In 1986, in the middle of the Iran–Iraq War, I arrived in Germany as a refugee child. My mother, my two younger brothers and I came first. My father followed two months later.
A German Christian family, the Hirths, welcomed us into their home. We lived upstairs in their yellow-painted middle-class house, with its adorable little garden, three rather overweight cats and an elderly dachshund.
Mrs Hirth guided my parents through German bureaucracy, found language classes and sat patiently with us over our homework. To me, she embodied the best of German Christian culture: love of one’s neighbour, civic duty and an instinct to help. She volunteered constantly, cooked wonderful German food and kept an impeccably organised home. Nobody could have introduced us to Germany better.
Integration was not an abstract government programme. It was a relationship. But it depended upon a host culture confident enough to introduce newcomers to itself.
I noticed the first cracks in the mid-1990s. Small gangs of North African and Turkish boys at our school regularly caused trouble and committed petty crimes. But they were still a minority. German culture remained the setting everyone else was expected to fit into.
After finishing school, I moved to Cologne to study. I spent my wasted youth in the heart of the city, in the shadow of its magnificent Gothic cathedral, between the Old Town and Cologne’s notorious gay quarter. The streets smelled of freshly brewed Kölsch from the Mühlen brewery, Greek gyros, bratwurst and bread from old German bakeries. The city was unmistakably German, yet culturally vivid and anything but ethnically uniform.
When I returned to my old neighbourhood years later, the smell of kebab dominated the streets. Turkish kiosks and bake-off shops selling reheated frozen dough had replaced many of the old bakeries and butchers. Most of the gay bars had moved elsewhere, making way for still more kiosks. Veiled women carrying groceries from the halal market passed the places where drag queens once stumbled out of the iconic Timp bar in the early hours of the morning.
The old Cologne—with all its contradictions, eccentricity and colour—had largely disappeared. What replaced it calls itself multicultural but looks increasingly monotonous: the same kebab shops, halal markets, kiosks and cheap bakeries repeated from one European city to another.
The demographic transformation is even clearer in the schools. At several Berlin secondary schools, more than 90 per cent of pupils have a non-German language of origin: 94.7 per cent at the Walter Gropius School, and over 90 per cent in Kreuzberg and Neukölln. These numbers do not reveal religion, but they show that German culture can no longer be assumed to constitute the surrounding majority. However, a culture cannot integrate newcomers once it has stopped being the world they arrive in.
And here the great misconception becomes impossible to miss: multiculturalism is not diversity. A multiethnic society is.
A multiethnic society brings different people into a common culture. Multiculturalism deconstructs that common culture and, in the case of Islam, legitimises separation. Other major immigrant communities integrated. The Muslim community built a parallel society—and it has proved remarkably rigid.
Halal and haram no longer govern only the believer’s plate when parents demand halal food and the removal of pork from school menus, and Muslim pupils pressure classmates to throw away sandwiches during Ramadan.
What Islam’s apologists ignore is that religious freedom cuts both ways. It protects the right to practise a religion—and the right to reject, criticise or ridicule its beliefs, commands and customs. It does not confer the right to make everyone else live as though they, too, were Muslim.
Religious offence is repackaged as harm, criticism as hatred, and the believer’s duty not to blaspheme becomes everybody else’s duty not to offend.
The same principle is at stake in Berlin’s Neutrality Act. Our Western societies are liberal democracies, not socialist or theocratic collectives. State neutrality protects the individual from the collective—not the collective from dissent.
But the question arises even before the state becomes involved: are Muslims themselves free to disobey Islam?
Whenever a religion—or a cult—speaks of choice, we must ask when choice ceases to be free. A girl can only choose the veil if she is equally free to remove it. If she has been taught that her worth lies in submission, uncovered hair is sinful and disobedience brings disgrace, ostracism or eternal hellfire, then “choice” is doing a great deal of dishonest work.
Halal and haram reach far beyond food, dividing clothing, sex, marriage, finance, education and speech into permitted and forbidden. Muslims are permitted to obey Islam. The dilemma is whether they are permitted not to.
Where disobedience brings family rupture, threats or death, obedience is not freedom. For example, apostasy in Islam is not comparable to leaving a church in contemporary Europe. Qur’an 4:89 commands that those who disbelieve and turn away be seized and killed. The canonical hadith is blunter: “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” Classical Sunni and Shia jurisprudence incorporated this command into Sharia, treating apostasy as a capital offence.
This is where the authority to judge and police others takes root—drenched in envy of freedoms believers have been taught to deny themselves. Uncovered hair, a gay couple holding hands, a colleague drinking wine or a child eating during Ramadan become acts of disobedience—and therefore provocations.
That is where private religion ends and political Islam begins.
