According to the history of Malta the Muslim invaders mostly imposed their faith upon the native population and instated methods on how to make life harder for the non-Muslim population, for example, through discriminatory and difficult taxation.
The Muslim past as you call it, is just the product of invasion and imposition by Muslims as it was in the rest of Europe, and that is how most know it amongst our own people, as this is how it was.
No wonder the Normans were seen as liberators, the Muslims treated what remained of the native population in a manner that is not well thought-of, not to mention the various raids on the islands by Arabs and Muslims alike throughout its history.
The idea that the Muslims came and took over uninhabited land is just an idea.
Certainly Maltese (as a language) is distinct from Arabic, I don't understand Arabic and at most I can understand a few words. I heard Arabs talk, and I viewed Arab Television, it is a different world altogether.
And this includes Tunisian Arabic. The question of the Maltese language has various hypotheses. Mainly being that it was imposed by the Arabs in the 9th. Century AD or that it predates that to the Phoenician/Carthaginian period. None of the hypotheses have been proven 100% correct and some that inquire in these hypotheses always cast doubts. There are also other hypotheses. The history of Malta on this question is shady.
The language might not change (although it is changing and evolving and this will go on in a natural manner towards a more Romance-based language as it happens everyday in daily life), but the people are no Arabs or Muslims culturally and racially.
Even spiritually, Malta was Christian before Arab rule, and it returned to Christianity after Arab rule (even though this is not a great thing, but it shows that the people sided with European Christendom).
We have our own share of Arabs in Malta (too much to my liking) and one can easily recognise the fact that they don't look like our own population.
Our own people are Southern European and that is what the huge majority of the Maltese look like. I think I know how to judge my people in this regard.
Although most of our tourists are Germanic, we do have our share of Southern European tourists and these are easily confusable with the native population, in particular our closest neighbours the Italians.
Groups of Italian youth and people come to Malta and one might think they are Maltese, this is what happens to me when I visit our capital and whenever I hear people speaking Italian, I don't recognise them as foreign, it is practically impossible given their looks. They dress the same and the body language is very similar if not identical (I notice no difference here), compared to the ones of Arabs which is discernible, their racial types are the same to the great majority of the local population, this being particularly true for Southern Italians and Sicilians. It is not the first time I approached someone thinking they were Maltese and they were Italian.
My town has a partnership (we call it "gemellagg" from "gemellagio" in Italian) with two Italian towns and all the Italian visitors were no different from the people of Malta in particular of one of the towns which is in Southern Italy, the town was Cicciano in the province of Napoli.
To see some types common in Malta visit this topic here:
www.avemelita.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=151There are other types (fairer, darker, whatever), but I tried to represent the most common.
The Muslim past which you say hit Malta has hit various Southern European areas including the Iberian peninsula and Italy and we were all lucky that it ended eventually.