Europe tells a story about colonialism. It happened elsewhere. In Africa, in Asia, in the Americas. It was done to other people, in other places, by Europeans who went abroad, did terrible things, and came home. The story allows for regret. Then it moves on, because its whole shape depends on colonialism being something that happened over there.
It did not happen over there. It happened everywhere, including in Europe. It changed the colonisers as surely as the colonised, and the change never left.
Start with the money. The wealth taken from the colonial world did not just enrich a few merchants. It paid for industrialisation. It built infrastructure. It helped fund the welfare states Europeans now take for granted.
So when a politician sets Europe's prosperity beside the poverty of the Global South and draws a conclusion about which civilisation is superior, he has the causation backwards. The wealth is here because it was taken from there. The poverty is there because the wealth was brought here. It is written in the ledgers of the colonial companies and the records of the colonial ports.
Then the habit of mind. Five centuries of ruling other peoples produced a psychology that did not end with the empires: the assumption that European ways are the default, that newcomers should be grateful, that gratitude is shown by becoming like us. Integration policy is built on it. The migrant must change. The norm never does.
You feel this in the most ordinary rooms. The interview where the panel is friendly and the questions carry a quiet subtext about fitting in. The meeting where real expertise is received as a curiosity rather than a credential. Nobody announces anything. It does not need announcing. It is the room temperature. Both sides feel it. Neither names it.
That temperature is the colonial relationship, still running, now indoors.
Here is the idea I think explains more than any other about Europe's reaction to its Muslims.
For five hundred years Europe looked at its colonies and saw itself reflected back: power, superiority, the right to rule. Now it looks at the people who came from those colonies, living in its cities and sitting in its schools, and it sees a different reflection. Its own history. Its own violence. Its own methods of ranking and taking, standing in its own streets.
The intensity of the reaction is out of all proportion to anything Muslims have done, because it is not really a reaction to Islam. It is a reaction to the reflection. A civilisation confronted by the consequences of its own history, in the shape of the people it classified as inferior five centuries ago, who have now come to live at its centre.
You cannot argue someone out of disliking a mirror. You can only wait for them to look.