now reproduced in Europe...He writes with eloquence, bringing to life the grim realities of the French banlieues and of the back-to-back houses of immigrant families in Leeds, where his requests for information met an impenetrable wall of silence." -- The Economist
"Leiken provides a historical, ethnic and socioeconomic context that identifies important differences as opposed to empty generalities. Both well written and researched-a valuable contribution to an ongoing discussion." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Timely and provocative, this is an important addition to the literature on Islamic terrorism." - Publisher's Weekly
"Leiken discusses Islamophobia and the extent to which Jihadist 'outsiders' manipulate those subjected to it for their own purposes, and emphasizes the need to distinguish between genuine Islamist political agitation and other forms of civil disobedience more rooted in socioeconomic tension."--Middle East Journal
"Leiken supports his anecdotal observations with the weight of academic and empirical studies, resulting in an immensely readable account that is also authoritative." -- Literary Review
Synopsis
Europe's Angry Muslims traces the routes, expectations and destinies of immigrant parents and the plight of their children, transporting both the general reader and specialist from immigrants' ancestral villages to their new enclaves in Europe. It guides readers through Islamic nomenclature,
chronicles the motive force of the Islamist narrative, offers them lively portraits of jihadists, and takes them inside radical mosques and into the minds of suicide bombers. Through interviews of former radicals and security agents and examination of the sermons of radical imams, Robert Leiken
presents an unsentimental yet compassionate account of Islam's growing presence in the West. His nuanced and authoritative analysis-historical, sociological, theological and anthropological-warns that conflating rioters and Islamists, folk and fundamentalist Muslims, pietists and jihadis, and
immigrants and their children is the method of strategic incoherence.
Now with a new preface analyzing the rise of ISIL, this book offers a cogent overview of how global terror and its responding foreign policy interacts with the lives of Muslim, first-and second generation immigrants in Europe.
Synopsis
Bombings in London, riots in Paris, terrorists in Germany, fury over mosques, veils and cartoons--such headlines underscore the tensions between Muslims and their European hosts. Did too much immigration, or too little integration, produce Muslim second-generation anger? Is that rage imported or spawned inside Europe itself? What do the conflicts between Muslims and their European hosts portend for an America encountering its own angry Muslims?
Europe's Angry Muslims traces the routes, expectations and destinies of immigrant parents and the plight of their children, transporting both the general reader and specialist from immigrants' ancestral villages to their strange new-fangled enclaves in Europe. It guides readers through Islamic nomenclature, chronicles the motive force of the Islamist narrative, offers them lively portraits of jihadists (a convict, a convert, and a community organizer) takes them inside radical mosques and into the minds of suicide bombers. The author interviews former radicals and security agents, examines court records and the sermons of radical imams and draws on a lifetime of personal experience with militant movements to present an account of the explosive fusion of Muslim immigration, Islamist grievance and second-generation alienation.
Robert Leiken shines an unsentimental and yet compassionate light on Islam's growing presence in the West, combining in-depth reporting with cutting-edge and far-ranging scholarship in an engaging narrative that is both moving and mordant. Leiken's nuanced and authoritative analysis--historical, sociological, theological and anthropological--warns that "conflating rioters and Islamists, folk and fundamentalist Muslims, pietists and jihadis, immigrants and their children is the method of strategic incoherence--'in the night all cats are black.'"
About the Author
Robert S. Leiken is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His commentaries have appeared in the major American newspapers and his reports and essays in
Foreign Affairs,
The New York Review of Books,
The New Republic,
The Weekly Standard,
Foreign Policy,
The Times Literary Supplement,
Commentary,
Washington Post Outlook,
The Los Angeles Sunday Times and
The Political Science Quarterly.
Table of Contents
Prologue
IN FRANCE
I. Europe's First Angry Muslim
II. A French Intifada?
III. A French Revolt
GUIDES FOR THE PERPLEXED
IV. A User' Guide
V. The Outside
VI. The Unwanted
VII. Angles of Aggregation
IN BRITAIN
VIII. Ghost Towns
IX. Cousins
X. The Lords of Londonistan
XI. The Life and Loves of a Terrorist
IN GERMANY
XII. Germany's Hot Summer
XIII. Germany's Young Turks
FINALE
XIV. Figures in the Carpet