Decline-of-Rome narratives frame modern Muslim presence as civilizational conquest

Evidence

Niall Ferguson, the conservative English historian and enthusiastic advocate of a new American empire, has also embraced the Eurabian idea in a widely reproduced article entitled ‘Eurabia?’, in which he laments the ‘de-Christianization of Europe’ and its culture of secularism that leaves the continent ‘weak in the face of fanaticism’. Drawing on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ferguson sees the recent establishment of a department of Islamic studies in his Oxford college as another symptom of the ‘the creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom’. … In Ferguson’s opinion, this process was already under way in a decadent ‘post-Christian’ Europe that was drifting inexorably towards the dark denouement of a vanquished civilisation and the fatal embrace of Islam. — Matt Carr, You Are Now Entering Eurabia, 31

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on how Gibbon’s Decline and Fall keeps getting repurposed as a template for declinist panic about immigration — the same rhetorical move from Spengler to Ferguson.
• XREF: Connects to declinist historiography (Spengler, Gibbon) and to contemporary debates about ‘Eurabia’ conspiracy theory as a genre of moral panic.