Here is a number worth sitting with. Muslims make up roughly five percent of the people of Western Europe. A small minority, economically marginal, politically underrepresented and internally divided.
And yet this five percent is regularly described as an existential threat to a civilisation of five hundred million.
Most people who notice the gap assume it is a mistake: bad statistics, lazy journalism, a moral panic that facts will eventually correct. It is not a mistake. The disproportion is the point.
Six hundred years before European sociology existed, a jurist born in Tunis in 1332 explained why.
Ibn Khaldun's central idea was asabiyyah: the group feeling that binds a civilisation together, the willingness of its people to put the common good before their own. While it is strong, a civilisation is purposeful and capable of acting together. When it weakens, the civilisation fragments.
And a fragmenting civilisation does something predictable. When it can no longer build solidarity out of shared purpose, it builds it out of negation. It stops defining itself by what it is and starts defining itself by what it is not. That "not" has to be embodied by someone visible, someone who can be blamed for a disintegration that is really internal.
This is the demand side of the pogrom. A classifiable minority is the supply. But the need for an enemy is manufactured at home, by the majority's own decay.
Look at Europe honestly and the conditions are all there. Birth rates below replacement. Churches emptying. National identities fraying under inequality and polarisation. The great unifying stories of the last century have lost their pull.
Into that vacuum steps the Muslim. Not because Islam threatens Europe, but because Muslims are visibly, audibly different. The unspoken argument runs: we may no longer know what it means to be European, but at least we know we are not that.
That is why the threat has to be inflated. To see it at its real size would mean facing the real source of the anxiety, and admitting that no amount of expulsion or assimilation would fix it.
Ibn Khaldun also saw what comes next, and it is the part Europe has never learned.
Persecution does not halt decline. It speeds it up. The energy spent on exclusion is energy not spent on repair. The talent driven out is talent lost. Each purge brings a brief rush of unity, then a deeper crisis, which demands a harsher purge. Spain expelled its Jews and began its long slide.
So when you hear the rhetoric rising, do not ask what Muslims have done to provoke it. Ask what the society shouting is failing to say about itself.
The minority is never the cause of the crisis. It is only the canvas the crisis is painted on.