"Islam is just as European as Christianity"

"Islam is represented as foreign to Europe. Even when politicians do talk positively about Islam in Europe, they tend to stick to the large Muslim populations in the United Kingdom, France, or Germany, most of whom arrived relatively recently. If Islam isn’t foreign to Europe, the narrative goes, then it’s new—something it’ll take Europeans (at least those who are practicing Christians) time to get used to.

But this is false...

Muslims have lived in Europe for centuries. And while Germany and France have the largest Muslim populations of any nation in Europe (unless we’re counting Russia or Turkey), the European Union member with the highest percentage of Muslims is actually Bulgaria.

These are not immigrants...

while the Ottomans were establishing themselves in Eastern Europe, Teutonic knights were already crusading against the indigenous peoples of what are now the Baltic states, forcing them to convert to Christianity. But who amongst us thinks Lithuania or Latvia is any less European for it? Islam is simply held to a different standard.

Rising nationalism saw many of these early Muslim communities wiped out, not very differently from how Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities were."

http://qz.com/505705/islam-is-just-as-european-as-christianity/