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The European Union has decided that what the continent really needs right now — amid economic stagnation, mass illegal immigration, rising crime, and cultural disintegration — is to funnel 10 million taxpayer euros into propagating fake history.
And not the usual or normal kind of fake history that many nations employ — the kind meant to puff up their own civilization’s legacy. No, the EU has gone in a bolder direction: financing a historical revisionism that deliberately weakens Europe’s cultural confidence and historical memory in the name of “diversity” — the kind that’s currently killing the continent.
The program, oxymoronically titled “The European Qur’an” (EuQu), has one overarching goal: to convince Europeans that Islam and the Koran were somehow foundational pillars of European civilization. As the project’s homepage proudly proclaims, the idea is to “challenge traditional perceptions of the Qur’anic text and well-established ideas about European religious and cultural identities” through exhibitions, conferences, and books — that is, through mass propaganda. Because what better use could there be for €10 million than reeducating Europeans into believing that Islam has always belonged in Europe, that the Koran was never a foreign invader’s playbook but rather a misunderstood sibling of the European canon?
Claims and Truth
According to the website, the project spans 700 years (1150–1850) of European history, stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to Hungary, and insists that “the influence of Islam on European culture is greatly underestimated.”
Is there any truth to this claim?
Well, yes — if by “influence” one includes centuries of war, conquest, slavery, and terror. As historian Bernard Lewis — no one’s idea of a right-wing zealot — once wrote:
We tend nowadays to forget that for approximately a thousand years, from the advent of Islam in the seventh century until the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam, the double threat of conquest and conversion. Most of the new Muslim domains were wrested from Christendom. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were all Christian countries, no less, indeed rather more, than Spain and Sicily. All this left a deep sense of loss and a deep fear.
Another historian, Franco Cardini, put it even more bluntly in his aptly titled book, Europe and Islam:
If we … ask ourselves how and when the modern notion of Europe and the European identity was born, we realize the extent to which Islam was a factor (albeit a negative one) in its creation. Repeated Muslim aggression against Europe … was a ‘violent midwife’ to Europe.
So yes, Islam has most certainly “influenced” Europe — but not in the way EuQu wants you to believe. Not by contributing to Renaissance art or Enlightenment philosophy, but by presenting a relentless, often existential, challenge to Europe’s very survival.
Strange Contributions
But apparently for EuQu, there’s no difference between influence and intrusion, or between contribution and conquest.
What Islam “contributed” to Europe was a religious system that, from the very founding text that EuQu is devoted to “celebrating,” has only ever offered three options to the non-Muslim: conversion, submission, or death (Koran 9:5, 9:29, among others). Hardly the stuff of cultural fusion.
But now, courtesy of the EU’s largesse, we’re told that the Koran — once rightly viewed by Christian Europe as the ideological manual behind jihad and conquest — was actually an integral part of European identity all along.
The truth is quite the contrary. From the very start, Europeans have shown only contempt for the teachings of the Koran — that “most pitiful and most inept little book of the Arab Muhammad,” to quote the ninth century’s Nicetas Byzantinos. After studying Islam’s holy book, he concluded that it is “full of blasphemies against the Most High, with all its ugly and vulgar filth,” particularly its claim that Heaven amounts to a “sexual brothel.”
And he was hardly alone. For centuries, European scholars translated the Koran not to admire it, but to understand the enemy. The only reason Christians ever studied it was to protect their civilizations against the ideology that had conquered so many once-Christian lands.
What Is Going On Here?
So what exactly is the EuQu project doing? A small confession appears on its own website:
… our project is addressing pressing and current issues in Europe and promises to open new perspectives on our multi-religious societies.
Translation: This isn’t just about history — it’s about shaping the present. About social engineering. About convincing Europeans that Islam has always belonged here, and if you think otherwise, well, clearly you haven’t read the Koran through our carefully curated exhibitions.
French MEP Fabrice Leggeri has publicly denounced the program, calling it a blatant “rewriting of the religious and cultural history of Europe.” He adds:
To make people believe that Islam has always had considerable importance in Europe is a falsification of history financed by public money.
