If there were any question as to whether Middle Eastern-born Muslim radicals could wreak massive destruction in Western countries, it was answered on September 11, 2001. An important related question, however, remains on the table. Could future Islamic terror arise from within Western societies, from Muslim radicals born in the West and thoroughly familiar with its ways? What paths might such radicalization take? To answer this question, we must develop and consult a new sociology--that of EuroIslam.

Diasporic and Universalist Islam

Islam in western Europe is in rapid transition from an imported Islam to forms of European or "universal" Islam. The key difference between the two is this: the former is practiced mostly by immigrants who preserve links with their countries of origin, while the latter is adhered to mostly by European-born Muslims who have ceased looking to the "old country" as a reference point and a storehouse of activists and clerics. The extent of the transition from imported to universal Islam varies greatly from one community to another. It is pronounced in recent generations born in Europe, and it applies more to Arabs than to Turks. Once through its transition, Islam in Europe could assume several different forms. One is integration, by which is meant the development of a distinct European, or French or British, "Muslim church." Another is re-communalization along supranational lines, which is defined in essence by European Muslims' identification with a universal umma, or community of the faithful. It is with this latter phenomenon that radicalism and violence become potentially serious issues.

A necessary condition of radicalization is re-Islamization--that is, the socialization of European-born Muslims to Islamic beliefs, or at least beliefs that are presented as Islamic. But this is not a sufficient condition. Clearly, there are modes of conservative and conformist re-Islamization where the primary concerns of individuals are preserving dignity and achieving recognition and respect. This is the case, for example, for many Muslims from the Indian subcontinent living in Great Britain. Re-Islamization can take on a humanist and even a liberal mode, such as that form advocated by the imam of the Ad-Dawa mosque in Paris.

Nevertheless, re-Islamization can also lead to radicalization, and it can do so, theoretically at least, in two ways. There is, first, diasporic radicalization, defined as that linked to and focused on the country of origin, not the European host society. But radical Muslim groups active in Europe that maintain close links with their countries of origin are never primarily Islamist; they are nationalist and often leftist, like the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK). The Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), although present in Europe, is no longer involved in militant activity among Algerian-born migrants, and the Turkish Milli Görüs--a European offshoot of the since-banned Refah Party--is, as we shall see, increasingly less involved in Turkish domestic politics even as it remains active among the diaspora.

The second type of radicalization is ideological and takes the form of a transnational Islam divorced from its country of origin. Ideological radicalization typically develops as a result of the alienation of the young, which is common to depressed or socially marginal urban areas. Unmoored from traditional Islam, second- and third-generation jobless males provide fertile ground for recruiters to radical Islam.

Islamic radicalization in Europe since the early 1990s has predominantly taken this second path, oriented toward a supranational community, the Muslim umma. As a constructivist community it is partly imaginary, but once imagined it becomes real in effect--a development much advanced by the advent of the Internet and its associated subculture. Oddly enough, this type of radicalization goes hand in hand with Westernization in France and other European countries. Most radicalized Muslim youth in Europe are Western educated, often in technical or scientific fields. Very few come out of a traditional madrassa, and most experience a period of fully Westernized life, complete with alcohol and girlfriends, before becoming "born-again Muslims" in European mosques or jails. Inversely, conservative groups, whose members practice traditional Islam with strong cultural and linguistic affinities with non-European cultures, can nonetheless develop strong loyalty toward the host European country. Radicalization is thus not directly linked to the level of integration.

Diasporic Radicalism

To understand why transnational, "ideological" Islam is liable to be most dangerous to the security and well-being of European states, it helps to look first at the lesser problem--diasporic radicalization.

A diaspora is formed when a community of migrants maintains close links with its country of origin: continuing to speak the mother tongue; keeping in touch with national events through newspapers and other media; supporting extended family relationships through endogamous practices (the marriage partner is selected from the country of origin, sometimes from the same village); maintaining a juridical link (dual nationality or the nationality of the country of birth); and often preserving the myth of a return to the home country--even if this return is constantly being postponed. The term "diaspora" retains no meaning in reference to those who abandon these behaviors, even if some family and emotional ties remain. Before a Muslim in Europe can become a supranationalized radical, he (or, far less often, she) must lose most if not all connection to the diaspora.

