Every competent organisation has a contingency plan. Every military has a fallback position. Every business has a disaster recovery strategy. Every ship carries lifeboats.
Nobody thinks the lifeboats are pessimism. Nobody accuses the architect of wanting the building to burn because she drew a fire escape. A contingency plan is not a prediction that disaster will come. It is what a serious person does about the possibility that it might.
The Muslim community in Europe, some twenty-five million people, has no such plan.
The reluctance is easy to understand. To plan for leaving feels like admitting you do not belong. To talk about it feels like a concession to the people who want you gone. So the conversation is avoided, or held in whispers, and the whole community invests everything in a single outcome: acceptance. There is no fallback if it never arrives.
History is unkind to that strategy. The Jews who left Germany in the early 1930s survived. Most of those who stayed, trusting the institutions and the neighbours and the rule of law, did not. The Huguenots who fled France after the Revocation survived and prospered; those who stayed were forcibly converted. The Bosnians who read the trajectory early and left before the siege lived. Those who trusted the international community learned what that trust was worth.
None of this means every family should pack tonight. It means the capacity to respond has to exist before it is needed.
What that capacity looks like is ordinary and lawful. Qualifications that are recognised in more than one country, in fields that travel: medicine, engineering, technology, finance. Languages learned as a practical asset, not a cultural luxury. Work that can be carried in a laptop. Savings not held entirely in one jurisdiction. A second citizenship, where the law allows one, understood as insurance rather than betrayal. Knowing, before it becomes urgent, what residency in other countries actually requires.
And above all, doing it together. Mosques and community organisations talking openly about it. Shared lists of immigration lawyers. Links with communities abroad, built now, so that no one ever arrives among strangers. Emergency funds for the families who could not afford to move quickly on their own.
There is a precedent for all of this at the heart of our own tradition.
When conditions in Makkah became intolerable, the Prophet, peace be upon him, did not stay out of sentiment. He migrated to Madinah, and the hijrah became not a defeat but the foundation of everything that followed.
But it was not improvised. It was prepared. The community in Madinah was ready to receive the migrants because the work had been done in advance.
That work belongs to the present: while the borders are open, the accounts accessible, the passports valid and the children young enough to adapt.
A plan is not an admission of defeat. The absence of one is.