THE MOSQUE OF NOTRE DAME DE PARIS

The great cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris has been called “the noblest architectural conception of man.” Its construction was begun in 1163 by Maurice de Sully (c.1110-1196), the Bishop of Paris, and completed 87 years later in 1250.

The small island in the River Seine has been a sacred site for millennia. It was a sacred grove for the Celts who held their most holy rituals there, then for the Romans who built a Temple of Jupiter. Upon the ruins of this temple, Childebert (496-558), son of Clovis who founded the French Merovingian dynasty, built a basilica to St. Etienne in 528. Since that time, the site has been sacred to Christians.

Elena Chudinova thinks it won’t be for very much longer. One of Russia’s most popular writers, her latest novel, The Mosque of Notre Dame de Paris is currently a runaway best seller in Russia. So current that it has not yet been translated into English. Let’s hope it soon will be.

Chudinova takes the ongoing transformation of Europe into Eurabia – the Moslemification of Europe – seriously. The setting of her novel is Paris of the year 2040. The Moslem immigrant children who comprised 40-50% of the population under 20 in many French cities in 2005 have grown up, have voted themselves into power, established Islam as the state religion in France, imposed strict Sharia Islamic law upon all French people, and converted the cathedral of Notre Dame into a mosque.

The only Christians who are left are forced to live in ghettos like Jews in pre-World War II Warsaw. The novel focuses upon an initially small Christian resistance movement that refuses to live according to Sharia laws and decides to fight back – violently.

Political correctness infects Russia just as much as the US, thus Chudinova’s book has been hysterically denounced by mainstream leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. Archpriest Georgiy Mitrofanov of the prestigious St. Petersburg Theological Seminary is a typical example, who frets that the book promotes “un-Christian phobias.” Mitrofanov explicitly views “anti-Islamism” as an evil on a par with anti-Semitism.

In an interview in Pravda on October 3, Chudinova struck back, stating that Islam is a “false religion” and that the future of Russia, France, and all of Europe “consists in a choice between the cross and the crescent,” between Christianity and Islam.

The only chance Christianity has, said Chudinova, of preventing Islam from destroying European Civilization is a massive effort of Christian missionaries to convert Moslems to Christ – and if that fails, “violent resistance.”

And in this month’s issue of the Moscow journal Politcheskiy, Chudinova continues her attack. “I do not want to live in a Moscow Caliphate,” which is coming, she says, unless Russian Christians start fighting back against Islam. “I would rather live in a Russia controlled by the Americans and garrisoned by American soldiers than in a Moscow where Russia’s own Moslems have established a caliphate.”

Her novel and her unapologetic defense of it are making her a hero in the eye of millions of Russians. Her critics agonize that her book will create millions of “Islamophobes” in Russia, and once it is translated into other languages, throughout Europe. Let’s hope so.

Because it is only through such Islamophobia that Western Civilization and Christianity in Russia and Europe have any chance to survive. That’s how bad it is getting – and Chudinova’s purpose in writing is to prevent it from getting a lot, lot worse.

“The purpose of my novel is not to sow religious discord,” she says, “it is to call Christians to Christ.”