Europe is not losing because Islamism is knocking at the door, but because Europeans themselves open it, bow politely, and call the capitulation tolerance, diversity and moral progress in the name of civilisation.
The most troubling aspect of the Iranians’ warning is not merely that they know Islamism from the inside. It is that they also know Europe from the outside.
Those who come from a society where freedom has already been lost often see more clearly than those who are born into freedom and therefore believe it to be a given. For the European, freedom has become like air. He does not notice it until it becomes thin. He assumes that the rule of law, women’s freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and the separation of religious power and political power are normal conditions in the world. They are not. They are historical exceptions: fragile, dearly bought and easy to lose.
The Iranians know this. They know that a society does not collapse in a single day. First it changes its language. Then its norms. Then its loyalties. Finally, it changes its laws.
It rarely begins with dark-clad men storming parliament. More often, it begins with the good words: respect, inclusion, dialogue, sensitivity, diversity. The words are not necessarily false in themselves. But they can be employed as instruments for something else.
This is where Europe’s weakness lies. Not primarily in the number of migrants. Not even in the strength of Islamism. Europe’s weakness lies in the fact that Europe no longer fully believes in itself. The modern West has made freedom an administrative category, not a civilisational obligation. Freedom is understood as the absence of boundaries. Tolerance is understood as an obligation to make room. Man is understood as a detached individual without roots, without inheritance and without any higher purpose than self-realisation.
But such a view of man cannot defend a civilisation. It can only negotiate it away.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran was not merely a political transfer of power. It was a metaphysical upheaval. It replaced one understanding of man with another. Woman was no longer first and foremost a free human being, but a sign that had to be controlled. Law was no longer an expression of civic equality, but of religious hierarchy. The state was no longer a safeguard of freedom, but an instrument of sacred discipline. Private life was no longer private. Conscience was no longer free.
This is what secular Europe does not understand. It believes the conflict concerns integration, the labour market, housing policy and social measures. All of these matter, but they do not touch the core. The core is that two different conceptions of man are meeting. One says that man possesses a conscience that does not belong to the state, the tribe or the priest. The other says that man is first and foremost subject to a revealed order that must also be given social and political form.
When these two orders meet, it is not enough to organise dialogue meetings.
This does not mean that all Muslims are Islamists. Nor does it mean that people who come from Muslim countries cannot love freedom more deeply than many native Europeans do. On the contrary. Exiled Iranians demonstrate this with almost painful clarity. They know the difference between faith as a personal conviction and religion as a power structure. They know the difference between prayer and control. They know the difference between piety and regime.
But Europe’s leaders would rather not know. For if they understood this, they would also have to admit that they themselves have been wrong for decades. They would have to acknowledge that “diversity” does not automatically create peace, that not all cultures carry the same view of man, and that freedom does not survive if it refuses to defend its own preconditions.
The great illusion is that a society can open its doors to every norm, every loyalty and every understanding of law, and nevertheless remain the same. But societies are not empty spaces. They have form. They have boundaries. They have unwritten obligations. When these dissolve, the space is filled by something else.
Small shifts produce great consequences over time. First one accepts separate prayer rooms in institutions that were otherwise meant to be worldview-neutral. Then one accepts special rules. Then one accepts that criticism is muted out of consideration for “vulnerable groups”. Then one accepts that women adapt themselves to religious norms of control that would otherwise be condemned if they came from a European majority culture.
This is how order decays.
Europe therefore faces not merely a political challenge. It faces a question about what Europe actually is. Is Europe merely a geographical area with welfare arrangements, universities, hospitals and consumer markets? Or is Europe an inheritance, a spiritual and moral form, built upon a conception of man as responsible, free and bound by truth?
If Europe is merely administration, it can be taken over from within without anyone formally declaring war. If Europe is civilisation, it must also dare to say what cannot be negotiated away.
The Iranians warn us because they have seen what happens when a society no longer understands the enemy before the enemy understands the society. They lost a country that believed modernity was enough. It was not. Miniskirts, universities, technological development and urban cultural life were not strong enough to withstand an ideology with a deeper metaphysical will.
This ought to make us pause.
The voice of the exiled Iranians is therefore more than a political warning. It is a mirror. In Europe, they see the outlines of what they themselves fled from. And perhaps that is precisely why their words seem so uncomfortable. Not because they are foreigners, but because they remind us of something we know deep down.
This is not really about them.
It is about what we are in the process of becoming.