There is a conversation that takes place in every Muslim household in Europe. At the kitchen table. In the car home from a family gathering. In a messaging group between siblings in different cities.
Should we be worried? Is it getting worse? What would we do if it got really bad? Where would we go?
The questions are asked. They are never answered. The conversation circles, retreats, and resumes the next time the news gives it a reason.
It stays unfinished for an understandable reason. Answering honestly would mean confronting truths that threaten the assumptions daily life is built on: the mortgage, the career, the school run, the plans. Confronting them feels like self-destruction rather than self-preservation.
So the community has run on something else instead. Hope.
Hope that the post-9/11 climate would pass. Hope that integration would be rewarded. Hope that the next generation would have it easier. Hope that the rhetoric was only rhetoric, the laws only laws, the surveillance only surveillance. Hope that each new restriction was the last.
Every single time, the machine went further. Every single time, the community adjusted its expectations down and hoped again.
That is not resilience. It is the normalisation of deterioration: the slow acceptance, step by step, of conditions that would have been recognised as intolerable if they had arrived all at once.
Hope itself is not the problem. In our tradition it is a virtue. Rajaa, hope in the mercy of Allah, is one of the stations of the spiritual path.
But hope in Allah's mercy is not the same thing as hope that the politics of one particular country will stay favourable forever. The first is faith. The second is a political calculation resting on nothing more than the wish for it to be true.
Confusing the two is how a community ends up with a theology of trust and no plan.
The honest conversation would start with a few plain admissions.
Integration, by itself, has not protected anyone. Each generation has been more integrated than the last and faced more hostility than the last.
The institutions are not a floor. Courts, rights and elections have helped, but they depend on political will, and rights that were won can be repealed.
And almost everything the community has built, the mosques, the schools, the businesses, the property, is fixed in place and depends on the goodwill of a single state.
None of this is a counsel of despair. It is the opposite. Despair is what arrives when hope has been the only plan and it fails.
The question was never whether things are getting worse. They are. The question is what we do now, with our hope placed where it belongs.