the decline and fall (of Niall Ferguson)

Niall Ferguson has once again stuck his head up his ass in a very public fashion, with this piece in the Telegraph under the unwieldy title, "Heaven knows how we'll rekindle our religion, but I believe we must." He bemoans the decline of religiosity in the UK, arguing that the resulting "moral vacuum" has made Britain more vulnerable to Islamist extremism. (The triumphalism with which the Fergusons and Huntingtons of the world have seized upon the July 7th attacks as evidence of their theses' validity is depressing beyond words.)

I disliked Ferguson even before he became a cheerful apologist for neo-imperialism (and a camera-ready celebrity historian) but the piece that drove me from dislike to disgust was last year's essay called "Eurabia?" Ferguson seizes upon this term (coined by Bat Ye'or, a right-wing British writer who also came up with the charming phrase "Palestinianism is the New Nazism") to paint an alarmist portrait of a Europe submerged by the demographic and cultural onslaught of Muslim immigrant communities. He ends with an especially repellent comment on the University of Oxford's Islamic Studies Centre (a wonderful institution, where I was lucky to attend James Piscatori's brilliant lecture series on Political Islam, which was undoubtedly a highlight of my Oxford studies):

Still, it is hard not to be reminded of Gibbon—especially now that his old university’s Center for Islamic Studies has almost completed work on its new premises. In addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, the building is expected to feature “a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower.”

When I first glimpsed a model of that minaret, I confess, the phrase that sprang to mind was indeed “decline and fall.”

Ferguson's blithering reminds me of a poster that's been on my wall for the last year and a half or so. It's an piece by the Russian graphic/digital arts collective AES, who created a series of digitally manipulated photographs playing upon such fears of "Islamization" and the clash of civilizations. This is Oxford, in Ferguson's worst nightmare: