Flemish veteran politician Filip Dewinter has a message for Muslims in Europe. Not an 87-page policy paper, not an inclusivity conference with vegetarian sandwiches, and certainly not a Brussels-subsidised dialogue forum.

He is doing something far more dangerous.

He is turning the tables.

Imagine millions of Europeans moving to Islamic countries. Not for a holiday, but to live there. And once they arrive, they start making demands.

In Riyadh, they want churches, with bells, if you please. In Tehran, they demand the public sale of alcohol and pork. In Islamabad, they want mixed-gender schools, sex education, and a Christmas tree at City Hall. In Kabul, an activist group emerges demanding that women in bikinis be allowed to visit the swimming pool undisturbed.

When the local population takes issue with this, the newcomers explain that locals urgently need to learn how to deal with diversity.

The Saudis get a course on inclusivity.

The Afghans get a rainbow-coloured zebra crossing.

And in Iran, a European diversity manager arrives to explain that the indigenous population ought to take a critical look at its own privileges.

The interesting thing about Dewinter’s thought experiment is that you immediately sense where the friction lies.

Not because every Muslim thinks alike or because every migrant refuses to adapt- that is demonstrably nonsense- but because Europe has developed a peculiar philosophy of civilisation in which it is almost exclusively the host society that is expected to make adjustments.

We call that integration.

The newcomer brings their culture along, and we receive a brochure explaining how we should deal with it.

A headscarf? Diversity.

A church turning into a mosque? Progress.

A Christmas party renamed a “winter celebration”? Inclusivity.

Anyone who then tentatively asks whether integration might also require something from the other side is looked at as if they had just placed *Mein Kampf* on the library’s reading table.

That is the power of the reversal.

For tolerance without reciprocity is not tolerance. It is capitulation with a policy officer in attendance.

A self-confident society can be hospitable without erasing itself. It can grant Muslims full civil rights while simultaneously insisting that freedom of speech, gender equality, freedom of religion, the democratic rule of law, and the separation of church and state are non-negotiable.

This is not a matter of hostility, but of having a backbone.

Europe does not need to become a replica of Mecca, Islamabad, or Tehran to prove it is tolerant.

Perhaps integration is, in the end, surprisingly simple:

When you enter someone else’s home, you may remain yourself. But you do not immediately start rearranging the furniture.