Belonging, by Fact and by History: Why Islam is Part of the West Generated using copilot for my Islam and Muslim Communities Op-Ed assessment taks Hook If Islam were truly alien to the West, our cities would look different, our libraries would be thinner, and our classrooms would be missing entire chapters of what we call Western thought. Yet the empirical record says otherwise: in England and Wales alone, about 6.5%—roughly four million people—identify as Muslim [AD1] , a minority share but a settled and visible one, in societies that have grown steadily more diverse over the last decade. That is social fact, not rhetoric. Thesis The assertion that Islam and Muslims “do not belong” to the West collapses under three kinds of evidence: demographic reality , attitudinal nuance , and civilisational history . When we look closely at how people live, what publics say, and what our intellectual inheritance contains, Islam is already inside Western life—culturally, so...