# European elites are secretly engineering a planned Islamic takeover of Europe, a debunked Islamophobic conspiracy theory known as 'Eurabia'

**Verdict: Contradicted.** 'Eurabia' is the false claim that European politicians and institutions are colluding, in secret, with Arab and Muslim powers to dissolve European civilization and replace it with an Islamic one, engineered through immigration and a hidden diplomatic pact. As stated, it is debunked. It was coined in the early 2000s by the writer Bat Ye'or, who recast a mundane 1970s diplomatic forum, the Euro-Arab Dialogue, as evidence of a civilizational conspiracy that no press or elected body ever noticed. Its demographic core rests on a demonstrable misreading of projections: Muslims are a small and slowly growing minority in Europe (roughly 5 percent, projected by Pew to somewhere between about 7 and 14 percent by 2050 depending on migration), not an incipient majority. This is not an academic error with no cost. The theory sits at the center of the manifesto of Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, and it is a direct sibling of the 'great replacement' and 'Kalergi Plan' myths. This file rates the conspiracy claim, which the evidence does not support, and its target is that hoax, never Muslims.

Category: Secret Societies & Power · Era: 2000s · First circulated: Coined by Bat Ye'or in the early 2000s (her book 'Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis' appeared in 2005); spread through counter-jihad blogs and columnists across the 2000s and 2010s · Believed by: A network running from Bat Ye'or and the transatlantic 'counter-jihad' movement, through anti-immigration bloggers and some newspaper columnists, into segments of the European far right; diluted, deniable versions surface in mainstream politics as claims of an imminent, planned 'Islamization.'
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/eurabia

## Summary
'Eurabia' holds that the growing Muslim presence in Europe is not the ordinary result of migration and birth rates but the product of a deliberate, hidden plan: a secret bargain in which European elites trade the continent's culture and independence to the Arab world in exchange for oil and markets, deliberately Islamizing Europe from above. The term was coined by the British-Swiss writer Bat Ye'or, who presented the real but unremarkable Euro-Arab Dialogue of the 1970s as the machinery of a civilizational surrender. This file separates a real fact from a false claim: Europe's Muslim population is growing modestly, but it is a small minority, and there is no pact, planner, or mechanism of the kind the theory requires. Named by scholars as the founding myth of contemporary Islamophobia, Eurabia is not a harmless misreading. It stands at the heart of the manifesto of the terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, and it is a direct relative of the 'great replacement' and 'Kalergi Plan' myths. It is debunked.

## The claim
That European political and cultural elites are knowingly executing a covert plan to Islamize Europe, dismantling its Christian and secular identity through mass Muslim immigration and a secret Euro-Arab pact, in order to build a new civilization, 'Eurabia,' subordinate to the Arab and Muslim world.

## Origin and timeline
- 1973-1974: In the aftermath of the oil crisis, European and Arab states set up the Euro-Arab Dialogue, an unremarkable diplomatic and economic forum. Decades later this ordinary body is recast by Eurabia proponents as the secret machinery of a civilizational conspiracy.
- 2002: The British-Swiss writer Bat Ye'or (the pen name of Gisele Littman) begins publishing the argument that Europe is being deliberately transformed into an appendage of the Arab world, using the coinage 'Eurabia' to name the supposed emerging entity.
- 2005: Bat Ye'or publishes 'Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis,' the book-length statement of the theory. It claims a conspiratorial pact between European elites and Arab states to Islamize the continent, a plan it says was hidden from Europe's own press and voters.
- 2006: The historian Matt Carr publishes 'You are now entering Eurabia' in the journal Race & Class, an early scholarly dissection describing how an 'outlandish conspiracy theory' had drifted toward mainstream respectability as an Islamophobic fantasy.
- 2007-2010: The idea circulates through the transatlantic 'counter-jihad' blogosphere and a run of alarmist books and columns forecasting an imminent Muslim-majority Europe, lending the conspiracy a veneer of demographic inevitability it does not have.
- 2011-07-22: Anders Behring Breivik murders 77 people in Norway, eight in an Oslo bombing and 69 at the Labour Party youth camp on Utoya island, after distributing a 1,500-page manifesto that places the Eurabia conspiracy at its center and lists Bat Ye'or among his influences.
- 2012: The journalist Doug Saunders publishes 'The Myth of the Muslim Tide,' a point-by-point rebuttal of the demographic panic Eurabia rests on, showing that projections of a Muslim-majority Europe are false and that fertility rates are converging.
- 2015-onward: Norway opens the 22 July Centre to document the attacks and the ideology behind them, while research bodies such as the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) catalogue Eurabia as a defined Islamophobic conspiracy theory rather than a serious thesis.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Europe's Muslim population is growing, so the 'Islamization' the theory describes is real.
  Evidence: A growing minority is not a planned takeover, and the theory depends on sliding from one to the other. Pew Research estimates Muslims were about 4.9 percent of Europe's population in 2016 and projects, depending on future migration, somewhere between roughly 7.4 percent (with zero further migration) and about 14 percent by 2050. Those are minority figures on every scenario, not the imminent majority Eurabia forecasts. Population change driven by migration, age structure, and family size is exactly what demographers expect; it is not evidence of a directing hand.
- Claim: The Euro-Arab Dialogue proves European elites made a secret pact to Islamize the continent.
  Evidence: The Euro-Arab Dialogue was a real but mundane forum on trade and diplomacy set up after the 1973 oil crisis; it produced conferences and communiques, not a civilizational surrender. Turning it into the engine of a hidden plan requires believing that a scheme to dissolve Europe was negotiated in public bodies yet somehow escaped the notice of the continent's press, parliaments, and voters. Scholars, including Matt Carr and the Nordic Journal of Migration Research, identify this as the theory's central sleight of hand: an ordinary record dressed up as proof of a conspiracy.
- Claim: High Muslim birth rates mean a Muslim-majority Europe is only a matter of time.
  Evidence: This is the specific demographic claim Doug Saunders dismantled in 'The Myth of the Muslim Tide.' Muslim fertility in Europe is higher than the non-Muslim rate but is falling and converging toward it as communities settle, a pattern seen in every earlier immigrant wave. Saunders and the underlying projections show Europe's Muslim share peaking as a minority, not crossing into majority. The 'ticking demographic clock' is the part of the theory with the least evidence and the most rhetorical work to do.
- Claim: Serious writers and even some politicians take the Eurabia thesis seriously, so it cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
  Evidence: Mainstreaming is not corroboration. That columnists and some political figures have echoed softened versions is a fact about the theory's spread, documented by researchers, not evidence for its truth. Bat Ye'or's thesis, when examined, requires an unfalsifiable secret plot; academic reviewers have found it rests on selective quotation and misread sources rather than on demonstrable coordination. Respectability laundered the idea; it never verified it.
- Claim: Concerns about immigration and integration in Europe are legitimate, so Eurabia is just an honest version of that debate.
  Evidence: The scale of immigration, the pace of integration, and their effects are legitimate subjects of open democratic argument, and reasonable people disagree about them. Eurabia is a different thing: it recasts those debates as an existential, coordinated plot by elites to extinguish a civilization on behalf of a foreign power. That conspiratorial framing, not any particular immigration figure, is what defines the theory, and it is that framing this file finds false.
- Claim: The theory is a fringe idea with no real-world consequences.
  Evidence: The opposite is documented. The Eurabia conspiracy sits at the heart of the manifesto of Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011 and listed Bat Ye'or among his influences. Researchers in the Nordic Journal of Migration Research argue that the conspiratorial structure of Eurabia, its logic of imminent civilizational doom, supplied the 'operational spur' for his choice of targets. Norway's 22 July Centre exists in part to teach how this ideology led to mass murder.

