General concerns with migration often fused with fears of Muslim migrants and Muslim residents who have grown up in Europe. Islam is now the largest minority religion in Europe. The EU’s 15 to 20 million Muslims outnumber Catholics in Europe’s mainly Protestant north, and they outnumber Protestants in Europe’s Catholic south. Major cities have substantial Muslim minorities. Muslim residents make up about 25 percent of the population in Marseilles and Rotterdam, 15 percent in Brussels, and about 10 percent in Paris, Copenhagen, and London.10

Worries increased after the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attack on New York’s World Trade Center (see “Turmoil in the Muslim World”) and the subsequent war in Iraq. Terrorist attacks in Europe organized by Islamist extremists heightened anxieties. On a morning in March 2004, radical Moroccan Muslims living in Spain exploded bombs planted on trains bound for Madrid, killing 191 commuters and wounding 1,800 more. A year later, an attack on the London transit system carried out by British citizens of Pakistani descent killed over 50 people. Since then, a number of attacks have kept Islamist terrorism in the public eye — including the murderous January 2015 assault on the staff of the satiric French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons critical of the Prophet Muhammad, and the even more deadly attacks in Paris in November 2015, when extremists motivated by the ideologies of the Islamic State killed 130 people.

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The vast majority of Europe’s Muslims clearly supported democracy and rejected violent extremism, but these spectacular attacks and other assaults by Islamist militants nonetheless sharpened the debate on immigration. Security was not the only focus of concern. Critics across the political spectrum warned that Europe’s rapidly growing Muslim population posed a dire threat to the West’s liberal tradition, which embraced freedom of thought, representative government, toleration, separation of church and state, and, more recently, equal rights for women and gays. Islamist extremists and radical clerics living in Europe, critics proclaimed, rejected these fundamental Western values and preached the supremacy of Islamic laws for Europe’s Muslims.

Secular Europeans at times had a hard time understanding the depths of Muslim spirituality. French attempts to enforce a ban on wearing the hijab (the headscarf worn by many faithful Muslim women) in public schools expressed the tension between Western secularism and Islamic religiosity on a most personal level and evoked outrage and protests in the Muslim community. As busy mosques came to outnumber dying churches in European cities, nationalist politicians exploited widespread doubts that immigrant populations from Muslim countries would ever assimilate into Western culture. A Danish-Muslim imam (spiritual leader) captured the dilemma: “The Danish shelves for faith and spirituality are empty,” he reported. “They fill them instead with fear of the ‘strong foreigner.’”11 Time was on the side of Euro-Islam, critics warned. Europe’s Muslim population, estimated at 20 million in 2010, appeared likely to grow to 30 million by 2025 and to increase rapidly thereafter — even though that total would only be 4 percent of Europe’s then-projected 750 million people.

By the 1990s in France, some 70 percent of the population believed that there were “too many Arabs,” and 30 percent supported right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen’s calls to rid France of its immigrants altogether.12 In the last decade, Le Pen’s National Front and other anti-immigration, far-right political parties, such as the Danish People’s Party and Austria’s Freedom Party, have made impressive gains in national elections. Their success has been aided by bigotry and popular misconceptions. According to one 2013 poll, about 50 percent of respondents in Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Britain, and Sweden believe that “Islam is not compatible with the West.” Other polls show that Europeans routinely overestimate the number of Muslims in Europe. In France, for example, the public believes that 31 percent of the population is Muslim, when the actual number is about 8 percent; the British believe that 21 percent of the population is Muslim, when the actual number is only 5 percent.13

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In Germany, tens of thousands of people have joined the anti-immigrant movement called Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West), and in the first six months of 2015 the German authorities recorded over two hundred attacks against migrant housing or against the migrants themselves. Immigration and the supposed “Islamization” of Europe, along with fundamentalist terrorism, have become highly charged political issues, and conservative and far-right pundits and politicians across Europe offer a variety of diagnoses and solutions to these perceived problems. (See “Thinking Like a Historian: The Conservative Reaction to Immigration and Islamist Terrorism.”)

Admitting that Islamist extremism could pose a serious challenge, some observers focused instead on the issue of integration. Whereas the first generation of Muslim migrants — predominantly Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Pakistanis in Britain, and Moroccans in the Netherlands — had found jobs as unskilled workers in Europe’s great postwar boom, they and their children had been hard hit after 1973 by the general economic downturn and the decline of manufacturing. Immigrants also suffered from a lack of educational opportunities. Provided with modest welfare benefits and housed minimally in dilapidated housing projects, many second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants were outcasts in their adopted countries. To these observers, economics, inadequate job training, and discrimination had more influence on immigrant attitudes about their host communities than did religion and extremist teachings.

This argument was strengthened by widespread rioting by Muslim youths in France in 2005 and again in 2007 and 2009. Almost always French by birth, language, and education, marauding groups labeled “Arabs” in press reports torched hundreds of automobiles night after night in Paris suburbs and other large cities. (See “Evaluating the Evidence 30.2: William Pfaff, Will the French Riots Change Anything?”) The rioters complained bitterly of high unemployment, systematic discrimination, and exclusion, and studies sparked by the rioting showed that religious ideology had almost no influence on their thinking.

A minority used such arguments to challenge anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim discrimination and its racist overtones. They argued that Europe badly needed newcomers — preferably talented newcomers — to limit the impending population decline and provide valuable technical skills. Some asserted that Europe should recognize that Islam has for centuries been a European religion and a vital part of European life. This recognition might open the way to political and cultural acceptance of European Muslims and head off the resentment that can drive a tiny minority to separatism and acts of terror.