Posted on 02/24/2006 8:28:31 PM PST by Grig
The second half of the Super Bowl began right after midday prayers. The fans in Khomeini Stadium had performed their ablutions by rote, awkwardly prostrating themselves, heels splayed, foreheads not even touching the ground. . .
At the speed history's moving right now, you gotta get your futuristic novels in fast, and Robert Ferrigno's is the first in the potentially extensive genre of Islamotopian fiction. In Prayers for the Assassin, the fun starts on the inside cover: a map of the Islamic Republic of America in the year 2040. The nation extends over most of the north and west of the Lower 48. Chicago, Detroit and the East Coast cities are ruined and abandoned, Mount Rushmore is rubble, and Seattle is the new capital. Catholics remain as a subordinate class to their Muslim rulers. The evangelicals -- the "peckerwoods" -- are hunkered down in a breakaway state called "the Bible Belt" (the old Confederacy), where they still have the Second Amendment and the original Coca-Cola formula: up north, they have to make do with Jihad Cola, which sucks big time. South Florida is an "independent unaligned" area, the Mormon Territories have held out, and the Nevada Free State remains a den of gambling, alcohol and fornication. And in the most intriguing detail on the map, there's a dotted line heading through Washington state to B.C. marked "Rakkim's route to Canada" -- the new underground railroad along which he smuggles Jews, gays and other problematic identity groups to freedom across the forty-ninth parallel. I can suspend almost all disbelief at the drop of a hat, but the notion of our already semi-dhimmified Dominion as a beacon of liberty is certainly among the harder conceits to swallow.
Every successful novelist has to convey the sense that his characters' lives continue when they're not on the page: an author has to know what grade school his middle-aged businessman went to even if it's never mentioned in the book. In an invented world, that goes double. And in a "what if?" scenario, where you're overlaying an unfamiliar pattern on the known map, it goes at least triple. Saying "Imagine the U.S. under a Muslim regime" is the easy bit, creating the "State Security" apparatus and Mullah Oxley's "Black Robes" -- a Saudi-style religious police -- is only marginally more difficult. It's being able to conceive the look of a cul-de-sac in a suburban subdivision -- what's the same, what's different -- that determines whether the proposition works or not. Ferrigno has some obvious touches -- the USS Ronald Reagan is now the Osama bin Laden -- and some inspired ones -- the Super Bowl cheerleaders are all male -- but it's the rich layers of detail that bring the world to life. In one scene, a character's in the back of a cab and the driver's listening to the radio: instead of Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil, it's a popular advice show called "What Should I Do, Imam?" It doesn't have any direct bearing on the plot but it reinforces the sense of a fully conceived landscape. There's no scene set in 2028, but if you asked Ferrigno what Character A was doing that year he'd be able to tell you. If you said "What's Dublin or Brussels like in this world?" he'd have a rough idea.
The Islamic Republic came into being 25 years earlier in the wake of simultaneous nuclear explosions in New York, Washington and Mecca: "5-19-2015 NEVER FORGET." A simple Arabic edition of the Koran found undamaged in the dust of D.C. now has pride of place at the House of Martyrs War Museum. On the other hand, the peckerwoods retrieved from the wreckage the statue of Jefferson, whose scorched marble now graces the Bible Belt capital of Atlanta. But what really happened on that May 19? Was it really a planet-wide "Zionist Betrayal"? Ferrigno's story hinges on the dark secret at the heart of the state, which various parties have kept from the people all these years. Car chase-wise, it's not dissimilar to Fatherland, Robert Harris's what-if-Hitler-won-the-war novel, in which a 1960s Third Reich is determined to keep its own conspiracy hidden. And in the sense that both plots involve the Jews, plus ça change -- in life as in art.
The local colour is more compelling than either the plot or the characters: there's a guy -- maverick ex-fedayeen -- and a girl -- plucky, and dangerous with a chopstick -- and a sinister old villain with the usual psycho subordinates. Standard fare, but in a curious way the routine American thriller elements lend the freaky landscape a verisimilitude it might not otherwise have had. Writing into the future, a novelist has to figure out what will have been invented in 35 years' time. Projecting from, say, 1890 to 1925 takes some skill: who'd foresee that telephones and automobiles would be everyday items and that nations would have things called "air forces"? By comparison, from 1970 to 2005, the look of our world has barely altered: the changes are significant but visually marginal -- email and computers. Technologically, Ferrigno's 2040 seems little different from today, but he has a persuasive explanation for it: nothing works unless it's foreign-made. American inventiveness has shrivelled and the country's already mired in the entrepreneurial arthritis that afflicts most of the Muslim world. As one character says:
"Marian and I used to discuss the fact that the nation is coasting on the intellectual capital amassed by the previous regime, and we're running low on reserves. Islam dominated Western intellectual thought for three hundred years, a period when Muslims were most open to the contributions of other faiths. This is the caliphate that should be restored, not some military-political autocracy."
