There have been two completed operations against Muslim populations inside Europe's borders. Set them side by side and the most important fact about them is not what they have in common. It is how long each one took.
Al-Andalus endured for nearly nine centuries. It was built on European soil by a European Muslim population. It gave Europe much of the intellectual foundation it later called its own.
Its erasure began in 1492 and ended with the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1614. Conversion, then suspicion of the converts, then removal. From first step to last, it took more than a century.
Bosnia's Muslims had been European for five centuries. They were integrated into European life to a degree that should have protected them from anything. In the 1990s they were subjected to genocide while Europe watched.
That took three years.
More than a century, then three years. The acceleration is the pattern within the pattern.
Bauman explained why. The modern bureaucratic state builds the infrastructure of persecution slowly, legally and rationally, in quiet times, and then activates it quickly when a crisis provides the trigger. The building is slow. The using is fast.
That changes the question a community has to ask. When erasure took a century, there was time to see it coming, to argue, to adapt, to leave. When it takes three years, the time to respond is not after it starts. It is before.
People sometimes hear an argument like this and call it an analogy: Muslims today are "like" the Moriscos, "like" Bosnia. It is not an analogy. Analogies point to resemblance. This is an argument from structure. The same classification, the same use of a population's labour, the same infrastructure assembled in advance, the same reliance on crisis to set it moving. The only thing that changes is the target.
And the structure does not care what its targets believe. It does not care whether they are devout or secular, first generation or fifth. It cares only that they are classifiable, present, and available.
That is why the argument cannot stay abstract for me. It ends in a house, at night, with my children asleep upstairs, in a country whose pattern I have spent years tracing.
So there are two lessons in those two dates.
The first is that it has happened here, to people like us, twice.
The second is that the next time will not give anyone a century to notice.
Which leaves only one question worth asking now. Not whether. What do we do about it?