Too Close for Coincidence
And it only gets worse. Leggeri also points to the concerning proximity between the project and political Islam, notably the Muslim Brotherhood. One of EuQu’s researchers, Naima Afif, wrote a flattering biography of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Le Journal du Dimanche, a French paper, also found that several academics involved in the project are “notoriously close” to the Brotherhood.
Also calling out the project is Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, a French academic who’s made a career exposing the Muslim Brotherhood’s gradual infiltration of European institutions — academic and political alike. Her reward? Cancellation — if not downright persecution. The message is clear: if you expose the ideological roots of these pro-Islamic projects, you’re the problem.
One of EuQu’s lead researchers, John Tolan (Université de Nantes), is particularly illustrative. He claims, “We try to understand the place of Islam and the Quran in a secular and scientific way,” and insists this work is “against the radicalism of the Wahhabis and the Salafists.”
If that were true, shouldn’t his work be geared toward convincing Muslims not to read the Koran like “Wahhabis and Salafists”? Instead, his efforts are geared towards convincing Europeans that there are “multiple ways to interpret the Qur’an” — an approach designed only to disarm the latter.
Keep It to Yourself
But this is not surprising; a consistent theme permeates Tolan’s work: the whitewashing of Islam and the demonization of Christians. For example, in his book Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, Tolan recounts the martyrdom of some 50 Christians in Muslim-ruled Córdoba — imprisoned, sadistically tortured, and brutally executed for refusing to convert or recant.
Instead of condemning the Muslim persecutors, Tolan turns his ire on the martyrs for speaking out against Islam in the first place. In particular, he attacks Saint Eulogius — a Christian renowned for his humility and charity who was also martyred in Cordoba for insulting the prophet of Islam by writing: “I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin [Mary]… He claimed that in the next world he would deflower her.”
Such “blasphemous” speech does not sit well with Tolan, who explains:
This outrageous claim [that Muhammad will “deflower” Mary], it seems, is Eulogius’s invention; I know of no other Christian polemicist who makes this accusation against Muhammad. Eulogius fabricates lies designed to shock his Christian reader. This way, even those elements of Islam that resemble Christianity (such as reverence of Jesus and his virgin mother) are deformed and blackened, so as to prevent the Christian from admiring anything about the Muslim other. The goal is to inspire hatred for the “oppressors” … Eulogius sets out to show that the Muslim is not a friend but a potential rapist of Christ’s virgins.
Meanwhile, and in reality, not only were (and are) Muslims notorious rapists of Christians and Europeans, but according to a well-known hadith, Muhammad declares that “Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, daughter of Imran” (whom Islam identifies as Jesus’s mother). Thus it was the prophet himself — not any “Christian polemicist” — who “fabricates lies designed to shock,” namely that Christ’s mother will be his eternal concubine. But because this hadith does not complement the efforts of modern academics trying to paint Muhammad as a beacon of tolerance, they pretend it doesn’t exist — except in the evil minds of medieval Christians.
EuQu’s real goal should be clear: to replace Europe’s memory of Islamic conquest with a fantasy of peaceful coexistence. To portray the Koran not as a source of jihad, but as a misunderstood spiritual guide. To present Islam not as a threat Europe had to survive, but as a vital thread in her civilizational fabric. And thus to “prove” that Muslims have every right to be in Europe, and that Europeans have every duty to welcome them in.
This isn’t scholarship. It’s propaganda — historical reeducation dressed in academic robes, bought and paid for by Brussels bureaucrats working with Muslim subversives, and laundered through compliant universities. The goal is not to uncover forgotten truths but to manufacture a new narrative — a fake history — where Islam has always been a cherished part of Europe’s identity, and where centuries of bloodshed, invasion, and persecution are quietly rebranded as “cultural exchange.”
In short, the European Union is paying handsomely — not to preserve European heritage, but to dismantle it. And they’re doing it not through bombs or invasions, but through exhibitions and peer-reviewed journals.
If that feels like a betrayal, it’s because it most certainly is. And yet it’s only the latest of countless betrayals, prompting an even more pressing question: When will Europeans wake — and rise — up against these ever more blatant attacks on their very being?
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.