In a Muslim America, there are not just fundamentalists but moderates and "moderns," and, though the Islamic Republic is a land in decline, it's not a totalitarian dystopia. Ferrigno is too artful to give us an "Islamophobic" rant. If you're familiar with his earlier work, you'll know he's an efficient writer of lurid Californian crime novels full of porno stars, junkies and a decadent elite: in other words, everyday life in the Golden State. At one level, the Islamic future is a corrective to that present. "You were too young to remember what the country was like before, but let me tell you, it was grim," a Catholic cop tells the young Muslim hero. "Man against man, black against white, and God against all -- that was the joke, but I sure never got a laugh out of it. . . . Your people are big on the punishment part of crime and punishment, and they don't take to blasphemy. I like that. The old government actually paid a man to drop a crucifix into a jar of piss and take a picture of it. Don't give me that look, I'm serious. He got paid money to take the picture, and people lined up around the block to look at it. So I'm not exactly pining for the good old days. . ."
It's not an unprecedented arc: Hitler followed Weimar -- or, for fans of Cabaret, prison camps followed transvestites in cutaway buttocks. There's an extremely fine line between "boldly transgressive" and spiritually barren, and it's foolish of secular Western elites to assume their own populations are immune to the strong-horse pitch. There's a reason that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Europe and North America, while, say, the Anglicans are joining Broadway up a chi-chi gay dead end. In Europe, it's demography that's ushering in the Islamification of a continent. In America, Ferrigno posits conversion:
"Jill Stanton's proclamation of faith while accepting her second Academy Award would have been enough to interest tens of millions of Americans in the truth of Islam, but she had also chosen that moment in the international spotlight to announce her betrothal to Assan Rachman, power forward and MVP of the world champion Los Angeles Lakers. Celebrity conversions cascaded in the weeks after that Oscars night. . ."
Ayatollah Khomeini's designation of "the Great Satan" at least acknowledges that America is a seducer -- which makes it considerably more sophisticated an insult than that of Canadians who sneer at the U.S. as the Great Moron. What gives Prayers for the Assassin an unsettling compelling power is the premise behind that fictional Oscar speech. As that cop says, "Muslims were the only people with a clear plan and a helping hand." If it's a choice between the defeatism and self-loathing of the Piss Christified West and a stern unyielding eternal Allah, maybe it's Islam that will prove the great seducer.
This is Mark Steyn? First thing of his I ever read that doesn't sound like him.
Probably the best description of that particular....incident.
He's really impressed with this book. I understand it's well researched and I think I'm going to see about ordering it.
"First thing of his I ever read that doesn't sound like him."
It's a book review, that's probably why.
I remember years ago, soon after the fatwa against Rushdie made him a household name, he wrote a big, front page review of some book for the NY Times Sunday Book Review. Back in those days it was required reading for me and all the folks I knew. It was also the first bit of Rushdie I'd ever read. I remember talking to a friend of mine that day and saying I'd read the review, mentioned that fatwa and wondered: did Rushdie write this way ALL the time? My friend (who'd read it also) said: I hope not!
I've since read other stuff by him (but never any of his novels), it seems to me he's improved.
I realize this is just one person's fiction, but it sure looks like Canada is light years ahead of the US in becoming part of the Islamic world. It seems unlikely that it would be some place of safety that people would be smuggled to.
What sends chills down my spine is reading that dialog between the "Catholic cop" and the "young Muslim hero" - it sounds in tone, if not in content, exactly like what more than a few of the Islamo-fascist appeasers around here would likely say in such an event. All in the name of "being realistic," of course: the "realists" at FR who constantly make apologies for Islamo-fascism behind the laughable facade of "hundreds of millions of muslims are on our side and really peaceful!" compose as much of an (albeit unwitting) fifth column as the outright cowardly DUmmyland denizens they mirror, though in an admittedly different sense.
Sounds like a good, though sobering, novel.
So true. Look at the Oscars for best song. Bitch and ho. Brother. We are not cultured enough to be decadent.
Young adults know nothing about American history except what they remember from TV.
Mark Steyn/futuristic Islamo-state book review ping
alternate future book along similar lines: "Fatherland"--
Berlin, 1964.
20 years have passed since Germany's victory over the Allies in World War II. Adolf Hitler has been in power for 31 years, his 75th birthday nears, and a summit meeting between the Fuhrer and President Kennedy has been announced.
This is the intriguing scenario presented by British journalist-novelist Robert Harris in his first novel, Fatherland.
Intense.
ping...
I think not. There are things that will make me take to the hills and fight to the last breath, and this is one of them. I would hope that 90 percent of our people feel the same way.
"Would we really want to enslave our women?"
For another take on what it would be like to live under such a regime, read Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". All you have to do is change the name of the group in power in the novel to Islam.
Well, I've read a fair number of his movie reviews and obituaries for dead composers and playrights and the like. Most of them are super.
He must write at least an article a day to keep up with all his duties, but it's very rare to find one that isn't at or near the top of his form. He is the guy who never gets tired and never gets stale. That's why I was a bit surprised.
Especially the idea of a mass VOLUNTARY conversion of Americans.
Yes, I can see a bunch of Hollywood lightweights converting, because it's the latest thing. But I don't see it spreading like that.
Frankly, a much more realistic novel would be based on Eurabia, which is coming pretty soon, IMHO. Maybe a Brit hero instead of an American.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.