Mehammed Amadeus Mack, The Eurabia Myth: Countercolonization and Masculine Fragility in France (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Mehammed Mack (MM): This is a book about two interrelated conspiracy theories: The Great Replacement and Eurabia. These theories have been instrumental to acts of domestic terrorism and doctrines of white supremacy in Anglophone countries but rarely do journalists trace their origins back to France’s relationship with the Arab world, the original laboratory for these ideas. That is one of the main reasons for writing the book.
The Great Replacement Theory, first credited to French gay intellectual and politician Renaud Camus, supposes that mass migration from the Middle East and Africa will push Europe past a tipping point where it will lose its European (secularized) Christian cultural identity, and demographically cease to be “white”—although in the French case that racial aspect is not always spelled out explicitly. The Eurabia Theory, which originated with Gisèle Littman, a Franco-Italian Jewish woman born in Egypt, supposes that globalist forces are colluding with Muslims and will eventually force Christians and Jews into servitude. She believed one of the first symptoms of Eurabia was Charles de Gaulle’s “abandonment” of colonial French Algeria.
Without knowing this deeper history, one cannot see how absurd it is for white supremacist terrorists in El Paso or Buffalo to cite the Great Replacement in their post-attack manifestos. They demonize Latinos and African Americans using theories which originally demonized Arabs and Muslims. At the same time, there is a logic to this changing of targets: the mortal violence which was permissible against foreign Muslim bogeymen can now be directed to internal American minorities, even if they are Christian.
As a Eurabian myself, hearing about the Great Replacement Theory makes me feel all kinds of ways. I talk in the book about the special kind of sado-masochism it takes to spend six years reading alarmist literature that imagines people like me to be a genetic nightmare and cultural failure. Yet I find the complexes and psychoses that afflict white supremacists as they contemplate Eurabians both interesting and funny, if I can use that word about something so serious. You never know when porn studies methodology will come in handy, but it does again and again: literature that imagines the Great Replacement can most easily be likened to a snuff film, in which erotic pleasure occurs at the death of the Other. This is why I talk in the book about the erotics of ethnic horror, a literary genre that best fits Great Replacement literature.
Mainstream media coverage of these theories and their resulting racial violence often leave out a key element: gender and sexuality. This is why I talk about the crisis of masculinity and the so-called men’s rights movement as central to the development and proliferation of these theories. In the Western far-right writ-large, riled up and often insecure men compare themselves, in paranoid ways, with ethnic minority men that they perceive as super-fertile demographic competitors. They also compare themselves with sexual minorities who have recently gained access to marriage and adoption and are thus competing on a common field of reproduction. If not for the white man’s perceived fall in status, white supremacists feel they would not have to compare themselves with others at all: blame for this disgrace falls on feminists and the LGBT community, who have enabled the ethnic male Other to surpass them by forcing white men to abide by the codes of progressive sexual politics—while supposedly giving Muslim, Arab, and black men a free pass. Strangely enough, white supremacists aim to restore their “lost” male privilege not by focusing on themselves but by imitating the ethnic competitors they believe have unfairly lapped them. Their imitation, of course, is by no means an accurate one but rather a stereotypical one: they copy the fantasized, scary, and fanatic Eurabian or Afropean, not the working-class descendants of immigrants found in sociologies and documentaries.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MM: In the book, I give a name to the process I just described above, this dynamic of comparison and unbearable but ultimate resemblance: adversarial becoming. It happens when white supremacist groups use the same playbook of ethnic and spiritual affirmation they believe black and Arab groups use. Or when they take cues from the gay pride movement and say they were “born this way”, i.e. they did not choose to be born white and straight. In more sinister ways, evidence for adversarial becoming can be found in calls for a holy war to defend the Christian West against Islamism, in a post 9/11 and especially post-Charlie Hebdo timeframe. Such calls intentionally reiterate the call for the first Crusades and the so-called Reconquista, movements which also copied perceived techniques of Islamic “Holy War”, all of which leads to a vertiginous historical circularity.