There is another multicultural sacred cow that needs to be slaughtered: the idea that all cultures are equally valid.
They are not.
Germany provides the comparison. Italian, Greek and Turkish guest workers arrived poor, foreign and often treated with suspicion. Yet their paths diverged. Italians and Greeks became part of Germany; their restaurants, shops and festivals changed the country without demanding changes to its laws or schools. Vietnamese refugees integrated without demanding Vietnamese courts, religious exemptions or censorship.
The Turkish story is more complicated. The first generation came to work. The Erdoğan generation is taught to remain Turkish, Muslim and politically attached to a country in which many have never lived. Ankara reaches into Germany through DITIB mosques, Turkish imams, satellite television and nationalist organisations. In the 2023 presidential run-off, Erdoğan received around 67 per cent of the ballots cast here. Although that does not describe every German Turk, it demolishes the fantasy that being born and raised in Germany, attending German schools and holding a German passport necessarily creates identification with German values and identity.
Europe repeats the mistake with refugees, assuming that anyone fleeing a country must also be fleeing its culture. Why would that be true?
A person can flee Assad without becoming a democrat, or flee the Taliban and still subjugate his daughter according to Sharia. He can escape religious violence while carrying the hatred of Jews, contempt for homosexuals or notions of female honour that helped turn his country into Mordor. Crossing a border does not perform a moral software update.
Middle Eastern history confirms what critics smeared as Islamophobes have warned for years: once an Islamic community becomes large and concentrated enough to sustain its own schools, clerics, charities, businesses, media and political representatives, private belief becomes organised power. First it withdraws. Then it builds. Then it bargains with the state. Finally, it demands that the state change.
The parallel society was not the outcome. It was the incubation stage of the adversarial counter-society.
A woman ordered to obey her husband, denied an equal right to divorce, or denied half her brother’s share of an inheritance is not practising a harmless tradition. She is denied equality because of her sex.
A child promised in marriage, a homosexual teenager terrorised into silence, and an apostate threatened by his family are not protected by “religious freedom”. They are its victims.
Segregated swimming lessons teach that the female body must be hidden and boys and girls cannot meet as equals. It’s plain and simple gender apartheid.
A prayer room becomes political when activists control it, separate the sexes, police attendance or impose Islamic behaviour. So does Ramadan fasting when enforced through intimidation, or modesty when Muslim girls are called whores for dressing like their German classmates.
Florence Bergeaud-Blackler draws a crucial distinction: halal is ancient; the global halal economy is not. Born from the convergence of globalisation and Islamic fundamentalism in the 1970s and 1980s, it expanded from meat certification into cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, tourism, fashion, media and finance.
She calls this halalisation: religious law converted into market power, and market power back into religious authority. Combined with rapid Muslim population growth and urban concentration, it gives organised Islam growing leverage over manufacturers, public institutions and policy—restricting non-Muslim choices and reorganising shared spaces around Islamic prohibitions.
This authority does not stop at consumption. From determining what may be sold and served, it advances towards determining what may be said—and eventually which law governs family life.
The line is simpler than politicians pretend: faith remains personal while it governs only the believer. It becomes political when its commands govern somebody else—or bind a school, court, business or public institution.
Political Islam does not begin with a bomb or an election manifesto. It begins the moment divine authority is asserted over another person’s freedom.
And who can guarantee that a sufficiently large and organised Muslim population will never use democracy to introduce more Islamic law?
No one.
It would probably not happen in one spectacular election. Liberal democracy would be hollowed out gradually: one religious exemption, one segregated activity, one informal Sharia ruling, one speech restriction and one concession to a self-appointed “community representative” at a time.
The danger is not that voting suddenly ends.
It is that voting continues while freedom is negotiated away.
Everything she says about multiculturalism’s collapse is true. Americans visiting Europe don’t realize how much Europe has changed. They see only the sites they want to see but do not see the underneath. I grew up in Germany. Angela Merkel destroyed Germany by inviting in Islamic hordes. Did she naively assumes they would become German workers or did she know they would not assimilate and would destroy Germany from within with Islam? Maybe she was so indoctrinated as a child to hate democracy and capitalism that she did it deliberately? I grew up in post-war war Germany and left at 13 before it had been Islamicized. Ayan Hirsi Ali chose to reject Islam after growing up in the Netherlands but had to flee for her life after she made a film criticizing Islam’s crushing of women’s rights. Her colleague, Theo Van Gogh, paid with his life, having a Muslim thrust a knife in his chest attached to a note denouncing their film as apostasy. Islam brooks no criticism. And yet it has invaded Europe and it is beginning to invade the U.S. Yes, multiculturalism is a disastrous failure!
Maral at her dynamic best; required reading... everywhere! 💙👊