It is not fortuitous that many of the flags of western industrial democracies such as Britain, Sweden and Norway feature a cross. This harks backs to their Christian traditions. Conversely, more recent nation-states such as France, Italy and Germany shunned featuring religious symbols on their national flags.

Ultimately however, in current times a cross on the national flag of a European country is more a tribute to tradition than the reaffirmation of a given faith.

While Western societies were  slowly shifting towards secularization and the disconnect between faith and state, many third world societies proceeded in the opposite direction.

Thus, within the overall process of decolonization practically all former colonies with Muslim majorities (Indonesia being a notable exception) chose to feature Islamic religious symbols on their national flags. For them, accession to independence walked hand in hand with a reaffirmation of their Islamic faith.

By doing so the Islamic countries not only reversed the disconnect  that had come about in the West between faith and state. They also implicitly created a category of citizens who were called upon to display their allegiance to a flag  that bore the symbol of a faith to which they did not belong.

While this situation does not necessarily impact the everyday life of a non-Muslim citizen of a Muslim-majority country it is indicative of a state of mind. And this in turn is suggestive  of a subsidiary reality – namely that, over the past decades, what can be termed “militant Islam” is on the rise.

“Militant Islam” in its contemporary version emerged in Egypt under the name of the Muslim Brotherhood. Created in 1928 by the Islamic scholar Al Banna as a Sunni transnational organization, it advocated  the unification of all Muslim believers under an Islamic state  ruled by Shariah law.

Over the following decades, while essentially based in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood – whose motto was “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope”– gained a substantive following throughout the Arab world, especially among the masses.

Featuring a cloudy, opaque and diffused leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood was as much an organization as a state of mind. As such, it spawned the likes of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other violent Islamic groups that dotted the Middle East ecosystem, all sharing one common goal: the creation of an Islamic state, ruled by the Shariah.

It’s ambition to exercise political authority, albeit as predicated by Shariah law, inevitably brought the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood and its spinoffs into conflict with the existing various political establements in the Middle East that had no intention of relinquishing their hold on the instruments of state power.

This development, however, was not linear, especially in the Gulf states. In the 1980s members of the Brotherhood gained safe haven in the Gulf states, where they provided skilled professionals especially in the field of education. However, at its core, there was an underlying mismatch between the Brotherhood, which promoted political Islam with some form of popular participation, and the Gulf monarchies, which were hereditary and absolute or semi absolute monarchies.

This mismatch came to the front in the wake of the Arab spring. In 2011, Mohamed Morsi, who had close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected president of Egypt in the country’s first democratic elections. Two years later he was  removed by the Army – a scenario that under different forms also took place in Algeria and Tunisia.

The election and subsequent removal of Morsi proved a wake-up call for the powerholders throughout the Middle East. It demonstrated not only that the Brotherhood had a considerable following at the grass-roots level but that in a free democratic election process political power could be  within its reach.

This did not lead to an outright ban of the Brotherhood throughout the Middle East and Turkey but rather to a policy of surveillance, control and even occasional funding – with, in the background, the option of a violent repression were it to become an immediate political threat.

Underlying the restriction put on the activities of the Brotherhood lay the uncomfortable truth that, were free and democratic elections held in most Arab countries, the winners would be the Brotherhood or its offspring.

With Militant Islam essentially kept in check by the Arab regimes themselves  within the Middle East, the extent to which it has migrated to Europe  has become a source of major controversy, often distorted and systematically politicized.

While there are no official government figures it is estimated that there are some 46 million Muslims in Europe, equivalent to some 6% of the total population. While the percentage varies by European country  with practically none in Poland or Hungary and up to 10% in France and 7% in Germany and the UK , overall some 70% are from Arab origin. This includes recent arrivals, legal or illegal residents, asylum seekers . refugees as well as native born.

As for the potential number of people among this group with a proclivity to  revert to  violence to promote their beliefs, security services believe that they do not, overall include more than a few thousands altogether. As for the Muslim Brotherhood, while it has a presence within the Islamic  population  its focus  is mostly on soft power with a presence in mosques, schools and social endeavors, all seeking to reenforce the separate identities of the Islamic communities.

Ultimately, it was not immigration but its numbers and makeup that created considerable disquiet in some of the countries of destination such as France, Germany, Sweden and the UK.

The issue is not immigration per se. Switzerland has a foreign population of some 23% and has no major  problem with immigration. The issue is immigrants creating parallel societies based on social norms that are incompatible with those of the countries of destination.

Within this ecosystem terrorism as such by individual or small radicalized groups is not significant. What is significant is the impact it has on European societies, which increasingly feel culturally under siege.

Thus, when the parents of a state-run  school in the French city of Lille, which has a high percentage of Muslim pupils, petitioned the authorities not to serve pork as part of the school lunches, the outcry of disapprobation throughout France was massive. And it was further massively amplified by a splattering of terrorist action by radicalized individuals acting in the name of Islam.

This in turn has conspired to create, throughout most European countries a pervasive negative view of immigration as such and of Islamic immigration even more so.

The resurgence of right wing parties is in great part credited to the belief that immigration, and in particular Muslim immigration, is out of control. The pressure on European government to restrict immigration is thus pervasive and Germany, which under chancellor Merkel accepted some one million refugees from Syria, is trying to return al least half of them.

The end result is that most European security services consider Islamic extremism originating from the Islamic communities within Europe a “significant threat,” albeit one that is difficult to identify and even more difficult to preempt. This applies in particular to acts of individuals or small groups who are radicalized through social media. As such, while they are not an institutional threat to the European societies they live in, they represent a destabilizing element which European governments have problems controlling.

As of today, for better or for worse, the powers throughout the Middle East  appear to have their militant Islamists under control.

The Europeans, albeit facing a differently configured challenge, are still groping.