I use adversarial becoming as a logical thread reconnecting time periods that have usually been thought of as disconnected in traditional histories of Europe. I show that the political right has politicized the history of Muslim/Christian entanglement at specific moments: when embarking on an imperial adventure or reeling from a defeat in the imperial arena. One key example, a historical episode often invoked, is the Battle of Poitiers (732), when the Frankish warrior Charles the Hammer (Charles Martel) repelled a large Muslim Army from Islamic Iberia, and allegedly, according to nationalist historians, saved Europe from becoming Muslim. This battle was especially invoked, according to a study of history textbooks, when France was invading Algeria, when it lost part of its territory to Germany, when it left Algeria, and now, when the far-right claims that Charles the Hammer is being erased from history textbooks in the era of mass migration. “I am not Charlie, I am Charles Martel,” figures on the far-right said after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
The French National Front party offers an illustration of what I am talking about: the far-right, arguably white supremacist movement (now renamed the National Rally party) was originally called the National Front for Algeria and was born out of conflicts with North Africans in French colonial Algeria.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MM: As with my first book, Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham, 2017), I look at a single phenomenon that does not respect disciplinary boundaries and thus demands a cultural studies or pluri-disciplinary approach. In my first book, that phenomenon was the sexual demonization of Arab and black minorities, and in my second it is the twin theories of Eurabia and the Great Replacement. For this book, I look at the theories through the following lenses: history, literature, gender and sexuality studies, environmental studies, and ethnography. Each field corresponds to one of the chapters. Respectively, I am looking at: the contemporary politics of histories of Christian/Muslim conflict from the classroom to sites of memory (Chapter 1); fiction that describes what a Great Replacement might look like (Chapter 2); the international men’s rights movement and the birth-rate battle (Chapter 3); and the eco-fascist movement and its scapegoating of migrants as invasive species (Chapter 4). In the final chapter, I hand over the mic to the human beings demonized by these myths: Eurabians and Afropeans. I interview cultural activists who have come up with robust responses to the Great Replacement Theory. Descendants of migrants are almost never asked for their views on the theory in the mainstream media, thus confirming, even if indirectly, that they are the “invaders” and that white Frenchmen of European origin are the indigenous “hosts” who have the most to lose from the Great Replacement and thus have the right to speak on it.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MM: I would like to arm readers, especially those who belong to communities that have been the targets of “overpopulation” rhetoric, with ammunition to counter these ideas and tell another story in their place. I would like to flip the script on the cultural impoverishment claims spread by Eurabia alarmists, who believe European civilization will soon end, by recounting, if only partially, the history of cross-pollinations and synergies that make up Mediterranean exchange. In other words, I would like to counter fearmongering about the demographic super-fertility of minorities with a historical corrective about the cultural fertility and splendor of Euro-Arab entanglement.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MM: Currently, I am working on a companion article to Eurabia wherein I analyze the rest of the ethnographic interviews I conducted (I was only able to include four of the nine total). I am also working on a new course in gender studies called “Queer Nightlife and Dance Music”.
J: What would you tell young researchers specializing in contemporary periods who think that what they are writing now will not be relevant by the time their book comes out?
MM: I would tell them that you never know what the future will bring. The academic timeline, with books requiring an incubation period of around six years, has a funny relationship to coincidence: six years is sometimes that exact amount of time it takes for a fringe concept to become mainstream. This was the case with my first book: I thought the topic of immigration and sexuality had been exhausted in 2009, and then in 2015 we saw an uptick in sexual demonization and the racialization of sexual violence with the Middle East refugee crisis. In 2017, the Great Replacement Theory was still a fringe, alt-right idea, while today it is a talking point on the evening news, a verb in the French language, and a source code for almost all the major acts of white domestic terror that have occurred in the United States in the intervening period.
