Islam as a Mirror: What Europe’s Migration Crisis Reveals About the West’s Loss of Faith

The following was written by Solène Tadié for the National Catholic Register after she interviewed Raymond Ibrahim.

Mass migration has become one of the defining flashpoints of Western politics, from the United States to Europe. For three decades, the Catholic Church has tried to bring moral clarity to the question, with each pope shaping that response through his own background and theological sensibility. Pope Leo, infused with his longtime experience as a missionary in Latin America, has repeatedly pressed the Trump administration over its treatment of migrants, suggesting that opposing abortion while supporting harsh deportation policy is not, in fact, a pro-life position.

That universal moral framework, however, encounters a particularly complex reality in Europe, where migration is overwhelmingly Muslim and where a long history of conflict with Islam still shapes political debate. Many European Catholics often feel torn between a desire to defend a culture and a faith they see eroding and a Church whose leadership has consistently called for welcome and mercy toward migrants regardless of origin and religion.

Few people have spent as long studying those relations as Raymond Ibrahim, a U.S. historian of Christian-Muslim relations and author of a number of internationally acclaimed books, including Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West and Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam. Speaking with the Register in the context of a series of conferences in Europe in May, he offered a reading of the current moment that takes the crisis seriously while challenging the terms in which it is most commonly framed.

FULL ARTICLE AT: https://raymondibrahim.substack.com/p/islam-as-a-mirror-what-europes-migration?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6873559&post_id=207469096&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1v9n4o&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email