The transition away from the diasporic condition can take three forms. The first of these is assimilation: the loss of all identity-related indicators of existing differences, even if memories or, for those born in the diaspora, awareness of one's origins persist (as, for example, with Italian immigrants to France). In this case, an Arab or Turkish immigrant would blend into a European society and lose all traces of his cultural, linguistic and religious origin. The second form of transition is integration, which is characterized by a reconstituted identity that stresses remaining differences. Thus, one can be simultaneously European and "Arab" without reference to the Arabic language or a particular Arab country; or simply "Muslim", understood as a follower of a religion detached from any specific citizenship. The third form is re-communalization, which combines a physical presence in Europe with a supranational Muslim identity that produces a "virtual ghetto."

Sociologically, west European Muslims are distributed all along this identity scale. Most of the approximately 13 million Muslims living in EU countries are not politically radical. But of those who are, the main pattern in recent years evinces a growing separation of the process of radicalization from the country of origin. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Algerian (FIS), Turkish (Refah/Milli Görüs) and Pakistani Islamic militants concentrated their actions on the country of origin, avoiding confrontations with the authorities of the host European country. They used the diaspora for recruitment and financing, but also as political leverage to influence the host country's policy toward the country of origin--on the same model, more or less, as that of the IRA, the Basque ETA and the PKK. They needed to avoid prosecution and hence kept a low political profile in the host country. A dozen years later, it is clear that this strategy failed.

The FIS provides the best example of that failure. During its meteoric rise beginning in 1989 and culminating in its short-lived victory in the 1991 Algerian elections, the FIS garnered much sympathy from Algerian immigrants in Europe. But its strategy was always centered on the home country: its aim was to mobilize Europe's Muslims in support of the struggle in Algeria. Its networks abjured violence in Europe against Europeans, particularly in France, in order to transform Europe into a base of support for militants on the run and a public relations platform.

For these purposes the FIS mobilized immigrants of North African origin through the Algerian Federation of France. Despite its anti-Western rhetoric, the Federation sought compromise with European authorities in order to isolate the Algerian government. For example, under the aegis of an Italian Catholic community, the Federation was involved in the "San Egidio process", whose objective was to reach an "historical compromise" in Algeria. The FIS was thus an Islamo-nationalist organization whose goal was power in Algeria, not international Islamic revolution; it worked entirely within the framework of the Algerian nation, and rejected the exportation of jihad to Europe or anywhere else.

The FIS' European strategy failed for two reasons. First, a more radical group, the GIA (Groupes Islamiques Armés, or Armed Islamic Groups), entered the political arena of global confrontation and terrorism. Second, European governments (and most of the media and public opinion, as well) aligned themselves with the Algerian government's eradicative stand, refusing to recognize the FIS as a bona fide political player. Ill prepared for clandestine action, the FIS quickly lost the battle at home to the Algerian army and the GIA, and it collapsed in Europe for this and additional reasons. Its members in France felt increasingly less in tune with their native country's politics. Second-generation European Muslims, including those of Algerian descent, were more attracted by the GIA's radical discourse on jihad than by the FIS call to form a political coalition in Algeria. That radical discourse helped European-born Muslims blend with other deracinated radicals to form new transnational Islamist networks.

What happened to the FIS exemplifies a general process: the detachment of the new Islamic radical youth of Europe from the Islamic political parties of their countries of origin. A polarization has resulted: radicalized Muslim youth in Europe become less attracted to the purely political and national approach of any Islamic mother-party, and those parties become even more Islamo-nationalist than internationalist as a result. While many Islamist movements are consolidating a stable constituency within their own countries, they are simultaneously losing appeal beyond their borders.

This polarizing tendency has affected groups other than the Algerian FIS. The 2001 split of the Refah-Fazilet party has partly dissociated Milli Görüs from domestic Turkish politics; the movement is now far more "European" than Middle Eastern, often associating with the Europe-based Arab Muslim Brothers. Its internal debates concentrate on what it means to be a Muslim in Europe. It is also dividing within itself in its European context. On one side is a dominant conservative body; on the other is a liberal wing represented by its Dutch section, headed by Haci Karacaer--of whom more below.

