Such aspects of Islamic culture soon had to sustain an almost unbearable burden. An exhibition called ‘1001 Islamic Inventions’ toured London’s Science Museum among others, insisting that almost everything in Western civilisation had in fact originated in the Islamic world. Ahistorical though such claims were, they developed the aura of faith. People needed them to be true and ceased challenging all such claims. It became a matter not merely of politeness, but of necessity to stress and indeed over-stress how much was owed by European culture to the cultures of the most troubled communities. When in 2008 a French medievalist academic, Sylvain Gouguenheim, published an essay arguing that the texts from Ancient Greece often said to have been saved by Arab Muslims with no knowledge of Greek had in fact been preserved by Syriac Christians, the debate became a heated political issue. Public petitions and letters denounced Gouguenheim for his ‘Islamophobia’ in coming to this finding. Few other academics even spoke out in support of his right to say what the evidence he provided showed. Cowardice aside, this was just one demonstration of an urgent need – as with the argument ‘we’ve always been a nation of immigrants’ that took hold at the same time – to change Europe’s fairly monocultural past to fit in with its very multicultural present.

At the same time there were people who took these methods to their extremes. For a further way of trying to arrange a point of equal standing between the incoming cultures and the host culture was to talk down the host culture. One notorious as well as high-profile example of this came from the Swedish Minister of Integration, Mona Sahlin, while speaking at a Kurdish mosque in 2004. The Social Democratic minister (who wore a veil for the occasion) told her audience that many Swedes were jealous of them, because the Kurds had a rich and unifying culture and history, whereas the Swedes only had silly things like the festival of Midsummer’s Night.10 Another way of achieving the same effect was to insist that there was in essence no such thing as European culture. In 2005 a journalist asked the Swedish government’s Parliamentary Secretary and lead integration official, Lise Bergh, whether or not Swedish culture was worth preserving. The reply she gave was, ‘Well, what is Swedish culture? And with that I guess I’ve answered the question.’11