Is Islam a problem for the West?
This question seems to have very different answers depending on who you ask.
Left-leaning people will generally say no. Some might say things like: “It’s their culture,” or “all cultures are equal,” and that we shouldn’t discriminate.
To this kind of person, almost any criticism aimed at Islamic ideology—and the practices that flow from it—is in some way bigoted. It’s Islamophobic, they drone in unison.
The problem with this view is that it completely ignores the very real tensions between Islamic ideology and liberal society. It loftily ignores the giant elephant in the room when contending with Islam’s outworking in the real world, and the long-term effect it is already having on our societies.
Often, it denies the existence of the elephant entirely.
To another group of people, like myself, the Islam question is existential. And the careless verbal shrug from the other side, when confronted with evidence of the dangers we are talking about, can be truly infuriating.
Imagine being one of many passengers on a bus with broken headlights, driving down a highway with no street lights.
To make matters worse, you have reliable intelligence that a gaping, bottomless pit lies somewhere in the road ahead.
Armed with this knowledge, you argue that the bus ought to make an emergency stop so the headlights can be fixed before the sun disappears over the horizon. Your argument sways some people, but not the majority.
The people who oppose you—including the driver—claim you’re simply a fearmonger. They confidently assert that there is no pit. Besides, there’s nothing to worry about because the sun is still out.
They take things even further by voting to speed up, because according to them, the dangers of driving in darkness are greatly overblown.
The driver proceeds to put his foot down on the pedal, laughing maniacally.
Your heart sinks.
Now all your attention is on the sun and its slow, steady descent below the horizon. Once it disappears, the darkness will be complete, and falling into the pit becomes almost inevitable.
So what do you do?
You go seat by seat and attempt to convince people of something incredibly simple: the sun will not remain in the sky indefinitely. Night will come. And if we don’t stop the bus, fix the lights and drive more carefully, we’re all done for.
This, I think, gets to the biggest divide between those who believe Islam is an existential problem for the West and those who don’t.
The timeline.
The Real Divide Is Time
You can point to thousands of terror attacks. You can point to parallel societies forming in parts of the West, where young girls are pressured to cover up and can end up living under social expectations that would not look out of place in some of the most oppressive Islamic societies in the Middle East.
You can point to the rise of gang violence in countries like Sweden. You can point to the radicalisation of second—and even third-generation immigrants—who sometimes take Islam more seriously than their parents, despite being born worlds away from the societies those parents came from.
You can raise an even more uncomfortable question: what exactly do we mean when we talk about “radical Islam”?
The comforting Western formulation suggests that radical Islam is some separate corruption of the real thing. But Islamist groups themselves can point directly to Islamic scripture, jurisprudence and history in defence of what they believe.
Hamas, for example, believes it is following Islam accurately. And when you look at the texts and traditions it draws from, it is not so easy to simply prove them wrong and dismiss their interpretation as having nothing to do with Islam.
The West barely wants to wrestle with that idea.
And the things you can point to—including fundamentally different cultural values and different conceptions of the relationship between religion, law and government—are almost limitless.
Many of the people who call these concerns Islamophobic will defend each issue in isolation.
The hijab is “their culture.”
“It’s a woman’s right to choose!”
Sharia is fringe.
The extremists are only a tiny minority.
Each individual issue is separated from the others, defended, explained away, and then forgotten.
What they refuse to do is connect the different issues into one picture and then zoom out. Because the question is not merely what these things mean today.
The question is where they lead in thirty years.
If the UK eventually became 20 or 30 percent Muslim, would that be good for the country?
No.
I believe it would be an unmitigated disaster.
Not because every Muslim thinks the same way. Obviously they don’t. But because demographics eventually become political power, political power influences institutions, and institutions shape societies.
That is the part of the conversation we seem almost incapable of having.
France Has Already Written the Warning Down
On May 21st, 2025, a report was shared with French President Emmanuel Macron. At the centre of the report was the Muslim Brotherhood and what it described as a “threat to national cohesion” in France. It warned about the spread of “political Islamism.”
I want to interject briefly here, because even the phrase political Islam reveals something about the Western approach to this subject.
The neat separation between Islam and “political Islam” is largely a Western way of understanding this religion.
Islam historically contains not merely spiritual teachings, but ideas about law, government, family, society and political authority. Yet the West continues to approach it as though we are dealing with another private religion that can simply be slotted into the liberal order without friction.
That misunderstanding makes it incredibly difficult to construct sensible guardrails.
