During a demonstration in Stockholm in front of the Turkish Embassy last week, a copy of the Quran was burned in public. It immediately led Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to reinstate his veto on Sweden’s adhesion to NATO, and then the (Dutch) NATO secretary-general to reply that the demonstration, pertained to freedom of speech in a democratic country.

That context echoed the vagaries of Michel Houellebecq, the most widely read living French author worldwide. His work explores the complex ethnic and religious weaving of religious and ethnic diversity brought about by the tidal waves of immigration from Africa, the Middle East and Asia in countries that — until the 1960s — were mostly rooted in their own culture, language and feeling of belonging to a cohesive nation.

The novelist is renowned for an extraordinary flair. In 2001, he published "Platform," a novel set in a tourist village in Malaysia that concludes with a raid of jihadis who storm the place. Early reviewers of the French version criticized the end plot as exaggerated and discriminatory — until the 9/11 “blessed holy raids” on New York City and Washington by al-Qaeda implemented it in real life a few weeks later.

Houellebecq's novel "Submission" — which translates into Arabic as “Islam” — made it even more to the point. Completed in 2014, it was a dystopia that foresaw the victory of a Muslim brother from Tunisian descent at the French presidential election of 2022 — in real life Emmanuel Macron was reelected last year — among a civil war pitting together jihadis against extreme-right nationalists. The book came out on Jan. 7, 2015 — the very day of the deadly attack at the Charlie Hebdo editorial office, which would launch three years of jihadi terror in France, with 272 dead and more than 1,200 wounded, and in many European countries.