In France, Pascal Bruckner is at the centre of the argument about Islam. As in Britain, anyone who voices any criticism at all about the Islamic world as a culture is likely to be called a racist, and Bruckner has not escaped that accusation: a novelist who speaks also on politics, he is rather in the position of Martin Amis. Bruckner has a good answer: “Multiculturalism is the racism of anti-racists.” But his answer gets him into trouble with multicultural ideologues, none of whom liked his two main works on the subject, Le sanglot de l’homme blanc (The Tears of the White Man, 1983) and La tyrannie de la pénitence (2006), a counter-strike against what he sees as the West’s overdeveloped capacity for self-criticism.