Like the politicians, most of the media across Europe throughout these years showed very little desire either to understand or say publicly what might be going on. For the press the causes were obvious: a combination of fear, cowardice and an internalisation of the threat. The politicians meanwhile could not face up to the problem because they were responsible for introducing it into Europe. Throughout all the decades that had gone before almost no one had considered the ideologies or beliefs of the people who were coming or showed much curiosity in doing so. Politicians and the media in general minimised the differences between Islam and any other faith. And all the time they insisted that the solution to the problem, if it did exist, was to bind the future of European societies to the future of Islam, in backing ‘the moderates’ so that a ‘reformed Islam’ could prevail. This, the politicians insisted, would solve the problem both for Europe and for Islam as a whole. They appeared to have no awareness of the fact that from the Mu’tazilites in the tenth century to the Iranian Ali Dashti in the twentieth century, Islamic history had witnessed many reform movements and many reform-minded individuals, all of which had been defeated by the force, arguments and appeals to authority of the fundamentalists. What European politicians were doing during this period was tying the future of Europe’s security to a reform movement that had failed throughout history and was at the very least likely to fail again. Still they remained undeterred in their pursuit of this argument. In a speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 2014 the then British Home Secretary, Theresa May, did what every politician was doing, which was to stress the peacefulness of Islam and to quote some of her favourite verses from the Koran. Having witnessed the forcefulness with which many Muslims were willing to defend their faith, it appeared to become the attitude of the political mainstream to pretend that the religion of Islam was at least partly true, and a source of wisdom and guidance. By 2016 one of Angela Merkel’s key allies, the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, was calling for the creation of a ‘German Islam’.