I’ve been writing about Islam in Europe for a
quarter century, but I’ve never written a word about Islam in Iceland,
and at one point I was naive enough to believe that I would never have
to. Pretty much everywhere else you go in Western Europe these days,
there’s at least a hint of an Islamic presence and hence, to at least
some degree, a sense of being in the presence of a hostile and alien
threat. It was never like that in Iceland. In no other Western European
urban center have I ever felt as safe as I have in Reykjavik. It’s a
clean, charming city of 120,000 in a remote island country of 370,000,
and until recently virtually everybody there was Icelandic. It’s like
one big family – except it’s not really that big. When I walked the
streets, at any time of day or night, the sense of security was
palpable; indeed, it was less like wandering around a city than like
wandering through the comfortable (if chilly) rooms of a well-secured
home. There are high-trust societies and there are low-trust societies;
Iceland was as high-trust as you can imagine. And a big part of the
reason for that was the extremely low level of immigration – especially
Muslim immigration. Well, that’s over. ....To Read More....
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