Two Examples

The Salman Rushdie affair exemplifies the shift from a diasporic to a universalist Islam. Pakistani immigrants to Great Britain from the Barelwi current were responsible for the public burning of The Satanic Verses in 1989. The Barelwis are considered moderates by Pakistani standards, but their special devotion to the Prophet rendered Rushdie's "insult" particularly grievous in their eyes. The fact that Rushdie is a renegade in their estimation was also very important. What was at stake was the definition of a new Islamic community in a European context that had nothing to do with possessing a particular passport. The Barelwis were trying to define a community that has no territorial, ethno-linguistic or juridical base. They were trying to pre-emptively determine the definition of a "Western" Muslim, which is a huge existential question for observant Muslims in Europe. Rushdie, of Indian Muslim origin, was targeted precisely because he is a British citizen who writes only in English and disclaims being a practicing Muslim. Had a Christian written The Satanic Verses, the Barelwis would have launched no street demonstrations.

At a deeper level, the objective of the anti-Rushdie campaign in England (before the matter was seized by Imam Khomeini in Iran for his own reasons) was to pass a new British law on blasphemy--to date reserved exclusively for the Church of England--for the benefit of Islam. Thus it was the demand for recognition on the part of Pakistani immigrants to Britain that lay behind the anti-Rushdie campaign, though Western public opinion, naturally enough, was oblivious to this angle. It is, however, interesting to note that two non-Muslim groups lent them an attentive ear: the left wing of the Labour Party, probably for electoral reasons but also in the name of multiculturalism; and a conservative group of Anglican and Catholic priests for whom this was a heaven-sent opportunity to forge a sacred alliance against the profanation of religion in the name of art--the controversy over Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, it should be recalled, was a near-contemporaneous affair.

Finally on this point, it bears noting that the anti-Rushdie campaign flowed more from fear than from aggression. The demand for communal recognition ran parallel to the attempt to define the borders of a community that, as its leaders saw it, was in danger of disintegration through assimilation. The internal vision of a beleaguered Islam in decline is important: many Muslims in the Middle East and outside of it share this vision--a view confirmed, in their eyes, by the Gulf War, the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the sanctions against Iraq and so on. Such motives contrast sharply with those attributed to Muslims in the Western view of an expanding Islam. In any case, it is clear that the European Muslim reaction to The Satanic Verses had nothing to do with importing Islamic radicalization to Europe; on the contrary, it evidenced a sui generis Muslim-European process of ideological radicalization, with the potential of exporting radicalism to, rather than importing it from, the Middle East.

The rise of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Europe also exemplifies the transition from a diasporic to a universalist mode of Islamic identity. Hizb ut-Tahrir ("Liberation Party") is a fundamentalist party based in London that was originally set up as a Palestinian Islamic movement in 1953. Officially non-violent, its ideas are nevertheless very radical. It advocates the immediate re-establishment of the caliphate and the ultimate conversion of the entire world to Islam. Hizb ut-Tahrir is now a genuinely international movement; indeed, it is difficult to identify and locate precisely its controlling authority. Officially, its leader is Sheikh Abdel Qadir Zalum, a Palestinian from Beirut who succeeded Taqiuddin Nabhani, the movement's founding father, in 1977. But Zalum appears to have lost effective control to a group of militants based in London. And it is a movement that is rapidly growing.

Hizb ut-Tahrir's growth is revealed through an analysis of its relationship with the Muhajirun organization of Sheikh Omar Bhakri, a Syrian residing in London who maintains a high profile in the English-language media. Though Bhakri does not make explicit reference to Hizb ut-Tahrir, their pronouncements and website content are often identical. The Muhajirun movement, therefore, is likely a front for Hizb ut-Tahrir in Europe, which developed in the 1980s and 1990s in Great Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands--and to a lesser extent in the United States. Starting in 1997, Hizb ut-Tahrir established new chapters in Muslim countries including Sudan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. The Pakistani branch, led by Dr. Abdul Qayyum, is more recent than the Uzbek branch, set up in 1999, and also more visible, with its meetings announced in the press. It seems to have been set up at the instigation of the London leadership. During a trial for sedition in Lahore in the fall of 2002, the defendants were British-born Muslims who spoke exclusively English with a cockney accent. Hizb ut-Tahrir thus represents another example of a re-communalized European radicalism being deliberately and systematically exported to Muslim countries.

