I’m in Albania, one of the European countries with a Muslim majority.
When people talk about Islam in Europe, the conversation often starts in the 1950s or 1960s, with immigration from former colonies and labour migration into countries such as Britain, France and Germany. Increasingly, it degenerates into conspiracy theories about Muslim invasions or the Great Replacement.
But Islam in Europe is much, much older than that.
Muslims make up around 6% of the UK population. In England and Wales, the 2021 Census recorded 3.87 million Muslims, 6.5% of the population. England alone was 6.7%, while Wales was 2.2%. Scotland is considerably lower: its 2022 Census recorded 2.2% Muslim.
Once Scotland and Northern Ireland are included, the UK-wide figure comes out at roughly 6%.
That is broadly in line with Europe as a whole, depending on exactly where you draw Europe’s boundaries. Roughly 6% of Europeans today are Muslim.
And historically, that isn’t particularly unusual.
Muslim Europe in 1900
The Muslim population of Europe in 1900 was probably around the same proportion as it is today.
Europe then had roughly 400 million people. Its Muslim population was concentrated principally in two enormous areas.
The first was the Balkans and what remained of Ottoman Europe: Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Thrace, as well as parts of what are now Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro. In the remaining European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims were approaching half the population by the end of the nineteenth century.
But there were also large Muslim populations outside Ottoman rule. Bosnia had about 549,000 Muslims in 1895, around 35% of its population, while Bulgaria had about 643,000 in 1900, around 17%.
The other great concentration was in the Russian Empire. Its 1897 census counted 13.9 million Muslims, around 11% of the empire’s population. A large proportion lived east of the conventional boundary of Europe, particularly in Central Asia and the Caucasus, so we cannot simply add all 13.9 million to Europe’s total.
Putting the geographically European populations together gives an estimate of around 6% of Europeans being Muslim in 1900, although inevitably the answer varies depending on exactly where Europe’s eastern boundary is drawn.
In other words, the Muslim share of Europe’s population in 1900 was probably not very different from what it is today.
The Ottoman high-water mark
Go back another two centuries and the picture becomes even starker.
At the peak of Ottoman power in Europe, around 1680–83 and immediately before the failed siege of Vienna, the Ottoman Empire controlled virtually all of the Balkans: modern Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia, as well as much of Romania and Hungary and parts of Croatia and Ukraine. But Ottoman control did not mean that these populations were predominantly Muslim.
Islamisation varied enormously. Bosnia and Albania developed very large Muslim populations, as did parts of Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Thrace. Greece, Serbia, Wallachia, Moldavia and Hungary remained overwhelmingly Christian. The Ottoman system generally allowed Orthodox and other Christian communities to retain their religion rather than attempting wholesale conversion.
Europe’s total population around 1700 was approximately 120–125 million. Historical demographic reconstruction is necessarily approximate, but something like 6–8 million Muslims lived in Ottoman-controlled Europe.
Add the Muslim populations of European Russia and the predominantly Muslim Crimean Khanate and a reasonable estimate is that around 7–8% of Europe’s population was Muslim.
These numbers should not be mistaken for modern census figures. Historical population estimates vary, as do estimates of religious affiliation, and the answer changes according to where we decide Europe ends. But the assumptions and populations behind the estimates are clear enough to allow different conclusions to be tested.
More importantly, none of this represents the high point of Muslim Europe.
Before the Ottomans
For that we need to go much further back.
The strongest candidate is probably the tenth and eleventh centuries, when Muslim-ruled al-Andalus encompassed much of the Iberian Peninsula.
At roughly the same time there were substantial Muslim populations in Sicily, parts of southern Italy and along Europe’s eastern and southeastern fringes.
Iberia matters enormously because Europe’s population was then much smaller — perhaps only 35–45 million around AD 1000. Several million Muslims therefore represented a much larger proportion of Europeans than the same population would have a few centuries later.
The difficulty is estimating both the population of al-Andalus and its religious composition. Estimates vary considerably. Muslims probably became a majority in al-Andalus during the tenth century, but both the population and the rate of conversion are disputed.
Nevertheless, a Muslim share of more than 10% of Europe’s population at the medieval high point is entirely plausible, and it may have been appreciably higher depending on the assumptions used.
Todat Moorish Spain is a big tourist attraction, try and get tickets at short notice to the Alhambra. Notably we call in Moorish Spain, but Muslim Spain, which is what it really was.
Ottoman Europe is less well celebrated; war and communist development wiped out lots of it’s traces. Belgrade retains many characteristics of its ottoman past in it’s food and strong coffee, but only has one mosque left. There are still beautiful traces of the old ottoman muslim Europe scattered around, and eating dinner in Tirana there was plenty of it on the menu even if the architecture has been replaced by communist brutalism.
Islam isn’t a recent arrival in Europe. Muslims have been part of European society for more than 1,300 years. Some of that tradition is celebrated under other names, part of it has been erased.
So why does it feel new?
Why, then, do so many people believe Europe is being “overrun” by Muslims when the current Muslim share of the population is not unprecedented historically?
Part of the answer is Islamophobia.
Hostility towards Muslims is prevalent in countries such as the UK and is amplified by social media. Stories about supposedly suspicious groups of dark-skinned men circulate rapidly through local Facebook groups, often with little or no evidence that the people involved are Muslim, migrants or doing anything suspicious at all.
