And not the usual ornormal kind of fake history that many nations employ — the kind meant to puff up their own civilization’s legacy. No, the EU has gone in a bolder direction: financing a historical revisionism that deliberately weakens Europe’s cultural confidence and historical memory in the name of “diversity.”

The program, oxymoronically titled “The European Qur’an” (EuQu), has one overarching goal: to convince Europeans that Islam and the Koran were somehow foundational pillars of European civilization. As the project’s homepage proudly proclaims, the idea is to “challenge traditional perceptions of the Qur’anic text and well-established ideas about European religious and cultural identities” through exhibitions, conferences, and books — that is, through mass propaganda.

Because what better use could there be for €10 million than “reeducating” Europeans into believing that Islam has always belonged in Europe, that the Koran was never a foreign invader’s playbook but rather a misunderstood sibling of the European canon?

According to the website, the project spans 700 years of European history, 1150 to 1850, from the Iberian Peninsula to Hungary, aiming to prove that “the influence of Islam on European culture is greatly underestimated.”

Is there any truth to this claim?

Well, yes — if by “influence” one means centuries of war, conquest, slavery, and terror. As historian Bernard Lewis — no one’s idea of a right-wing zealot — once wrote:

We tend nowadays to forget that for approximately a thousand years, from the advent of Islam in the seventh century until the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam, the double threat of conquest and conversion. Most of the new Muslim domains were wrested from Christendom. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were all Christian countries, no less, indeed rather more, than Spain and Sicily. All this left a deep sense of loss and a deep fear.Another historian, Franco Cardini, put it even more bluntly in his aptly titled book, Europe and Islam:

If we … ask ourselves how and when the modern notion of Europe and the European identity was born, we realize the extent to which Islam was a factor (albeit a negative one) in its creation. Repeated Muslim aggression against Europe … was a ‘violent midwife’ to Europe.

So yes, Islam has most certainly “influenced” Europe — but not in the way EuQu wants you to believe. Not by contributing to Renaissance art or to Enlightenment philosophy, but by presenting a relentless, often existential, challenge to Europe’s very survival.

Apparently, for EuQu, there’s no difference between influence and intrusion, or between contribution and conquest. What Islam “contributed” to Europe was a religious system that, from the very founding text that EuQu is devoted to “celebrating,” has only ever offered three options to the non-Muslim: conversion, submission, or death (Koran 9:5, 9:29, etc.) — hardly the stuff of cultural fusion.

But now, courtesy of the EU’s largesse, we’re told that the Koran — once rightly viewed by Christian Europe as the ideological manual behind jihad and conquest — was actually an integral part of European identity all along.

The truth is quite the contrary. From the very start, Europeans have shown deserved contempt for the teachings of the Koran — that “most pitiful and most inept little book of the Arab Muhammad,” to quote the ninth century’s Nicetas Byzantinos. After studying Islam’s holy book, he concluded that it is “full of blasphemies against the Most High, with all its ugly and vulgar filth,” particularly its claim that Heaven amounts to a “sexual brothel.” Indeed, for centuries, European scholars translated the Koran not to admire it, but to understand the enemy. The only reason Christians ever studied it was to protect their civilizations against the ideology that had conquered so many once-Christian lands.