The transition from diasporic to universalist Islam is also illustrated by the fact that very few Muslims in Europe mobilize on the basis of Middle Eastern conflicts. Although the Palestinian cause is popular among European Muslims, their support has never gone further than street demonstrations numbering fewer than 5,000 people in Paris, in company with traditional left-wing and anti-imperialist non-Muslim European sympathizers. Support for the Palestinian cause is generally not expressed in religious terms, and neither is opposition to a U.S.-led war against Iraq.

The Radicalization of the Uprooted

What is the essential nature of supranational, ideological Islam in Europe, and what recruitment patterns does it manifest? Only by understanding these matters can we hazard a guess as to how significant a security problem European states--and the United States--may face in the future from such movements.

Identification with a supranational umma in Europe can be experienced as a purely religious identification. This is often the case among Muslim middle-class populations, but, particularly among disenchanted and alienated youth, such identification can lead to a process of political radicalization. This process varies from place to place, and from one immigrant community to another, but the general trend is clear--as is the reason for it.

When Muslim immigrants live in open, cosmopolitan societies, particularly ones offering economic dynamism and social mobility, efforts by diasporic elders to keep them segregated from the mainstream usually fail, albeit in varying degrees and at varying speeds. As the original culture falls away, it is replaced by new cultural norms--either fully, as with assimilation, or partly, as with integration. When these new norms come from the host country, they can sometimes take the form of a subculture--such as the "suburban" youth culture in France, whose combative nature is Western, not Islamic, in origin. But as we have seen, sometimes a process of identity reconstruction ensues that seeks to preserve the essence of difference. Without the actual anchors of a diasporic community to sustain them, however, they require an imagined community. In the case of European Muslims, this constructivist community is usually based on a transnational religious identity. (Interestingly enough, many European Muslims nonetheless require their host society's freedom and openness to advance the cause of a transnational identity that bypasses both Muslim nations and local European patriotisms. This is illustrated by the creation in Antwerp of a controversial organization, the Arab European League, which lobbies for recognition of minority rights for Muslims at an all-European level.)

The rejection of the culture of origin, together with the refusal to assimilate into the surrounding Western culture, finds perfect expression in neo-fundamentalism (or salafism). Fundamentalism--meaning a return to the "true" tenets of religion--is nearly as old as Islam itself. The contemporary trend, justifiably called neo-fundamentalism, combines technical modernism, de-culturation (rejection of both traditional Muslim and modern Western cultures) and globalization (exemplified by websites like umma.net). Neo-fundamentalism is particularly appealing to alienated youth because it turns their cultural alienation into a justification for forging a universal Islam stripped of customs and traditions and thus adaptable to all societies. It envisions the whole world as a great potential umma, and it does not require the thousands of hours of study that traditional Islamic piety requires from would-be leaders and community activists. It discards native religious cultures as UN-Islamic and polluted by superstitions, folklore and accretions from non-Islamic sources. Thus, contrary to what many casual observers seem to think, traditional and national culture, even if they are Muslim, are connoted negatively in the neo-fundamentalist vision.

Neo-fundamentalism in Europe does not target communities with ties to a culture of origin, but individuals in doubt about their faith and identity. It appeals to well-educated, but also uprooted and disgruntled, youth. For such individuals, fundamentalism offers a system for regulating behavior in any situation, from Afghan deserts to American college campuses. But this system is both a product and an agent of de-culturation. Islam, as preached by the Taliban, Saudi Wahhabis and bin Laden's radicals, is hostile even to culture that is Islamic in origin. It expresses the same rejection of all material civilization and gladly destroys it--whether it is Muhammad's tomb, the Bamiyan Buddha statues or the World Trade Center.

Yet these movements are not nihilistic. On the contrary, they are determined to restore what they imagine the purity of early Islam to have been, before it was sullied by human constructs. By championing the transnational umma, they address the universalist yearning of Muslims who cannot identify with any specific place or nation. The constructivist umma therefore must span the globe, where it battles the Western political, economic and cultural uniformity that, ironically, it requires to sustain itself. Thus McDonald's and English-as-a-second-language is fought by neo-fundamentalists wearing white robes and beards who also speak English-as-a-second-language (except in Britain, where it has become the new mother tongue) and go for hallal fast food.

