An Egyptian Scholar on Dismissing the Muslim Threat in Europe

A.S. Ibrahim was born in Egypt; he is either a former Muslim or a Copt. In either case, he is determined to set Westerners straight about the menace of Islam. His most recent essay on this theme can be found here: “The Economist’s comforting confusion about Islam,” by A.S. Ibrahim, World, September 17, 2026:

Don’t trust liberal media outlets or progressive politicians when they talk about Islam in the West.

Exhibit A: The Economist’s Sept. 10 cover story, “The truth and the lies about Islam in Europe.” The article opens honestly enough, with panic about Islam rising across the continent. At present, large shares of the public view Islam as incompatible with Western values and the shift can be seen in the gains conservative parties are making in Germany, Britain, and France. Then, having correctly diagnosed the fever, the article spends the rest of its word count diluting the “Muslim” problem and insisting the patient isn’t actually sick.

According to the piece, there is no Islamic dominance, no takeover, no mass radicalization, and no erasure of European culture. Sharia, we are told, isn’t entering national law. There’s no demographic “great replacement.” Muslims make up roughly 6% of Europe’s population, and even though immigrant fertility runs higher, the rates converge within two generations—“a long way,” the article assures us, from civilizational erasure. Most Muslim immigrants, it says, are fine people fully integrating in European life and want to succeed in their new countries, not remake them. And in its one moment of near-honesty, the article concedes: “Islam poses no serious danger. But Islamism and the fear of Islam do.” Even there, it hastens to add that most Islamists reject violence outright, preferring quieter “entryism” into political and social institutions to advance goals it calls “illiberal” without ever defining the term.

What a toothless piece of analysis!

Here is what a lifetime studying Islamic texts, history, and movements teaches us: Islam, once it grows in representation within a society, doesn’t settle for being one voice among many. It seeks dominion. The Economist’s own reporting concedes as much when it describes Muslim communities pressing for social and political accommodation well beyond proportional presence. You can see the pattern in New York City, where mosques are plentiful yet demands persist for overflow prayer in the streets and for the call to prayer to be broadcast to entire neighborhoods, believers and unbelievers alike. This is the signature move: Play the aggrieved minority while numbers are small, then press for public deference once numbers grow….

Long before they are a majority, history teaches us, Muslims have taken over lands, sometimes through violent means — both qital (combat) and terrorism — and sometimes by inexorable demographic conquest, as happened to Egypt, where an entirely Coptic society was reduced over time to 10% of the population. In European countries where they now live, and are 10% or less of the population — as in France, the U.K., and Germany —Muslims are already entering politics in noticeable numbers, and also using their power as a political bloc to persuade non-Muslim politicians to carry out their wishes. It’s the same situation in the United States, where Muslim political candidates at every level have burst onto the scene and too often, alas, are winning. They have managed to turn much of the Democratic Party against Israel, and as a result, may even be able to block arms sales to Israel that are critical to its survival. On campuses all over the Western world, students have been brainwashed into hating Israel and, just as worrisome, fed a sanitized version of Islamic history that the ghost of Scheherezade could not have bettered.