## Why people believe it
- Visible change is real and can be disorienting: new mosques, new communities, and shifting neighborhoods are easy to see, and a theory that names a plot offers a single, dramatic explanation for an anxiety that otherwise has many diffuse causes.
- The theory borrows the authority of numbers. It cites real population projections and a real diplomatic forum, then quietly exaggerates and reframes them, so its conclusions feel data-driven even though the coordinating plot is invented.
- It offers a total, closed narrative in which every headline about immigration, terrorism, or diversity becomes further confirmation, making it feel more proven the more one looks, and immune to any single fact that would refute it.
- Softened, deniable versions repeated by some columnists and politicians launder the idea, so the underlying conspiracy can feel mainstream and respectable rather than what it is: a defined Islamophobic myth.

## Open questions
- The honest, open question is not whether elites are plotting an Islamic takeover, they are not, but why a demonstrably false conspiracy theory keeps gaining respectability. Researchers point to economic insecurity, the mainstreaming of counter-jihad rhetoric, and the theory's ability to dress prejudice in the language of demography.
- Immigration levels, integration policy, and social cohesion are genuine subjects of democratic debate, and people hold sincere, opposing views. Distinguishing that ordinary argument from the Eurabia conspiracy, which posits a deliberate civilizational plot, matters precisely because the myth trades on borrowing the legitimacy of the honest debate.
- The most urgent documented question is how a demographic panic is converted into a license for violence. Breivik's attack, and the manifestos of later far-right killers who echo the same 'replacement' framing, make the pathway from conspiracy theory to terrorism a live concern for researchers rather than an abstraction.
- Eurabia, the 'great replacement,' and the 'Kalergi Plan' are versions of one idea in different vocabularies. Tracing how they borrow and reinforce each other, secular in one telling, antisemitic in another, Islamophobic in a third, is an ongoing task for extremism research.

## Sources
- Eurabia conspiracy theory, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurabia_conspiracy_theory
- Eurabia, European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS): https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/eurabia/
- You are now entering Eurabia, Matt Carr, Race & Class (SAGE) (2006): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306396806066636
- Breivik and Eurabia, Institute of Race Relations (2011): https://irr.org.uk/article/breivik-and-eurabia/
- Spur to Violence? Anders Behring Breivik and the Eurabia conspiracy, Nordic Journal of Migration Research (2013): https://journal-njmr.org/articles/10.2478/njmr-2013-0013
- Debunking the 'Myth of the Muslim Tide', NPR (Fresh Air) (2012): https://www.npr.org/transcripts/161168231
- Europe's Growing Muslim Population, Pew Research Center (2017): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/
- The 22 July Centre, 22. juli-senteret (Norwegian Ministry of Education): https://www.22julisenteret.no/en
- 2011 Norway attacks, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/eurabia