The French report warned:
“The reality of this threat, even if it is long term and does not involve violent action, poses a risk of damage to the fabric of society and republican institutions (...) and, more broadly, to national cohesion.”
Think about what this is saying for a moment.
There are forces operating within French society that are causing enough concern about long-term social change that the French state produced a report warning about damage to its institutions and national cohesion.
And notice those words again:
Even if it is long term.
That is precisely the point.
The report describes Islamism spreading “from the bottom up”—primarily at the local level. It does not require some spectacular revolution.
It happens neighbourhood by neighbourhood, institution by institution, election by election.
This is something we increasingly see across Europe and, in different forms, in the United States.
When Demography Becomes Political Power
As Muslim communities become larger and more politically organised, they naturally become more influential voting blocs.
Dearborn, Michigan, is one example of the political influence a concentrated Muslim population can develop.
Look at the UK.
The “Muslim vote” is becoming increasingly formidable—large enough that politicians desperate for votes are having to respond to specifically Muslim political demands.
That is simply how democratic politics works.
But once again, the important question is:
What happens when this grows?
The polling should at least force us to take this seriously.
In one ICM poll, 40% of British Muslims supported introducing Sharia law in predominantly Muslim areas of Britain. A 2016 survey conducted by ICM for Channel 4 found that 52% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal.
American Muslims are often regarded as among the most assimilated Muslim populations in the Western world.
Yet according to Pew polling from 2026, 44% of Muslim Americans surveyed had a favourable view of Hamas.
These are not fringe numbers.
And once again, the question is not merely what they mean today.
What happens as these communities grow?
An excerpt from Le Monde describing the French report put the concern this way:
The report highlighted the “subversive nature of the project,” saying it aims “to gradually bring about changes to local or national rules,” particularly those concerning secularism and gender equality. Such “municipal Islamism” risks affecting the public sphere and local politics, the report said, pointing to “the creation of increasingly numerous Islamist ecosystems.”
Again:
Gradually.
This is not primarily an argument about tomorrow morning.
It is about the direction of travel.
As I write, another enormous mosque is being built in Strasbourg. A proverbial chef’s kiss on the state of “Islamism” in France and the broader continent.
Islam Is Not Just a Private Religion
Islam is a problem for Europe, ultimately, because it is a religion that has proven extraordinarily resistant to reform.
It is also a religion in which the separation between religion and political authority has historically been far less clear than it became in Christianity.
Islam did not develop around the Western idea of separating church and state. From its earliest history, religious belief, law and political authority were deeply intertwined.
Islam was not simply concerned with how an individual worshipped God. It developed rules governing family, criminality, commerce, war, government and society itself.
That matters.
Because the Western world continues to treat an ideology with a deeply embedded political and legal tradition as though it were simply another benign private religion that can be neatly separated from the state.
It isn’t.
And listen, I’m not talking about individual Muslims.
People are unique. People are complicated. Millions of Muslims live completely ordinary lives, disagree about their religion, practise it to different degrees, or barely practise it at all.
I am talking about the ideology.
An ideology is like a seed.
If watered, protected and allowed to grow, it develops in a particular direction.
It is the seed—and what happens when that seed begins shaping communities, institutions and eventually nations—that I am worried about.
If we refuse to wrestle with this issue, our societies will change regardless.
We Are Falling in Slow Motion
We’re driving down the highway as the sun sinks.
We are falling in slow motion.
The steady, long-term drip and grinding of this ideology within Western societies has the power to change the West forever.
And in some ways, this slow surrender frightens me even more than terrorist attacks committed by unstable individuals.
I fear the day when walking through the streets of major European cities reveals a sea of hijabs and burkas—not simply because individual women have freely chosen them, but because entire communities have recreated the same religious expectations from which women elsewhere have desperately tried to escape.
I fear calls for Sharia law going from fringe-sounding impossibilities to real political movements.
I fear Western values—shaped over centuries by Greek rationality, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the long development of liberal democracy—being gradually swallowed by a seventh-century ideology frozen in time.
There is a reason some Iranians who fled Iran after the 1979 revolution look at developments in the West with horror. They watched Islamists take over their country, aided by leftists and communists who believed they could work alongside them.
They know that enormous political transformations do not always announce themselves all at once.
Sometimes they happen gradually.
Then suddenly.
We still have time to change things.
But it will require political courage.
And above all, it will require honest conversations about Islam that the West has spent far too long being afraid to have.