Recently, Mayor Giuliani, who was pardoned by President Trump, appeared on Piers Morgan’s show. Both men are often criticized for promoting anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and Europe, so Giuliani’s choice of platform raised questions. On the show, he repeated the unsupported claim that Muslims are taking over Europe, a claim also echoed by parts of the far right.
Recent laws in places like Florida targeting Sharia reflect the same fear-based politics. In the United States, however, the Constitution is the only governing law. Anything else is distortion and fearmongering.
There is a serious and growing danger of majority tyranny, even in democracies, setting aside for the moment one-party states and outright autocracies. The U.S., Israel, and India are clear examples of this disturbing trend. When a majority is unwilling or unable to protect minorities as equal citizens, those minorities are left exposed, marginalized, and politically trapped. The real question is not whether minorities can influence the majority, but how they can do so before their rights are stripped away. History is full of examples of both effective resistance and catastrophic failure, and we ignore those lessons at our peril.
The current debate in the U.S. over the influence of the Jewish lobby and a foreign government, as Tucker Carlson frames it, exposes a deeper and more troubling problem: how a small minority, through organized political power, can shape national policy in a democracy of 350 million people. Critics argue that this influence has helped make the U.S. complicit in genocide and has granted a foreign state extraordinary access to American military hardware worth billions of dollars and intelligence that is beyond price.
Europe, meanwhile, cannot hide behind selective memory. It must confront its own record of colonization, repeated man-made famines, exploitation, and the devastating violence of the two world wars, which killed more than 70 million people (about twice the population of California). The Holocaust killed about 6 million Jews, but other mass atrocities in Russia, China, Poland, Germany, and Indonesia claimed between 4 million and 22 million lives in these countries, including civilians and soldiers from Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim communities during those two WWs.
Islamophobia is deeply rooted in European colonial history and Christian supremacist thinking, a point extensively explored by critic and activist Edward Said. In the United States, that rhetoric is now intensifying again.
If Muslims were to gain significant influence in Europe or America, why should that be seen as inherently alarming? The worst catastrophes of the modern era have largely been driven by Christian and non-Muslim powers: the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, colonial rule across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and repeated wars of conquest in the modern period. Muslims have not been the primary drivers of these crimes.
The Industrial Revolution, meanwhile, accelerated environmental destruction through extractive capitalism and empire. The atomic bomb was developed and used by non-Muslim states, and in the past 50 years Muslim-majority countries have not launched wars of conquest, while the U.S., Israel, and their allies have repeatedly gone to war. The destruction in Gaza is also being carried out by Israel, a non-Muslim state.
So where does this fear of Muslim influence really come from?
Muslims have also played a major role in building peace, order, and intellectual life. Early Muslim rule united the Arabian Peninsula, brought stability to a region marked by conflict, and replaced the rival Sassanid and Byzantine empires, both of which committed abuses against Christians, Jews, and others. Muslim empires generally protected religious minorities, encouraged scholarship, and preserved and expanded knowledge from Greek, Indian, and Chinese sources. Muslim Spain became a major center of learning for nearly 800 years, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians studied and worked together, and thinkers such as Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas were deeply influenced by that intellectual world.
Across these empires, many people benefited from greater security, religious tolerance, commercial exchange, and intellectual exchange. Under Muslim rule, cities often became hubs of trade, education, and cultural life, and diverse communities were able to live, worship, and work with a degree of stability that was uncommon in much of the medieval world. The Crusades were fought to control Jerusalem, and when Crusaders captured it, they often massacred Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. By contrast, Muslim rule typically restored order and allowed diverse faiths to worship. In India, the Mughal Empire helped create wealth and relative harmony among Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists before British colonial rule left the country poorer and more divided. The Ottoman Empire likewise lasted for centuries and gave many communities religious freedom and a degree of local autonomy.
Seen in this historical context, greater Muslim influence in the West should not be treated as a threat. The far right has long used similar fear tactics against Catholics, Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, and Japanese communities.
Given this historical background, greater Muslim influence in the U.S. and Europe could be seen as a positive development rather than something to fear.
It is also worth asking whether a stronger Muslim presence in the West might have helped prevent some of history’s worst violence, including the Crusades, slavery in the Americas, the Holocaust, and the major conflicts of the 20th century. These disasters emerged from false justifications, racism, imperial ambition, and repeated violations of the ethical teachings claimed by Christian societies.
A more honest reading of history, one that takes non-European and non-Western experience seriously, would lead to a more balanced and empathetic view of Muslim influence in the West. The West has never hesitated to dominate and exploit the rest of the world, yet it reacts with alarm at the idea of other groups gaining influence within it. That reaction reveals deep bias, not objective judgment.
We can and must do better as students of history and as Americans.
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