It began with the attacks on Madrid’s commuter trains in 2004 and in London in 2005. Then came the assaults in Paris and Saint-Denis in 2015, the attacks in Brussels and Nice a year later, followed by Berlin and Barcelona in 2017.
More than 550 people have been killed by Islamist terrorism in Europe over the past 22 years. Between 2010 and 2023 alone, there were 163 Islamist attacks in the European Union. Most took place in France, Belgium, Spain and Germany. Europe should have been warned.
The fact that there have been no major attacks in recent years is not the result of a lower threat level. It is due to the vigilance of the security services. Yet one thing is already clear. Sooner or later, even the most attentive intelligence agencies will miss a threat. Then the next catastrophe will follow.
A Threat Pushed Into the Background
Europe still underestimates Islamism. Experts who warn of Islamist influence are quickly dismissed as hysterical, or even as xenophobic and racist. Since the last major attacks, media attention has long since moved on to other issues.
In politics, too, the dangers posed by Islamism have for years been overshadowed by other priorities. The war in Ukraine in particular appears to be absorbing Europe’s entire security policy bandwidth. That is negligent, even if support for Ukraine and the EU’s security realignment must remain short-term priorities.
But Putin and his clique will sooner or later be history. Islamism, and the danger that emanates from it, will remain. For migrants as well as Muslims from predominantly Islamic regions, radical Islamism offers a powerful form of identity. There will continue to be demand for that offer. That much is certain.
In a rapidly changing world shaped by globalization, digitalization and modernization, many Muslims feel culturally overwhelmed. None of the innovations that define people’s lives across the world today originated in an Islamic country: electrical technology, nuclear technology, aviation, robots, computers, smartphones and the internet. All are products invented in the Western cultural sphere, carrying its ideas and way of life into the world.
The Lure of a Radical Identity
For many Muslims, the result is a sense of alienation, cultural humiliation and inner dislocation. Together, they form an explosive mixture made still more volatile by the fact that Islam understands itself as the last and only true religion founded by God. It is this combination of a claim to superiority, a sense of factual inferiority and the loss of orientation caused by modernization that drives many Muslims towards conservative Islam or even militant Islamism.
Muslims in the diaspora are especially vulnerable to this kind of radicalization. Contrary to what is often suggested, they rarely arrive in Europe with a strong willingness to assimilate. The opposite is true. They are drawn into an identity crisis, in a way that is unsurprising and deeply human.
Their new environment is foreign to them or even suspect. Western hedonism repels them. Libertinism is seen as sinful. Their own religious values, shaped by puritanical ideas, are regarded as superior. Western civilization, by contrast, is seen as inferior and decadent. The loss of social recognition is all the more painful. Frustration and aggression grow.
From that perspective, the only plausible explanation for the decline of a supposedly superior Islamic culture is its temporary Westernization in the mid-20th century. That fall from grace must be corrected, and everything Western must be eradicated. Judaism is seen as the vanguard and incarnation of degenerate Western culture, and therefore as something to be destroyed.
A Religious Revolt Against Modernity
Conservative Islam and its radical expression, militant Islamism, are therefore classic defensive reactions to Western modernity of the kind known from European history itself. In that sense, they resemble fascism in Europe and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. They offer believers not only stability and orientation, but also restore their pride and dignity.
That is what makes them so appealing, and from a Western point of view so difficult to combat. Fundamentalist religious movements of this kind are resilient against repression and against attempts at co-option.
The appeal of Islamist convictions among young people in the Muslim diaspora was shown two years ago by a study of Muslim pupils in Germany by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony. According to the study, more than two thirds, 67.8%, of Muslim pupils agreed with the statement that the rules of the Koran were more important to them than the laws in Germany. Among respondents, 45.8% said an Islamic theocracy was the best form of government. Just over a fifth, 21.2%, said the “threat to Islam from the Western world” justified Muslims defending themselves with violence.
A Hamburg University study found that manifest attitudes sympathetic to Islamism were present among 11.5% of Muslims under the age of 40, with a sharply rising trend. Overall, 45.1% of the youngest Muslim age group were described in 2025 as having latent or manifest sympathies of that kind.
Young Muslims and the Pull of Faith
A recent survey commissioned by the city of Vienna reached very similar conclusions. At almost 39%, Muslims are now the largest religious group. How religious pupils actually are depends on their level of education. Among young people with only compulsory schooling, 64% said they were religious. Among those who had passed the Matura, the figure was 43%, still significantly higher than in Christian comparison groups. A third of Muslims also said they had become more religious over the past three to five years.
Their everyday identity is also strongly shaped by religion. Religious practices such as regular prayer, dietary and fasting rules or visits to a place of worship are far more widespread among young Muslims than among young people from other religious communities.
Accordingly, 46% of the pupils surveyed said they “fully” or “rather” agreed that one must be prepared “to fight and die for the defense of one’s faith”. A further 36% of all young Muslims agreed with the statement that “all people should obey the rules of my religion”. For 41%, the rules of their religion stand above the laws of Austria.
The political reaction to such figures is always much the same. Leaders emphasize the absolute validity of existing laws. They declare rhetorical war on parallel societies, but do nothing about their existence. They stress their commitment to human rights and the values of the Enlightenment. In practice, however, they leave the field to fundamentalist zealots.
No Way Back to Comfortable Illusions
Through failed immigration policy and false tolerance, Europe has maneuvered itself into a dead end. Parts of Europe’s Muslim population will continue to radicalize. The reasons are not hard to understand. They lie in disorientation and wounded pride, in other words, in weakness. Religion merely serves as a vehicle for giving one’s existence stability and meaning. The fact that orthodox Islam represents a maximum provocation to liberal Western society makes it especially appealing.
Islam itself is not even the main problem. The real problem lies in the reasons why people embrace the most radical reading of the religion: alienation, uprootedness, cultural homelessness and feelings of inferiority.
These factors cannot be eliminated through civics lessons, democracy classes or police work. They are the direct consequences of a naive immigration policy guided partly by economic interests and partly by humanitarian romanticism. Anyone who believes that growing radicalization among young Muslims can be countered with more money or more social workers is making the next mistake.
Instead of indulging in dreams of a harmonious multicultural society, Europe should learn to face the facts. The fundamentalists are among us, and they will not disappear.