The truth and the lies about Islam in Europe Islam poses no serious danger. But Islamism and the fear of Islam do   Sep 10th 2026|6 min read   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”.   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. ■   主旨： 歐洲對伊斯蘭的真相與謊言：伊斯蘭本身並無危險，真正的威脅來自伊斯蘭主義與群眾恐慌 日期： 2026年9月10日 【第一段：群眾恐慌與政治亂象】 針對歐洲伊斯蘭教的恐慌，正在各地迅速蔓延。 在好幾個歐洲國家，已經有一半的人口認為，伊斯蘭教與西方核心價值完全無法相容。9月6號，極右翼的「德國另類選擇黨」（AfD）在薩克森-安哈特邦的選舉中，拿下了高達 44% 的選票，創下該黨在邦選舉中的歷史新高。他們在競選中不斷警告「伊斯蘭化」的危機，並承諾要實施強制驅逐出境。 同一週末，在英國，數百名戴著巴拉克拉法頭套的暴徒佔領了多佛港，高喊著「阻止難民船」和「基督為王」的口號。而在法國，瑪琳．勒龐（Marine Le Pen）主張要在公共場所禁止佩戴伊斯蘭頭巾，這個提議獲得了高達六成選民的支持。 這種執念甚至跨越了大西洋，在美國扎根。人們現在擔心的不再是像 2001 年「911 事件」那樣的外在恐怖份子，而是害怕伊斯蘭勢力正在從內部暗中掌控歐洲。川普政府的成員甚至警告，這是一場「文明的消亡」。 【第二段：事實釐清與真正的危險】 這種觀感不僅正在傷害跨大西洋的盟友關係，而且它根本是錯的。 歐洲並沒有面臨被伊斯蘭接管的危險，沒有出現大規模的穆斯林極端化，也沒有所謂的文化消亡。正如我們的調查報導所顯示，歐洲根本沒有所謂的「治安禁區」（No-go zones），伊斯蘭教法沒有滲透進國家法律，各地更沒有發生人口結構上的「大換血」（Great Replacement）。 歐洲面臨的真正危險其實另有原因：第一，是「伊斯蘭主義」（也就是主張國家應強制施行伊斯蘭教義的政治主張）所引發的極端主義；第二，則是社群媒體所推波助瀾的右翼疑神疑鬼。 左派把情況搞得更糟，因為他們選擇無視伊斯蘭主義所帶來的溫和但實質的威脅。而中間派政客則保持沉默，深怕被扣上種族歧視的帽子。這種政治動態確實會傷害歐洲的民主體制——但並不是因為歐洲會被「哈里發國」取代，而是因為它會拖慢社會融合，並促成那些對人民自由造成永久傷害的政策。 【第三段：數據與融合現況】 那些最極端的恐慌，很容易就被事實推翻。 即使經歷了來自穆斯林占多數國家的破紀錄移民潮，穆斯林目前也僅占歐洲 5 億多總人口的 6% 左右。雖然新移民的生育率通常高於本土出生的人口，但到了第二代，生育率通常就會趨於一致。這離所謂的「文明消亡」還差得遠。 事實上，絕大多數穆斯林移民是希望在新的家園好好生活，而不是把他們剛離開的社會制度強加給新環境。他們的下一代在學校的表現，往往也比父母更好。 以英國為例，在 2021 年參加標準考試的孟加拉裔青年中，有 67% 在 19 歲前進入大學，而英國白人青年的比例僅為 38%。許多穆斯林也積極參與主流政治，英國的內政大臣和倫敦市長就是很好的例子。在許多重要觀念上，穆斯林的態度與其他歐洲人非常相似。我們在英國穆斯林群體中進行的民調就發現，他們對於女性參與工作幾乎沒有阻力。 【第四段：保守觀念與社會爭議】 那麼，到底是什麼原因讓這麼多歐洲人站到了伊斯蘭教的對立面？ 確實，許多穆斯林持有一些非自由主義的觀點——我們在本期報導中，就提及了一位南非公開性性向的伊瑪目（伊斯蘭教長）遭到殺害的慘劇。在英國，我們的民調顯示，有 52% 的穆斯林認為同性戀是不對的；而年輕的穆斯林（35 歲以下占 41%）比年長的穆斯林（占 25%）更容易認為，如果有人侮辱了先知，使用暴力是可以被接受的。 抱持社會保守觀念本身，並不代表這些人就是威脅——畢竟，許多打著保護歐洲旗號的右翼捍衛者，他們反同性戀的程度並不亞於他們所指責的穆斯林。