On 2 October 2020, French President Macron stated that “'Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today.” Today, for more than three weeks, a wave of protests has been underway in Europe. It began in France and soon spread to Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Austria, and even Albania. Living-condition and sectoral crises combined to ignite a wave of European anger. While the education crisis and the teacher shortage ignited the student protests in France, the insane hikes in housing and rental costs became the fuel for popular movements in Spain and Portugal. As the demonstrations spread, the demands turned into a general uprising against inflation, the high cost of living, and austerity policies in Italy and Belgium. They also overlapped with a wave of condemnation of political corruption in Albania, reflecting, taken as a whole, the widening gap between government policies and people’s purchasing power.

This is not the first time that major popular protests have erupted in Europe. Over the past decade, successive waves of unrest and sweeping popular uprisings have occurred. Between 2019 and 2024, traffic paralysis was witnessed in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Poland, and Italy after farmers blocked vital arteries with their tractors in protest against environmental laws and production costs. This economic and human divide deepened with the million-strong demonstrations by trade unions in France in 2023 against the amendment to the law raising the retirement age. At the same time, angry crowds took to the streets in Belgium and Italy in 2022 to condemn record-breaking increases in inflation rates and energy bills. These living-condition crises coincided with political upheavals and anti-corruption movements in Belarus in 2020, and in Serbia and Georgia in 2023 and 2024. This was in addition to the violent protests that swept through Britain, Austria, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands between 2020 and 2021 in rejection of the restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a whole, Europe thus became an open arena for ongoing popular movements that reflected the widening gap between peoples’ aspirations and government decisions.

Instead of investigating and resolving the root causes of these protests, US President Trump came out on Sunday, 18 October 2026, to say that immigration was the cause of the unrest taking place in France, urging Paris to “close the borders.” In a post on his Truth Social platform, he said: “France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country.” This was a reference to Muslims. Trump had previously blamed immigration and Islam for the mass student protests that France has been witnessing since last September. Thus, they turn a blind eye to the facts and blame others, in an attempt to evade responsibility and avoid confronting the truth.

They are experiencing a real crisis as their policies and governments, founded upon their capitalist ideology, deteriorate. This ideology has demonstrated its inability to manage people’s affairs and improve their conditions, despite all the preventive measures and makeshift solutions they introduce with every crisis and turning point, instead of addressing the root of the problem and the cause of failure. Their peoples have been scorched by the fire of capitalism and its remedies, and their suffering has reached its limit, or nearly so.

This is a natural matter and an inevitable consequence of the capitalist ideology, which would not have continued for all this time—short as that time may be—had the alternative represented by the ideology of Islam not been concealed. Islam was excluded from the scene when the Dawlah (state) of the Khilafah(Caliphate) was destroyed, thereby depriving humanity of the goodness and mercy of Islam. Thus, the words of Allah Almighty apply to them:

[أَلَمْ تَرَ إِلَى الَّذِينَ بَدَّلُواْ نِعْمَةَ اللّهِ كُفْراً وَأَحَلُّواْ قَوْمَهُمْ دَارَ الْبَوَارِ]

“Have you not seen those who exchanged the blessing of Allah for disbelief and settled their people in the abode of ruin?” [TMQ Ibrahim:28].

The capitalist ideology is staggering; its flaws have become apparent and its corruption has been exposed. Yet the rulers in the West continue to cling to it because they benefit from its continued existence. It is designed to suit the capitalists and those wielding influence, allowing them to sustain themselves and enjoy prosperity at the expense of the majority. Therefore, they will not allow it to collapse unless the peoples overthrow them and seize them by the collars, or unless the second Khilafah Rashidah (rightly guided Caliphate) is established, delivering the final blow to it and its corrupt states, and bringing humanity out of the torment and hardship of capitalism into the mercy and justice of Islam. It will indeed come soon, by Allah’s permission.

Allah Almighty says:

[وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَاكَ إِلَّا رَحْمَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ]

“And We have not sent you except as a mercy to the worlds.” [TMQ Al-Anbiya:107].