Eurabia
(a portmanteau of "Europe" and "Arabia") is the name given to a hypothetical future scenario in which, thanks to a supposed declining birth rate among white Europeans and capitulation from politicians trying to appeal to immigrant communities, Europe becomes ruled by Muslims, who reshape the continent to resemble the Middle East (specifically either Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan), or at least the Theme Park Version of it. In most scenarios, this new state links up with a Middle Eastern Coalition to form a new Euro-Asian caliphate.
While the word itself was first used as a name for the newsletter of a Euro-Arab friendship committee in the 1970s, the concept underlying its modern usage was coined by far-right essayist Bat Ye'or in her 2005 book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, which claimed that there was a conspiracy underway between France and the Arab world to allow Europe to become "Islamicized" as part of a plan to increase its power against the United States and Israel. Although Ye'or's theories have been derided by a lot of academics (and many of those who believe them are aren't exactly fond of Jews or Israel themselves), it has not stopped them from inspiring a number of works imagining an Islamic takeover of Europe.
Bear in mind that a lot of the mindset on this trope involves a belief that All Muslims Are Arab, which ignores non-Muslim Arabs or non-Arab Muslims. Indeed, the only Islamic countries in Europe, located in the Balkans, aren't even Arab or Semitic and blend Islamic culture with their local European one. Or to put it in the terms of this very wiki, European Muslim nations are far more likely to resemble Ruritania than Qurac.
Usually involves a Bad Future. May be part of an Author Tract or Filibuster Freefall. Compare and contrast other region-specific cases of Take Over the World (America Takes Over the World, Russia Takes Over the World, China Takes Over the World, Japan Takes Over the World, etc.) as well as Americasia on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
As arguments over the actual plausibility of this are often prone to Flame Bait, No Real Life Examples, Please!.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Fan Works
- The Islamic Europan Union in a hypothetical extended map of the Fictional Earth of Strangereal from Ace Combat is inspired by this - just look at it◊! The capital is Lutetia (Paris), and other settlements include Qurtuva and Andalus. (Despite this, there are also Fantasy Counterpart Culture versions of Italy, Greece, and Scandinavia, and the region that would be Scandinavia is part of Yuktobania.)
Literature
- In Flashback by Dan Simmons, Europe has been taken over by global caliphate.
- In Caliphate by Tom Kratman, Europe is part of a global caliphate, and only the United States is still beyond its reach.
- The Partisan, an explicitly white-supremacist novel, involves a white French woman slaughtering her way through a Paris that has been taken over by Islamists.
- Michel Houellebecq's Soumission features a France electing a Muslim as president, who then proceeds to enact his radical agenda.
- L'An 330 de la Republique by Maurice Spronk (written in 1894) features a morally decadent West being taken over by a more dynamic Islamic world, in a Take That! favoring his neo-Nietzschian ideals.
- The Genie of Londonistan tells the story of a future where England has been taken over by Islamists and the protagonist is the victim of a terror attack whose consciousness has been transferred into the body of a drive-by shooting victim.
- The Islamic Conquest of Europe 2020 tells the story of Europe's gradual fall into Islamism in the not-too-distant future.
- The Camp of the Saints, written in 1973, portrays France, and later the rest of Europe, being overtaken by immigrants from the third world, although in this example, the takeover originates from India, rather than the Middle East.
- Inspired by The Camp of the Saints, french writer Renaud Camus would write two books, L'Abécédaire de l'in-nocence ("Abecedarium of no-harm") and Le Grand Remplacement ("The Great Replacement"), warning that "replacist elites"are conspiring against the White French and Europeans in order to replace them with Muslim populations from Africa and the Middle East—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the European birth rate.
- The Marîd Audran series portrays a world where the West is in decline while the Arab World prospers, resulting in Islam becoming dominant.
- The Mirage is an Alternate History variant. The Middle East and North Africa are unified into the United Arab States, which went on to become a major player in world history, while Europe and America are divided among third-world Christian nations. On November 9, 2001, Christian fundamentalists hijacked planes and crashed them into important landmarks in Baghdad and Riyadh, which lead to the UAS invading the Christian States of America in 2003. Later it's revealed that the entire setting was created as a result of a wish made to a Djinn.
- Douglas Murray writes in his book The Strange Death Of Europe that he thinks that European civilisations as we have known it will not survive due to a combination of mass migration of new peoples into Europe specifically Muslims in The Middle East along with low birth rates from the European population.
- In The Years of Rice and Salt, this future happens a thousand years early, as The Black Death kills off virtually the entire European population, allowing the Islamic world to settle the empty continent. The resultant power struggle over the next thousand years is between the Islamic world and the Chinese one.
- In Pamela Sargent's Venus trilogy of SF novels, primarily about the terraforming of Venus in a Colonized Solar System future, Earth is largely Muslim, although the regime isn't at all tyrannical.
- Way back in The '50s, The Chronicles of Narnia featured a constant state of tension between Narnia and Calormen. Narnia is a Magical Land patterned on Christian virtues and European folklore, while Calormen is a cruel and expansionist nation-state located in The Savage South and patterned on the Arabian Nights stories. The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis's final installment in the series, centres on a Calormene invasion of Narnia. In The '50s, there was less anxiety than there is today about Muslim presence in Europe, so the Calormene threat draws more on the historical spectre of Moorish and Ottoman incursions into Europe centuries ago — which makes sense, considering the series's Medieval European Fantasy nature. Moreover, the polytheistic Calormene faith is closer to The Middle East's pre-Abrahamic pantheons and to medieval misconceptions about Islam than to Islam itself. On the other hand, Lewis does sneak in a few jabs at politically correct multiculturalism, like when Les Collaborateurs insist that the Calormene god Tash and the Narnian god Aslan are one and the same (Tash is explicitly shown to be a God of Evil).
