Douglas Saunders has spent much of his career reporting on Islamic extremism around the world, and by his own admission he is no apologist for Islam. Yet, in The Myth of the Muslim Tide, he challenges the increasingly popular argument that Western society is on the verge of being overrun and undermined by Islamic immigrants.
Though some will find his arguments controversial, Saunders maintains a moderate tone. Following a brief history of what he terms "crescent fever," Saunders methodically debunks the major claims of the anti-Muslim movement, which he divides into three types: those related to population growth, those dealing with immigrants' integration into their host cultures and those linking immigrants to Muslim extremism.
Saunders's most powerful argument comes not from his skillful use of demographic and other statistical data, but from his appeal to history. In a brief section titled "We've Been Here Before," Saunders compares the claims of modern Islamophobia with the fears surrounding Jewish and Catholic immigrants through the first half of the 20th century. The similarity of the claims is startling, and, of course, time has proven them to be untrue.
Saunders ends with a discussion of what he terms "the real issues," undeniable problems in Muslim immigrant communities and concrete proposals for their solution. The Myth of the Muslim Tide is an important book on a topic with serious implications for Western electoral politics. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins