About 16,000 jihadists from the Middle East and North Africa went to fight with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. That region has about 414 million Muslims, 94 percent of its population. Western Europe, where Muslims number about 26 million, under 5 percent of the population, produced more than 5,000. That is one jihadist for every 25,000 or so Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, and one for every 5,000 in Western Europe, more than four times the rate.
The gap widens in individual countries. Belgium, with about 860,000 Muslims, produced roughly 500 jihadists, one for every 1,700. France, with 5.7 million Muslims, produced about 1,700, one for every 3,400. Indonesia, with about 239 million Muslims, produced about 600, one for every 400,000. Belgium’s rate is roughly two hundred times Indonesia’s.
A study coordinated by Germany’s federal criminal police found that in 2025, 23.8 percent of Muslims in Germany called an Islamic theocracy the best form of government, up from 18.7 percent in 2021, and 25.1 percent put the rules of the Koran above German law. In France, 24 percent of Muslims told IFOP they sympathize with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founder called restoring the caliphate an obligation on every Muslim.
Muslims in the West are a small minority in rich, safe, free countries. Muslims in the Islamic world are the majority, and Islam runs their courts, their schools and their calendars. The second group should be the more militant one. The first is, by a wide margin. So what is happening? Why does Islam in the West, at a fraction of the numbers, produce more jihad per head than the Muslim world does?