Hostile Takeover: How Islam Hinders Progress and Threatens Society, by Thilo Sarrazin

There was no doubting what the staff at Dussmann, Berlin’s largest bookshop, thought of Thilo Sarrazin’s new book. They placed it next to Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: a Warning.

It’s no wonder. Feindliche Übernahme — or, to give it its full title, Hostile Takeover: How Islam Hinders Progress and Threatens Society — has the potential to become a bible of Germany’s new right. It provides the pseudo-intellectual underpinning for a xenophobic worldview that is striking ever-deeper roots in German society and poisoning its politics.

That ideology was on full view in Chemnitz last month, when local neo-Nazis staged a mini-pogrom, beating up anyone who looked foreign and giving the Hitler salute. In the charged atmosphere that has prevailed since, this book seems like a live grenade thrown into a munitions dump.

A former senior civil servant in Berlin’s finance ministry and ex-director of the Bundesbank, Sarrazin has form. His 2010 book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Is Abolishing Itself) claimed that the German nation was committing collective suicide by allowing in so many uneducated Muslims. It was a bestseller, shifting more than 1.5m copies, and paved the way for the anti-immigration, anti-Islam Alternative for Germany, now the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. If anything, this book is even more incendiary. As one paper observed: “Germany needs this book like an outbreak of Ebola.”

Sarrazin is neither a scholar of Islam nor a theologian. He knows no Arabic, and read the Koran in German translation. But that did not stop him launching a 495-page screed against the religion and its adherents.

In the Koran, Sarrazin sees only “intolerance, violence, hatred for infidels, backwardness and the oppression of women”. Islamic societies are described as backward, undemocratic, plagued by war and marked by a lack of intellectual curiosity. All, he says, are sliding inexorably towards fundamentalism.

While some scholars might put the blame on corrupt elites, the legacy of colonialism, or military intervention, Sarrazin singles out the malign effect of Islam as the sole source of their woes.

The same reductive approach is also applied to the condition of Muslim immigrants to Germany. In a series of sweeping generalisations, he claims they do not learn German properly or integrate socially, are uninterested in their host culture and prone to radicalisation and criminal behaviour.

The book often says more about the cultural arrogance of the German intelligentsia than it does about Islam. As proof of Muslims’ contempt for western culture, Sarrazin notes that in all his trips to the opera or the Berlin Philharmonic he has never seen a woman in a headscarf. The occasional foray into eugenics is equally disturbing: since intermarriage with Christians is forbidden, “Muslims remain genetically among themselves” — a claim that bizarrely presupposes the existence of a Muslim gene.

This tendentious argument builds towards the end of the book, where Sarrazin warns that if there is no change to immigration policy, Muslims will form the majority of Germany’s population in two-to-three generations and will then set about “Islamising secular institutions and secular law”. To prevent this, he writes, Germany must ban Muslim immigration, amend the Geneva Convention and deport all rejected asylum-seekers.

Sarrazin’s longtime publisher DVA, a subsidiary of Random House, rejected the book, saying it “puts a world religion on trial” without the accused “ever having the chance to explain and defend itself”. He is suing for breach of contract. A succès de scandale is virtually assured. There are legitimate questions being raised across the German political spectrum about integrating more than a million refugees who have arrived in the past three years. Sarrazin has tapped into real anxiety about what the influx means for German society. But anyone looking for a reasoned reaction or keen to understand Islam’s role in the world should probably avoid this diatribe disguised as a serious work of scholarship. If it deserves to be read at all then purely as a symptom of our populist era, with its proliferation of opinion disguised as truth and appeals to humanity’s worst instincts.

The reviewer is the FT’s Berlin bureau chief