Islam has never been expulsed from the European continent, though, but, on the contrary, it can boast an uninterrupted presence there since the 7th century AD. That's significantly more than the most recently Christianised regions of the same continent in the extreme north and east, like the Baltics and Scandinavia. I suppose you are referring to the Reconquista achieved by the Iberian kingdoms, but Muslims continued to have presence in several parts of Europe, like Bosnia, Thrace and Crimea. By that logic, someone could argue that the Jews were also removed from Europe, because the degrees of the Catholic monarchs of Portugal and Spain targeted not only Muslims, but Jews as well. However, both these persecuted religious groups successfully found refuge in more tolerant lands, where Jewish and Muslim communities already existed and prospered.
As a result, Muslims existed in Europe well into the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and, at a certain degree, participated in a few of its major historical events. When it comes to Muslims in European wars, for example, we usually think of French colonial regiments, which defended France's territorial integrity in 1871 and to which Bismarck explicitly ordered the Prussian soldiers to give no quarter. However, Muslim soldiers, indigenuous to Europe, fought in both World Wars for the interests of all four different sides, the Central Powers and the Entente, the Axis and the Allies.
Not that, in my opinion, a hypothetical complete ethnic cleansing would legitimise any current harsh treatment of a religious group, solely based on their creed. Western Europe is supposedly proud of its humanitarian principles, according to which, secularism and religious tolerance are endorsed, while sectarianism and collective guilt are rejected. Unfortunately, our debate here is not theoretical, because the hateful fruits of Islamophobia have already matured in post-Soviet Europe. Terrorist attacks have claimed the lives of tens of innocent victims in Norway, Germany and elsewhere, in the name of religious purity, while the most recent massacre, almost unanimously recognized as a genocide, on European soil targeted one of the oldest Muslim communities in Europe, which had been left largely intact, despite the violence, discrimination and population exchanges that had so dramatically altered the demographic composition of the Balkans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Therefore, I can rationalise Islamophobia and, generally speaking, the oppression of Muslims under the guise of European identity, only from a Christian fundamentalist or nationalist western European perspective, according to which, only certain parts of the continent and only certain aspects of the cultures that have influenced Europe, are entitled to define the so-called European civilization. That methodological approach usually focus on the "Latin" and "Germanic" parts of Europe, but, as previously illustrated, that strategy is dangerously inconsistent and can lead to a couple of embarassing self-contradictions, which further weaken the already fragile logical foundations of the Islamophobic narrative. |