It was a careful choice of words, Bernard Lewis being nothing if not careful. In 2004, the West audibly gasped when its preeminent scholar of Islam famously told the German newspaper Die Welt,“Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” if not sooner.
Listen carefully. He did not say that Muslims will be the majority population in what is still recognizably Europe. No, Professor Lewis said “Europe will be Islamic.”
We are not talking about Muslims here. We are talking about Islam. Lots of individual Muslims desire peaceful coexistence, even assimilation. But Islam’s aim is to prevail. So, yet again this week, Lewis’s foreboding has been brought to the fore by a jihadist mass-murder attack, this time in London. » | Andrew C. McCarthy | Saturday, March 25, 2017