但是，對於長期認為「開放社會最終會讓人們變得更包容」的自由主義者來說，這些態度確實令人不安。 此外，如果政府過於懦弱，不敢去面對少數族群所犯下的過錯——例如先前在英國數個城市發生的穆斯林男性幫派集體侵害年輕少女案——這必然會引發社會大眾的憤怒。 【第五段：宗教與政治意識形態的混淆】 同樣重要的是，人們常把「伊斯蘭教」這個宗教，與「伊斯蘭主義」這種政治意識形態混為一談。 伊斯蘭教本身並不是問題；但「伊斯蘭主義」可能是。 與 911 事件中的恐怖份子不同，大多數伊斯蘭主義者並不主張暴力。但許多人實行「滲入主義」（Entryism）——也就是滲透進民主體制內，去推廣非自由主義的訴求。這些人脈廣闊的伊斯蘭主義團體，可能會遊說政府制定嚴苛的反仇恨言論法，或是反對去極端化計畫。 這種「滲入主義」的主要危險在於地方層面。小型但組織嚴密的網絡可以掌控一所學校、一座清真寺、一個地方議會或慈善機構，並利用這些機構來阻礙社會融合，把宗教規範強加給住在附近的其他穆斯林。 【第六段：地方威脅與其受害者】 歐洲的安全部門對這些非暴力伊斯蘭主義者的擔憂日益加劇。在法國，官方非常擔心穆斯林兄弟會的隱蔽滲透。去年公布的一份官方報告警告，伊斯蘭主義隨著時間推移，可能會威脅到世俗法規與女性權益。 不過，要全面威脅世俗體制似乎不太可能。根據法國內政部的估算，在全法 2,800 個穆斯林禮拜場所中，只有 139 個與穆斯林兄弟會有關聯。 事實上，這種意識形態最大的受害者，往往是其他的穆斯林。 在英格蘭北部的布萊克本（Blackburn），12 個選區中有半數的穆斯林人口超過 60%，甚至有兩個選區超過 80%。在這些區域，婦女可能會感受到壓力，被迫讓伊斯蘭教法委員會來處置她們的家庭生活。同志與自由派穆斯林則面臨恐嚇。許多不願從俗的穆斯林抱怨，西方政府因為害怕被貼上種族歧視的標籤，根本沒有給予他們與非穆斯林公民同等的保護。 此外，還有更廣泛的危害。伊斯蘭主義者煽動反猶太主義（尤其是在加薩議題上）；他們要求限制對其信仰的言論自由；他們甚至威脅政客、喜劇演員、學者和記者，迫使他們進行自我審查；他們還會霸凌學校、學生會、慈善機構和地方議會。 【第七段：政治兩極化的惡性循環】 讓這些地方威脅演變成全歐洲危機的，正是這些威脅被惡意利用的方式。 對伊斯蘭主義者來說，把任何針對他們政治主張的批判，統統包裝成「對伊斯蘭教的攻擊」，最符合他們的利益。 而民粹左派（包括「不屈法國」以及英國的綠黨）則傾向於把所有關於移民、犯罪或伊斯蘭主義的質疑，一律打成種族歧視。 至於民粹右派，則藉由聲稱「所有穆斯林都是威脅」，並指控政府在進行「左傾掩蓋」和「雙重標準執法」，來不斷煽動恐懼。其中最猖狂的莫過於伊隆．馬斯克（Elon Musk），他利用自己的社群平台重塑全球對伊斯蘭教的看法，並為歐洲的反穆斯林右翼勢力推波助瀾——從德國另類選擇黨，到英國煽動者湯米．羅賓遜（Tommy Robinson，我們本週末開始的採訪播客節目中將對他進行三集特別報導）。 【第八段：右翼解方帶來的傷害與未來展望】 民粹右派提出的解決方案，其實和他們聲稱要保護歐洲免受其害的伊斯蘭主義者一樣，缺乏自由精神。大規模驅逐出境、種族隔離以及禁穿特定服飾等承諾，只會讓穆斯林感到恐懼，進而阻礙融合，甚至把他們推向極端主義者的懷抱。任何實行這些政策的國家都會發現，隨之爆發的仇恨將造成永久且不可逆的傷害。 這就是為什麼歐洲的主流政客需要提供另一種選擇。 暴力以及暴力威脅必須依法嚴懲，但絕不能為了所謂的「文化敏感性」而設立禁忌。言論自由絕不是包容的敵人，而是包容的前提。 面對「滲入主義」必須果斷揭露，面對偏見也應一視同仁地譴責。政府如果不敢收集或公開數據，只會留下真空，讓誇大不實的推測趁虛而入。 解決這些問題絕非易事，也不可能一蹴可幾，但我們依然可以看到希望。歐洲的穆斯林正在逐步融入社會，就像早年落腳於這些國家的天主教徒、猶太人和加勒比海移民一樣。當初每一個新移民群體的到來，都曾引發過「他們到底能不能融入」的集體恐慌，但最終，他們都找到了屬於自己的位置。 只要我們不讓對立與猜忌繼續蔓延，穆斯林也同樣能在這裡找到歸屬。 --Hosting provided by SoundOn