Excerpt from the book (from “Introduction: The Great Replacement Theory, from France to the United States and Back”, pages 44 to 47)
OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS
In chapter 1, I focus on the contemporary politicization of Christian and Muslim historical clashes in what came to be known as Europe, and their reactivation in current immigration debates. These include the Battle of Poitiers in France, the so-called Reconquest of Spain, the Crusades, and, more briefly, Ottoman incursions in Eastern and Central Europe. I study this politicization of history in three locations: the classroom, the media, and the electoral stage. I pay particular attention to how French commentators and historians depict the Battle of Poitiers, during which Frankish leader Charles Martel repelled the Andalusian Arab invaders out of what would become France. Some consider this battle to be a turning point at which Christian Europe decisively came into being; it is considered by others to merely constitute a failed raid without further territorial ambitions. Reactionary historians argue that some educators choose to include or exclude the battle from school manuals not merely out of concern for historical accuracy but also because of how they imagine the battle resonates with a student body and French populace counting more and more Muslims among it. Countless Franco-Muslim actors, writers, rappers, and filmmakers have recounted traumatic memories of childhood teachersdeclaring that “our ancestor,” Charles Martel, saved Europe from Muslim invaders and Christian enslavement.
The French history classroom becomes particularly important at a time when the far right believes these history lessons are getting canceled, and worse still, that those strongmen at their center—Charles the Hammer, Matamoros (the “Killer of Moors,” aka Saint James), the Knights Templar, Crusaders, Vikings—are being erased. The memorialization of ancestral European “heroes” (often extremely violent and immoral) becomes necessary as a grounding legend for the many survivalist and men’s rights movements who take after them. These groups contrast the fearless leaders of old with the lamentable, fragile state of today’s European man.
Chapter 2 examines the current trend of alarmist and nativist literature that projects today’s demographic tendencies into the future, using popular social science to paint a picture of European Christian extinction. Houellebecq, author of Submission, about Europe’s capitulation to Muslims, was called prophetic after the attacks at the Charlie Hebdo offices. His literary prediction of a spineless France unable to confront Muslims out of political correctness seems to have found validation with a large readership. Jean Raspail wrote the blueprint for “submission” decades earlier, with Camp of the Saints, considered the favorite novel of Western white nationalists. It trades Muslims for Indian invaders, describing France’s submersion under a fleet of a million famished refugees fleeing the subcontinent. Raspail later admitted in interviews that he was really talking about North Africans but switched them out to avoid scandal. Similar to naturalist and realist writers of old, with their attention to detail and vivisections of society, these alarmist writers nevertheless distort what they believe to be reality. They overdose on “real” ingredients like bad news, gritty and pessimistic outlooks, and worst-case scenario predictions and thus concoct a “realist” vision that lacks proportion and verisimilitude. The border blurs between authors who write dystopian fiction inspired by current events and nonfiction writers who exaggerate current events and warn of a bleak future. I refer to both as great replacement writers. So-called security experts like Laurent Obertone use police statistics to detail scenarios in which crime would vanish if only Muslims would do the same (La France Orange mécanique, 2013). Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe (2017), seeks in his work to specify, with journalism and figures, all the ways in which Raspail and Houellebecq’s fictions are becoming reality. These authors share a common pity for (white) European man, who is on the precipice of major and destabilizing change. Houellebecq, for example, describes the middle-aged, white, balding, romantically clueless protagonist François (a prototype that makes repeat appearances in his novels) as powerless to stop Islamization. I pay particular attention to the way that these portraits of miserable and failing European men are designed to spur European man into action, not further pessimism and lamentation, as most critics have suggested. The difference is important: it means that Europe is not a lost cause. European man can regain his ascendancy if sufficiently incited, a convalescent strategy I’m calling provocative self-pity. The authors cultivate the affect of disgust (over the indigestible otherness of the migrant) and self-disgust (when European man faces his miserable portrait), so as to motivate him out of his torpor.
