In Submission, his most recent novel, the French writer-provocateur Michel Houellebecq imagines France after an Islamic takeover. The book, argues Amir Taheri, is as much a critique of European decadence as a warning about the dangers of radical Islam:

It is, of course, possible to read Submission as an exercise in tongue-in-cheek provocation. The trouble is that the self-loathing it portrays is real. Many Frenchmen see their society as drifting in uncertain waters without an anchor. They are concerned by increasingly powerless elected governments, distant bureaucrats who intervene in every aspect of people’s lives, and an economic system that promises more and more but delivers less and less. Advocates of the view that the West is in “decline” claim that Europeans no longer believe in anything and are thus doomed to lose the fight against home grown Islamists who passionately believe in the little they know of Islam.

The novel partly answers the question that many French are asking these days: What do jihadists want? The answer is that they don’t want anything in particular because they want everything. They want to seize control of your life and dictate its every aspect to the last detail. In exchange, they offer you security and a share of whatever cake may remain.

Houellebecq’s novel ends without its hero specifically accepting the bargain, although he clearly tilts towards doing so. In other words, the French, even seven years from now (the novel is set in 2022), still have a choice. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of the French will not feel the same temptation felt by Houellebecq’s narrator.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.