John R. Bowen, author of Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves and Can Islam be French, has a new article in this month’s Boston Review, “Nothing to Fear: Misreading Muslim Immigration in Europe.” In it, he examines a spate of books penned by American authors that deal with Islam in Europe, such as Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within and Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (the website for which touts the book as having been called “flagrantly Islamophobic” by the Canadian Human Rights Commission).

In Bowen’s assessment, these books argue that “Islam […] has shocked Europeans, the shock comes from Islamic values, and the clash is unlikely to subside. These three themes—Islamic shock, value conflict, and unending struggle—evoke Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” but with added urgency: Muslims are now on the wrong side of the Huntingtonian line.” He adds, in conclusion, that “[we] need to take this argument seriously and understand what is wrong with it. And—to cut right to the chase—it is wrong on every detail that matters.”

The entire article can be found here. As it sometimes seems to go, the often vitriolic comments section is worth a hard look.