The Security Dimension of EuroIslam

The fact that re-Islamization of young Muslims in Europe represents a radical disconnection between the country of origin and the new generations, constituting rather a factor of de-culturation, helps to explain why the dynamic of re-Islamization favors supranational organizations instead of "national" Islamic movements. But the various recruitment strategies of these organizations--the Muslim Brotherhood, Tablighi Jamaat, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Qaeda--are rather different, and these differences have important implications for the security threats they may pose.

The Muslim Brothers and their sympathizers approach integration on a communal basis: they try to organize Muslims into a visible and active community, with institutions for education and social services. The UOIF (Union of French Islamic Organizations) and Milli Görüs now fit this pattern precisely. They want to be recognized by the authorities and often advocate the "Jewish" model (as they see it) to mobilize the Muslim community. They are legal-minded, stressing the negotiation of their status (whether over the veil, hallal food or consultation on ethical issues). They may evolve into a sort of Muslim church in Europe, which would pose little or no security threat, and would advance a conservative agenda in terms of moral and social values. This would likely put an end to the alliance between the multiculturalist, liberal European Left and the first generation of migrants, itself an interesting and important political development in its own right.

Tablighi Jamaat, a South Asian fundamentalist organization, on the other hand, is opposed to any sort of integration and, along with many salafi or Wahhabi movements, wants to organize the Muslims as separate communities--on a kind of ghetto model--with as little interaction as possible with the non-Muslim European world. Its members look askance at educating females and strongly oppose co-education. They are a font of societal problems, but they are probably not a serious security threat so long as they are allowed to live their segregated communal lives without interference from Western authorities.

This brings us to Al-Qaeda and Hizb ut-Tahrir. If we analyze the violent Islamic militants who have operated in western Europe since the early 1990s, a distinct pattern emerges. These individuals are not linked to or used by any Middle Eastern state, intelligence service or radical movement, as had been the case in the 1980s. With a single, transitional exception, they are part of the de-territorialized, supranational Islamic networks that operate specifically in the West and at the periphery of the Middle East. Their background has nothing to do with Middle Eastern conflicts or traditional religious education (excluding only the Saudis). On the contrary, as noted above, they are Western-educated and often have scientific backgrounds. Their groups are often mixes of educated middle-class leaders and working-class dropouts, a pattern common to most of the West European radicals of the 1970s and 1980s (Germany's Rote Armee Fraktion, Italy's Brigada Rossa, France's Action Directe). Many became "born-again" Muslims or jailhouse converts, sharing a common marginal culture.

The converts from mainstream European societies (whose existence was well known in Europe but only discovered by Americans with the case of John Walker Lindh) fit the same pattern. A few are from the middle class, usually the leaders (like Christophe Caze in France, a medical doctor who was killed "in action" against the police in Roubaix in 1996). Many are working-class dropouts--José Padilla, Richard Reid and the Frenchman Lionel Dumont (who fought in Bosnia)--who joined Islam because "the Muslims are the only ones to fight the system." Twenty years ago such individuals would have joined radical leftist movements, which have now disappeared or become "bourgeois" (like the Revolutionary Communist League in France). Now only two Western movements of radical protest claim to be "internationalist": the anti-globalization movement and the radical Islamists. To convert to Islam today is a way for a European rebel to find a cause; it has little to do with theology. (More than 100,000 converts to Islam live in France, but most converted for practical reasons--to marry a Muslim woman, for example.)

It follows that the second generation of Al-Qaeda militants in Europe (recruited after 1992) is characterized precisely by the breaking of their ties with the "real" Muslim world they claim to represent. All of the September 11 terrorists and their accomplices (except the Saudi "muscle" on the planes) left their country of origin to fight or to study abroad (usually in the West). All broke with their families. They did not belong to a neighborhood or community, not even a religious one in most cases. They were cultural outcasts both in their countries of origin and in their host countries. But they were all Westernized in some way (again, except the Saudis and the Yemenis); none had attended a madrassa, all were trained in technical or scientific fields and spoke a Western language. If we include the logistical networks, some possessed Western citizenship (Zacarias Moussaoui was born in France). All of them (except, once again, the Saudis) became born-again Muslims in Europe after living "normal" lives in their countries of origin. The mosques of Hamburg (Al-Qods), London (Finsbury Park), Marseilles and even Montréal played a far bigger role than any Saudi madrassa in the process of their Islamic radicalization.