This taps into something deeper: a perfectly human desire to protect your community from threats from outside. Those emotions have always existed. But in the modern world people don’t need to be protected, particularly if protection involves control. Instead these emotions can easily become attached to visible differences in ethnicity, religion and culture — and can just as easily be exploited.
But dismissing everything as Islamophobia would also miss something important.
There really has been a substantial increase in Muslim populations within living memory, particularly in Western Europe.
The question is why.
Europe’s Muslim population fell dramatically
The Muslim share of Europe’s population reached one of its modern historical low points during the middle of the twentieth century.
This was not because Muslims gradually disappeared from Europe. It followed a series of extraordinary demographic shocks: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, wars, expulsions, population exchanges and the creation of new nation states.
The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 drove hundreds of thousands of Muslims from territories lost by the Ottomans, a process accelerated by the First World War.
The most dramatic example came after the Greco-Turkish War. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne sanctioned a compulsory population exchange: around 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were transferred from Turkey to Greece and roughly 400,000–500,000 Muslims moved in the opposite direction. Communities that had existed for centuries were effectively removed in a few years.
The Second World War brought further displacement and population loss across Yugoslavia, Albania and the wider Balkans. After 1945, communist governments did not generally remove their Muslim populations, but they severely restricted organised religion. This reached its extreme in Albania, where Enver Hoxha eventually declared the country officially atheist in 1967 and effectively outlawed religious practice.
The unusually small and frequently invisible Muslim population of mid-twentieth-century Europe was therefore not some ancient demographic norm. It was partly the product of war, forced migration, population exchange, the collapse of a multi-ethnic empire and, later, religious repression.
Then the direction changed
Some of the apparent subsequent increase in Europe’s Muslim population is not population growth at all. It is people who were already there becoming willing and able to identify themselves as Muslim again.
Pew estimates that the Muslim share of Eastern Europe increased from 4.9% in 1990 to 6.2% in 2000 following the collapse of communism, as religious identity and expression became more acceptable. These were predominantly long-established Muslim communities rather than newly arrived immigrants.
Albania is an extreme example. Under Hoxha, religious institutions were destroyed or closed and public religious practice was prohibited. After communism collapsed, people could once again identify openly as Muslim, Christian or something else. Comparing religious statistics from communist Albania with a modern census can therefore measure suppression and subsequent re-identification as much as demographic change.
But that is only part of the story. Western Europe experienced something quite different.
As European powers abandoned their empires after the Second World War, substantial migration developed between former colonies and the old imperial countries. Britain received migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere in South Asia; France from North Africa.
There were also deliberate programmes to recruit overseas workers. West Germany’s Gastarbeiter programme brought large numbers of Turkish workers to Germany, while Britain actively recruited workers from abroad, including Asian doctors to staff the NHS.
Europe’s modern Muslim population therefore has two rather different histories.
In eastern and southeastern Europe, many Muslim communities have been European for centuries. Their modern visibility partly represents the survival and re-emergence of populations whose religious identity had previously been suppressed. In western Europe, the growth is much more recent, driven initially by post-war migration and subsequently by a combination of migration and natural population growth.
Muslims aren’t outsiders to Europe
None of this means that Europeans cannot debate immigration, integration or the pace of demographic change. They plainly can.
Britain has experienced demographic change within living memory, and pretending otherwise merely hands ammunition to people who claim that mainstream politics refuses to discuss it. But that is a completely different argument from claiming that Muslims are outsiders to Europe, or that Islam is an alien religion which has only recently arrived on the continent.
The historical record simply doesn’t support it.
Muslims lived in Spain hundreds of years before the Norman Conquest of England. Muslim communities in Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Russia and elsewhere have histories stretching back centuries. At various points in European history, Muslims probably represented a greater proportion of the continent’s population than they do today.
There is evidence of contact between Anglo-Saxon Britain and the Islamic world surprisingly early. Islamic silver dirhams have been found in Britain from the early medieval period, showing that Britain was connected to trading networks reaching the Muslim world. The most extraordinary evidence is King Offa of Mercia’s gold dinar, minted in England in the late eighth century, probably around AD 773–796. It copies an Abbasid dinar and even carries Arabic versions of the Islamic declaration of faith alongside “OFFA REX”.
The idea of an eternally Christian Europe into which Islam has suddenly intruded is therefore largely a historical fiction.
Yet it is a politically useful fiction.
Fear of immigration is one thing. Fear that an alien population is taking over your civilisation is something altogether more powerful. That is why stories of Muslim “invasion”, demographic replacement and an existential struggle for Europe have become such useful political tools for authoritarian and nativist movements.
There are perfectly legitimate arguments to be had about immigration and integration.
Whether Muslims belong in Europe isn’t one of them. They’ve been here for more than 1,300 years.
For consistency, these estimates exclude Turkey, including Eastern Thrace and the European side of Istanbul. Geographically, these areas form part of Europe and today contain a substantial Muslim population. Including them would therefore increase both the historical and the contemporary European Muslim population, but they have been excluded here to maintain a consistent definition of the countries covered by the estimates.
Great gaslighting.
HI George, which bit of it do you think is wrong?