More than two decades ago, Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential cleric, predicted that Islam would return to Europe as a conqueror. Then he added the sentence that matters: This time, the conquest would come “not by the sword but by preaching and ideology.”

He called his doctrine wasatiyya, the moderate middle way. The West believed the label and skipped the fine print: In 2003, the same “moderate” said suicide attacks against the “Zionist occupation” were “by no means to be defined as terrorism.” For a generation, the West measured the Islamist threat by the only yardstick it trusted: bombs. Madrid in 2004. London in 2005. Paris in 2015. Barcelona in 2017.

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