A fixation on the numbers of Muslims coming into Europe and the number of children they brought or had once they were here was not something that Fallaci plucked from nowhere. Nor was her suggestion that this migration or hijra was a declared intention of some Muslim leaders. In The Rage and the Pride she quotes Islamic leaders who boast that they intended to do exactly what she was describing. She quotes an Islamic scholar who allegedly told a synod at the Vatican in 1999, ‘By means of your democracy we shall invade you, by means of our religion we shall dominate you.’ It was, she said, ‘a reverse crusade’.23 All this leads Fallaci to conclude that Europe’s Muslims are attempting ‘not only a conquest of souls but also a conquest of territory.’ And then, ‘They breed too much. Italians don’t produce babies anymore, the idiots. For decades they have had and still have the lowest birth-rate in the West.’24 This is the slightly watered-down version that Fallaci’s publishers released when the author translated her own work into her own idiosyncratic English. But in the original edition Fallaci had flavoured this with her observation that Muslims ‘breed like rats’.25

Muslim groups in Italy pressed for Fallaci to be prosecuted on the grounds, among others, of ‘vilification of religion’. Similar prosecutions against her were attempted in France. This happened in 2002 at the same time as a spate of similar prosecutions were attempted against public figures. In France the actress turned animal-rights campaigner Brigitte Bardot was prosecuted for statements including her attacks on the practice of Halal slaughter.26 French Muslim groups also attempted the prosecution of the novelist Michel Houellebecq for saying in an interview that he thought Islam ‘the most stupid religion’ and the Koran ‘badly written’.27

The prospect of prosecution in her home country for offending Islam was not the only threat to Fallaci after the publication of The Rage and the Pride. When she returned to Italy she had to be protected around the clock by the Carabinieri.28 These and other outrages to her in her home country spurred Fallaci to a less disciplined work than The Rage and the Pride. Her follow-up sermon, The Force of Reason, sold almost as many copies in continental Europe and saw the same preoccupations taken up a notch. The argument was not devoid of historical or present-day evidence. In defence of her view that Muslims were trying to outbreed Europeans inside Europe, Fallaci quoted the former Algerian President Houari Boumedienne who in 1974 told the General Assembly of the United Nations, ‘One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.’29 A third and final book by Fallaci in a similar vein followed.30