The 2026 Winter Gathering confronts a deliberate historical amnesia: the erasure of over a millennium of Muslim presence in Europe and the decisive role Muslim societies and populations played in shaping European civilisation. This is not an obscure academic oversight. It sits at the centre of today’s argument about Western decline, contested values and whether Muslims are internal to Europe or permanently alien to it.

Across Europe and North America a powerful narrative claims that Muslim immigration heralds the fatal weakening of Western civilisation and the erosion of its values. This revisionism fuels Islamophobia and “replacement” theories that cast Muslims as a hostile ‘fifth column’ that must be expelled. Such claims depend on treating Islam as permanently foreign to Europe. The 2026 Gathering will intervene directly in this crucial historical and ideological debate.

Muslim rule in Europe was not an interruption of European advance.. It was one of its key historical forms. From the 7th century onward, Muslims colonised , governed and lived across Western and Eastern Europe. In Iberia alone, Muslim rule endured for nearly eight centuries. Within generations, Muslims were European-born and locally rooted.

In 929 CE the Spanish-born Emir ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III proclaimed himself Commander of the Faithful – the political and the religious leader of all the Muslims in al-Andalus, as well as the protector of his Christian and Jewish subjects. Contemporary accounts describe him as fair-skinned, blue-eyed and with reddish or blond hair. By heritage, birth, culture and political life, he was a European ruler. He appears foreign only through a later racialisation that coded Islam itself as alien.

History normally allows ‘foreignness’ to expire. Contemporary European populations in the Americas and Australasia are no longer described as invaders. The descendants of Vikings and Normans who conquered England are considered indigenous. Conquest gives way to settlement, settlement to continuity and continuity to a sense of belonging. However Muslims are denied this transition.

Muslim Europe was also an intellectual engine. Philosophy, medicine, mathematics and law were developed in European cities under Muslim rule. Enlightenment Europe encountered Aristotle and systematic rational inquiry largely through Muslim thinkers Many values modern Europe claims as its core inheritance — commitment to reason, scientific progress, legal rationality and institutional learning — were shaped within this Muslim European context. To detach those values from that history is to misrepresent how Europe became what it is.

The later erasure of Muslim Europe continues to structure contemporary Islamophobia by presenting Muslims as permanent outsiders. The 2026 Gathering will treat this not only as a dispute about the past, but as a contest over Europe’s possible futures.

It will explore these areas:
• Historical memory and belonging, asking who is permitted to count as indigenous.
• Intellectual inheritance, tracing how Muslim Europe shaped European modernity.
• Narratives of decline, examining how fear of civilisational loss is constructed and mobilized.
• How Muslims tell their own European history to themselves and to their fellow citizens.
• & the future(s) of Europe; considering what a confident European identity grounded in historical truth might look like.

The event is open to Muslim Institute Fellows only. To become a Fellow click here.

Registration for fellows will open at the start of September 2026.