Thus, far from representing a traditional religious community or culture, these militants broke with their pasts (and some with traditional Islam altogether). They experienced an individual re-Islamization in a small cell of uprooted fellows, where they forged their own Islam--as illustrated vividly by Mohamed Atta's refusal to be buried according to Egyptian traditions, which he dubbed UN-Islamic. They did not follow any Islamic school or notable cleric, and often lived according to non-Muslim standards. Almost none made an endogamous marriage, but many (Al Mottassadek, Ahmed Ressam, Fateh Kemal, Jemal Beghal, Kamel Daoudi) married "European" wives. They are all far more a product of a Westernized Islam than of traditional Middle Eastern politics. However "old time" their theology may sound to Westerners, and whatever they may think of themselves, radical EuroIslamists are clearly more a post-modern phenomenon than a pre-modern one.

And they are a wholly European phenomenon. Except for a few Pakistanis, no Al-Qaeda member left Europe or the United States to fight for Islam in his country of origin. All the "Algerians" came from Europe (or, like Ressam, became radicalized in Europe), and not one was ever found in the GIA's Algerian strongholds. The foreigners sentenced in Yemen in January 1999 for hostage-taking included six British citizens of Pakistani descent (including the son-in-law of Sheikh Hamza, the Egyptian-born imam of Finsbury Park) and two French Algerians. Sheikh Saïd Omar, convicted in Pakistan for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, is a British-born citizen of the United Kingdom. The two young Muslims sentenced in Morocco for firing on tourists in a Marrakesh hotel in 1994 were from French Algerian families.

The peripheral character of Al-Qaeda militants is also reflected in the geography of their chosen battlefields. There is a paradox: most Al-Qaeda fighters are ethnic Arabs, the bulk of them being Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian-Palestinian. But Al-Qaeda has been conspicuously absent from Arab lands (except, probably, for the Khobar Towers attack, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and perhaps recent small-scale activity in Kuwait). Nor have these militants cared much about Arab conflicts. Bin Laden gave only faint lip service to the Palestinian cause until the end of 2001. Training for the September 11 attacks was initiated before the so-called second intifada; most of the terrorists arrived on U.S. soil in the spring of 2000 and the decision to attack was taken that January. Instead of the Middle East, Al-Qaeda and its likes have been fighting in the West (New York, Paris, London), in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Philippines, Indonesia and East Africa--but not in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria or Algeria.

This is not just because Arab states take their own internal security seriously. Rather, the re-communalized Muslims of Europe, logically enough, are fighting at the frontiers of their imaginary umma, and they are doing so because what most agitates them are side effects from their own Westernization. All the literature and websites linked to Al-Qaeda stress the "peripheral" jihad from Bosnia to the Philippines, and that focus has been noticed and criticized by Arab militants like the Saudi Sheikh Abu Ayman al-Hilali. Most of the jihadi websites are based in the West or in Malaysia. This is not only because of censorship; it is because the people behind them live in the West. While Al-Qaeda's campaign against U.S. interests has constantly increased and hundreds of Islamic militants have been arrested or tracked down in Europe, Islamist violence in the Middle East has steadily decreased since the Luxor killings of 1997. Hence the obvious question: Could EU member states be viewed as legitimate battlefields, and be attacked as a result? The answer is "yes, most definitely."

Islam in Europe's Future

Radicalization is a peripheral result of the Westernization of Muslims born and living in Europe. It is linked with a generation gap and a depressed social status, and it perpetuates a pre-existent tradition of leftist, anti-imperialist protest in those communities. Notwithstanding such circumstances, most European Muslims have found a way to conciliate faith and a non-Muslim environment in a practical, if sometimes makeshift, manner. The problem is that what amounts to their de facto liberalism is not expressed in theological terms, and it is not bound into a socialization mechanism that can be transmitted easily to subsequent generations. This suggests that there will be ample raw human material for radicals to proselytize in the future.