In chapter 3, I study men’s rights movements and their relationship to the GRT. European guardians’ demographic alarm about losing the birthrate battle to immigrant populations stems, as I mentioned, from a domestic crisis of masculinity visible in all manner of cultural production. This is evident, for example, in the doomsday fiction discussed in the preceding chapter, where authors warn of the national and cultural dangers of emasculation. This chapter focuses on the main domestic scapegoats for this emasculation, namely the gay and feminist rights movements, perceived ascomprising enablers paving the way for the great replacement. The social “disruptions” that alarm nativists the most are the prospect of gay parenthood, the teaching of gender theory in schools, and the opening of IVF to single mothers, all of which threaten to cut straight men out of the picture entirely. I underline the surprising role of homophobic homoeroticismin the resurrection of European man in the process of curating his restored image. White nationalists in both Europe and the United States aim to reforge homosocial links of tribal brotherhood, seen clearly in the muscular campaigns in France against gay marriage, mocked by journalists for being the gayest protests against gay marriage ever. Ultimately, this homophobic homoeroticism aims to displace “useless,” hedonistic, public homosexuality with a homoeroticism that drives patriarchy and is a tonic for reproductive marriage. White nativists aim to sacralize bodily contact between white men through sport and combat, driving it away from its homosexual connotations. Ironically, the homosocial infrastructure and brotherhood that white nativists aim to put in place closely resembles the communitarian homosociality that characterizes relations between Muslim men in the Western gaze (affectionate friendships, love born of mutual struggle or combat). These Islamic links between men were considered suspect and possibly homosexual only decades before.
The theme of tribalism provides a bridge to chapter 4, which looks at the role environmentalism plays in demographic anxiety and anti-immigrant rhetoric. While left-leaning groups have traditionally been associated with back-to- the- land movements, the right has its own version, which sometimes borrows from leftist ecological philosophies in order togreenwash its conservatism and xenophobia. Nativist groups are converging with men’s rights movements across the Western world and creating survivalist camps in forests and the countryside, spaces viewed as beyond the corrupting reach of cosmopolitan cities and immigration. In order to resolve the crisis of Western masculinity, these groups urge white men to go back to basics and recover ancient reflexes (that modern and technological comforts have atrophied) through survival training in the elements.
This austerity program would promote masculine sustainability through strategic resource deprivation, a kind of fasting that strengthens the body and mind. These groups form neopagan wolf packs that teach self-defense through jousting within the group and creating hierarchies that order the chain of command. Collaborative hunting teaches them to discard the self-sabotaging lone wolf mentality and embrace tribal chains in the wolf pack; strength in numbers trumps the self-sufficiency of individualist survivalism. Tactics learned in the wild can be redeployed against racial and migrant others on Day X, the horizon of inevitable civil war in Europe.
In their search for “pure” codes that predate postcolonial migration, these groups embrace paganism. As a system of beliefs that existed before Christianity, paganism has greater “native” credentials and moreover lacks Christianity’s crucial flaw: a code of hospitality that welcomes strangers. This version of paganism emerges from the land and foregoes all missionary elements, focusing instead on an essential connection between “blood and soil,” giving new dimension to an old fascist phrase. Researchers and journalists have coined the term ecofascism to refer to the nexus between the environmental and European nativist movements. In the past, Nazism advocated for an exclusive relationship between the Aryan race and the European environment; natural selection would favor Aryans’ claim to “their” land. Today’s fascists, however, use the apparent political neutrality of environmentalism to make inroads toward new, untapped constituencies. They deploy a whole host of plant and animal metaphors to frame immigrants (and their descendants) as invasive species and parasites feasting on largesse provided by their “overly generous” hosts, which are unprepared for disruptions to their ecosystem. With this racialization of different species, ecofascists aim for population reduction and the fostering of “native” human species that are supposedly better stewards of European land, in preexisting synergy with its plants and animals. This framework uses the incontestable “logic” of nature to call for a return to essentialist gender roles that naturalize sexual difference. This ecofascist patriarchy privileges sexual complementarity and the dependency of women on men, selectively ignoring natural models that showcase male parenting, synergy between male and female organisms, female leadership, or homosexuality.