Hegemony: An Oxford thesis wrapped in a political thriller

Hegemony, a novel by Swedish-Filipino Elizabeth Ferido-Bohlin, is a serious, scholarly treatise wrapped delicately in a political thriller as exciting as they come—garnished with servings of a budding romance; the murder of the Saudi Arabian ambassador and a sensational, ritualistic beheading gripping peaceful Sweden; espionage and skulduggery; treachery and betrayal in high places; and, as cliffhanger, terror in the skies.

Set in the backdrop of a Sweden all agog over the 113th anniversary of the Nobel Prize ceremony usually held at the magnificent Stockholm Concert Hall, a young, innocent Isabelle, lugging her book-bound Oxford thesis that she is about to defend before her peers, descends into the bowels of the Ostermalm building where she resides and finds herself in Valfisken Hall.  Entranced by the opulent surroundings, she is drawn to four pairs of swords attached to a wall:  the Katana/Samurai, the Crusader, the Scimitar/Shamshir, and the Viking.

But Isabelle remembers she has to attend a party and departs in haste.  She forgets her book, which is discovered by the prostitute Marit Fagger, who comes to Valfisken Hall to meet another Ostermalm resident.  The wily Marit, out to extort a pretty sum for the mysterious microchip she stole from her paramour, the Saudi ambassador (who dies in the hands of Muslim fundamentalists disguised as Saudi Embassy personnel), hides it in Isabelle’s book—and is gruesomely killed by the pugnacious Saudi Embassy press attaché, Mohammed Fathi, swinging the Scimitar to cut off her head.

The chase is on to recover the microchip, involving Wahhabis embedded in the Saudi Embassy; their Iranian rivals; unsuspecting Stockholm police led by the dashing Superintendent Robert von Ramm, tasked to solve the twin murders; and the Quisling diplomat Leopold Poole Svinfoth, working for the third richest man in the world, Prince Mallah, who wants to use Sweden as his beachhead to reconquer a secular Europe with the Islamic sword.

The core of the book, however, is Isabelle’s Oxford thesis, about the stealthy, “soft” Muslim re-invasion of Europe, as the continent grapples with the question of Turkish entry into the European Union.  As Isabelle defends her thesis, the reader actually reads her thoughts:  75 million Turkish Muslims eventually flooding Europe, already saddled with the problem of 53 million hostile and unassimilated Muslim residents within its borders, a potentially explosive situation that could endanger tenets Europeans take for granted—liberty, equality before the law, religious freedom, and solidarity—fruits of 2000 years of Judeo-Christian ethics that define Europe as Christian.

The book’s prologue contends that the Islamization of Europe is “fortified by political leaders, mainstream media, and so-called public intellectuals” enthralled by the forces of multiculturalism, relativism, and political correctness.  Secularism, in particular, is aggressively pushing Christianity to the graveyard, as Bohlin puts it.  An awakened Muslim soul, adds Bohlin, “has surreptitiously entered through the rectum of those who wield political power across the Judeo-Christian world.”

Only the Hegemon that is the Holy See stands in the way of the “charm offensive” by political Islam.  The Holy See, without any army, is the Phantom State that commands the respect of the rest of the world.

In the book’s concluding chapters, the microchip is found and thus, a race to decipher its code and disable it.  But a plane explodes in the sky.  Which plane?  That which carries the Pope?  Or the plane of the Iranian president?  In Isabelle’s steady hands rest the fates of both men.