- In the dystopian novel The Notre Dame De Paris Mosque by Elena Chudinova, Muslims take over western Europe, impose Shariah law over it, and shut Europeans who did not convert to Islam into ghettoes.
- In the Year 2050: America's Religious Civil War is about this scenario taking place in America, the title being a reference to the year there will supposedly be a Muslim/Arabic majority, leading to a Muslim President (though the book insists Obama already was one) and majority Congress and a Western/Christian La Résistance. The book still takes time to mention how Europe and the Middle East have formed their own Caliphates that will be subordinate to the American one.
- Prayers for the Assassin is another book where the premise is applied to the US, which apart from Mormon Utah and South Wyoming, the "Nevada Free State", and the ostensibly independent Bible Belt, has somehow become majority Muslim by 2040 due in large part to a second American civil war in the 2010s, nuclear/dirty bombs being used against New York, Washington DC and Mecca by Israeli agents but not really, turns out it was Islamic extremists all along and celebrity conversions to Islam, including country singer "Shania X".
- Without Warning has a prominent subplot about a US spy investigating a generational conspiracy to Islamicize France, with the full consent and support of the French government.
- In the "What If?'' counter-factual novel written by actual historians, one of the Alternate History scenarios describes the Battle of Tours being won by the Muslim invaders of Spain. After the defeat of the Frankish army, the Caliphate keeps bringing in more forces across the Mediterranean, ultimately conquering most of Western Europe and surrounding the Byzantine Empire on two sides, while reintroducing infrastructure and central governance absent in those areas since the Romans. When European explorers sail to the new world, they're carrying Korans, not Bibles, ultimately turning Islam into the single largest religion on Earth.
- The book Lion's Blood (and its sequel, Zulu Heart) by Steven Barnes is a Alternate History world where Islamic Africa is the center of the world while Europe is considered tribal and primitive; white slaves are captured from Europe and taken from there to America, which has been colonized by Africans.
- The specific blend of Culture Chop Suey in Dune generally leans towards this trope—the main religious text is called the "Orange Catholic Bible" and the government is mostly based on the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, but the biggest cultural influence on the Sublime Padishah Empire seems to be Islam.
Tabletop Games
- GURPS Infinite Worlds: Exaggerated on Caliph: The printing press was invented 600 years early, leading to an Islamic conquest of the world.
Video Games
- Readily done in Crusader Kings II. Aside from player-made empires, the Umayyad Sultanate of Andalusia in 769 almost invariably takes over the remaining Christian regions of Spain and will usually expand well into France unless checked by an interested player (or Francia or the Holy Roman Empire in the rare circumstance that an AI Charlemagne manages to form them.)
- Crusader Kings III has a special Decision available for Iberian Muslims called "Avenge the Battle of Tours" which requires the player to not only conquer all of Iberia but also a large chunk of Southern Francia. Doing so grants an achievement appropriately called "Al-Andalus".
- Crusader Kings III and Crusader Kings II: In both games this can be inverted with the crusades and the decision to Form the Empire of Outremer, which merges the player's european culture with the local arabic culture
- Europa Universalis IV has a decision to reform Andalusia if you conquer a large chunk of Iberia with either a Maghrebi nation or Granada. What's more, Granada has a unique achievement for forming Andalusia and conquering the entirety of Iberia. Given Granada is a Vestigial Empire (the last remnant of the Umayyad Caliphate) holding a mere four provinces, all menaced by much more powerful Christian kingdoms, this is easier said than done.
- Another, often markedly easier way to enact the trope is by playing the Ottoman Empire, which in the early game is a formidable Rising Empire. A moderately skilled and experienced player could easily seize Vienna and Rome by the early 16th century.
- Command & Conquer: Generals: In the sequel, the totally-not Al-Qaeda GLA (which is an awful lot more comparable to ISIS) manages to get control over Western Europe (thanks in part to U.S. isolationism after having their weaponry stolen and used to destroy their own forces). It's China that drives them out.
- GLA’s founding population is more central Asian than Arab; the center of their territory is Kazakhstan. In the sequel Zero Hour, however, Egyptian and Somali chapters of the GLA finally appear.
- A popular Game Mod called Rise of the Reds postulates that the GLA invasion actually reversed the trend of the Islamicisation of Europe; the European Muslims were so utterly disgusted by the GLA's chain of war crimes that they denounced anything having to do with them and subsequently tried harder than ever to integrate and accept Western values, in an attempt to escape any potential stigma they could suffer from it. This is especially true in Germany with its large Turkish minority, as it's cited as a direct example. As far as the story goes, it worked out and Islamic extremism and the GLA come out severely weakened, if sadly not fully defeated (by the assumed 2040s, the GLA has a strong foothold in mid-Africa, but not much support elsewhere).
- This can happen in Medieval: Total War and Empire: Total War if you manage a Muslim faction, especially the Ottoman Empire.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons:
- Parodied in an episode where Bart befriends a Muslim family, and Homer, who'd been watching too many episodes of 24, has a nightmare about Springfield becoming Islamicized, with the Genie from Aladdin transforming American things into stereotypical Muslim things (and turning all music into copies of Cat Stevens albums).
- In another episode, "Days of Future Past", Milhouse is living in Michigannote , which in the future is under shariah law, and is forced to wear a hijab.