This is not to say that Islam in the West is not producing a school of modern Islamic theology; it is, like that of Mohamed Arkoun at Paris University, Khaled Abou al-Fadl at UCLA and others. But this school has too few students. This is not only because of the conservative nature of Muslims. It also has to do with the lower social and educational level of first-generation immigrants, and, more importantly, with the fact that all contemporary forms of vibrant religiosity are usually based on charismatic, pietist and anti-intellectual approaches.

This is not a "Muslim" issue alone, then, but a modern one: modern theologians are not very popular in either the charismatic Christian movements or the Curia in the Vatican. Innovative theologians everywhere are waging uphill battles, whether under the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or in the domain of the American-style televangelists. Indeed, contemporary forms of religiosity among second-generation Muslims outside the Middle East are closer to those of their 19th- and 20th-century American Christian counterparts than to medieval Islam: in short, they are examples of revivalism. Religious revivalism, after all, is centered not in family and communal tradition, but on individuals who experience a crisis of identity amid the discontinuity of familial and communal ties. It accords with individualism, the reconstruction of an imagined community (the evangelical church or the umma), a crisis of authority, defiance toward theological formality and religious authorities (bishops as well as ulama). It privileges self-instruction and an insistence on emotional faith rather than theology and traditional rituals.

In our time, religious revivalism is almost always socially conservative, from the American Bible Belt to the Lubavitch movement to John Paul II's defense against liberation theology. Conservative religious leaders rail against corruption and lost values, and in this sense transnational European Islam is becoming a part of the European debate on values. Many imams preach about "regaining happiness", "recovering from destitution", affirming a categorical difference between right and wrong, making a good life and so on-no different, in essence, from what conservative Christian and Jewish clergy say to their congregations.

Preaching such a message is a challenge for all conservative clergy, given the conditions they face in Europe. But it is only one of many challenges for Muslim clergy, for they are confronted head-on with the issue of tolerance. A complex dialectic has been set in motion: many Muslims in Europe define the bounds of their own toleration in relation to how they themselves are tolerated by non-Muslim Europeans--and here a world of mutual misperception spreads before us. Pim Fortuyn's decision to enter Dutch politics was triggered, he said, by the speech of a Moroccan-born imam who called homosexuals "sick people." This was, for the imam, a way to excuse homosexuals and thus to avoid the harsh treatment set down for them in the sharia, but Fortuyn could not have been expected to appreciate this. As some Europeans react against "alien" Muslim elements among them, it makes some Muslims more defensive and intolerant.

But not all Europeans do so, and not all Muslims are turning inward. Thus, Haci Karacaer, the aforementioned head of the Dutch Milli Görüs, has engaged in a dialogue with the Gay and Lesbian Associations, something inconceivable in the Middle East (where, on the contrary, there is a growing hostility toward homosexuality, as illustrated by the Cairo trials of 2002). In other words, matters are in flux, and how they are managed by both sides will go far to determine how much tinder for anger and violence may lie ahead.

In this sense, it is not theological debate but concrete interactions between European Muslims and non-Muslim society that is driving the evolution of EuroIslam. Clearly, the fundamentalist organizations of the different salafi schools try to prevent such an interaction by advocating the maintenance of a "closed" community for devout Muslims. Modernism is spread mainly by community leaders and local preachers who, when confronted by their salafi colleagues, dare to part company with them. September 11 has magnified the "obligation to speak" among moderate mainstream Muslims who are caught between a desire to express solidarity with more conservative fellow-believers and the pressure of European public opinion to denounce the veil and sharia.

Moderate Islam must be elaborated by Muslims themselves over the course of time, and not under political pressure or in a forced theological debate. Such a debate among Muslims in Europe will certainly come to pass, and it may even have an impact in traditional Middle Eastern societies--so much, anyway, we may hope, for reform is not yet making much headway in the authoritarian political cultures of the Muslim Middle East. But whatever the different trends at work--radicalism, liberalism, humanism--it is clear that they are the product of the endogenous evolution of EuroIslam. From a national security perspective, a great deal is riding on the outcome.

Olivier Roy is senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research and author of L'Islam Mondialise' (Le Seuil, 2002), to be published in English in 2003.