Islam poses no serious danger. But Islamism and the fear of Islam do

Published on: Sep 11, 2026, 21:40:14 IST

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PANIC ABOUT Islam in Europe is spreading. In several European countries half the population now thinks it is incompatible with Western values. On September 6th the populist-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, its largest state-election tally yet, warning about “Islamisation” and promising forced deportations. The same weekend in Britain hundreds of balaclava-clad thugs occupied Dover, chanting “Stop the boats” and “Christ is King”. In France Marine Le Pen's call to ban Islamic headscarves from public places is backed by 60% of voters.

The obsession has also taken root in America. The fear is less of terrorists, as it was after September 11th 2001, than of an Islamic plot to take over Europe from within. Members of the Trump administration warn of “civilisational erasure”.

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This perception is harming transatlantic relations. It is also wrong. Europe faces no Islamic takeover, no mass radicalisation of Muslims and no erasure of its culture. As our reporting shows, it does not have “no-go zones”, sharia is not creeping into national law and nowhere is a demographic “great replacement” under way.

The real danger to Europe is different: of extremism fuelled by Islamism (the belief that the state should enforce Islamic principles) and by social-media-driven right-wing paranoia. The left makes this worse by denying the modest but real threats Islamism poses. So do politicians in the centre, by keeping quiet lest they attract accusations of racism. This dynamic could indeed harm Europe’s liberal democracies—not by replacing them with a caliphate, but by slowing integration and favouring policies that would do lasting harm to their freedoms.

The most extreme fears are easily debunked. Even after record migration from majority-Muslim countries, Muslims now make up just 6% of Europe’s population of well over 500m. Although new arrivals typically have more children than the native-born do, fertility rates tend to converge within two generations. That is a long way from civilisational erasure.

In fact, most Muslim immigrants want to get on in their new home, not impose on it a version of the societies they have just left. Their children tend to do better than their parents at school. In Britain 67% of Bangladeshis who sat standard tests in 2021 were enrolled in university by age 19, compared with 38% of white Britons. Many Muslims are involved in mainstream politics: witness Britain’s home secretary and London’s mayor. In important ways Muslim attitudes can resemble those of other Europeans. In polling we commissioned among British Muslims, we found little resistance to women working.

What, then, is setting so many Europeans against Islam? Plenty of Muslims hold illiberal views—we report in this issue on the killing of an openly gay imam in South Africa. In Britain, our polling finds, 52% of Muslims think homosexuality is wrong, and young Muslims (41% of under-35s) are more likely than their elders (25%) to believe violence can be justified if someone insults the prophet.

Holding socially conservative views does not in itself make people a threat—some of Europe’s defenders on the right are just as anti-gay as the Muslims they decry. But some of these attitudes should trouble liberals who have long assumed that open societies eventually make people more tolerant. And if the state is too pusillanimous to confront wrongs committed by minorities, as when gangs of Muslim men abused young girls in several English cities, it rightly causes outrage.

Just as important is the conflation of Islam, a religion, with Islamism, a political ideology. Islam isn’t a problem; Islamism can be. Unlike the jihadis of 9/11, most Islamists do not advocate violence. But many practise “entryism”—infiltrating democratic institutions to promote an illiberal agenda. Well-connected Islamist groups might lobby for sweeping hate-speech laws or against counter-extremism programmes. The main danger of entryism is local. Small, well-organised networks can capture a school, a mosque, a council or a charity and use such institutions to discourage integration and impose religious conformity on other Muslims who live nearby.

Concern about these non-violent Islamists has grown among Europe’s security services. In France authorities fret about covert entryism by the Muslim Brotherhood. An official report released last year warned that Islamism could, in time, threaten secular rules and women’s rights. But that seems unlikely. France’s interior ministry estimated that just 139 of 2,800 Muslim places of worship were linked to the Brotherhood.

Instead, the main victims are other Muslims. Half of the 12 council wards in Blackburn, in northern England, are over 60% Muslim; two are over 80%. In such areas women can feel pressure to let sharia councils govern their family lives. Gay and liberal Muslims face intimidation. Non-conformist Muslims complain that Western authorities—scared of being seen as racist—do not extend the same protections to them as they do to non-Muslim citizens.

There is broader harm, too. Islamists stir up antisemitism, not least over Gaza. They demand curbs on free speech about their beliefs. They scare politicians, comedians, academics and journalists into self-censorship. They can bully schools, student unions, charities and councils.

What turns these local threats into a continental danger is how they are exploited. It suits Islamists to claim that any criticism of their political project is an attack on Islam itself. The populist left, including Unsubmissive France and the Greens in Britain, tends to treat questions about migration, crime or Islamism as racist.

And the populist right often whips up fear by claiming that all Muslims pose a threat and accusing the state of a “woke cover-up” and “two-tier treatment”. Few have been more vehement than Elon Musk, who has used his social-media platform to shape views of Islam around the world and to boost Europe’s anti-Muslim right, from the AfD to Tommy Robinson, a British agitator whom we feature in a three-part podcast series starting this weekend.

The populist right’s remedies are as illiberal as the Islamists they claim to be protecting Europe from. Promises of mass deportation, segregation and dress bans all terrify Muslims, inhibiting integration and driving them into the arms of extremists. Any country that enacted such policies would find that the hatred they unleashed would cause enduring damage.

That is why Europe’s mainstream politicians need to offer an alternative. Violence and threats of it should be prosecuted. But there should be no taboos for the sake of cultural sensitivity. Free speech is not the enemy of tolerance but its precondition. Entryism should be called out, as should bigotry. Governments nervous about collecting, or releasing, data leave a vacuum to be filled by speculative hyperbole.

Tackling all this will not be easy or quick, but there is hope. Europe’s Muslims are assimilating, as did earlier waves of Catholic, Jewish and Caribbean migrants in the countries where they settled. The arrival of all those previous groups sparked moral panics about whether they would ever fit in. All eventually found a place. Muslims will, too—if division and paranoia are not allowed to get in the way.

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