Europe's rising class of believers: Muslims

At the same time, acknowledges Tariq Ramadan, one of the foremost Islamic thinkers in Europe, Muslims must change their thinking on many customs that alienate Europeans, such as their attitudes about women. "From Arab Islam, or African Islam, we have to come to European Islam," he argues.

Arguments over how to integrate Muslims into modern European life, and how much Islam Europe can accept without betraying its values, have been tainted by the link to terror. Governments have reacted by tightening controls on Muslim preachers, many of whom do not speak the language of their adopted country. Britain has introduced civics tests for imams. French authorities are planning to set up a school that would also send preachers in training to secular universities. And in Denmark, the right-wing People's Party, a government coalition member, urges a ban on all foreign imams.

Such moves have won support even in some Muslim quarters. "It is not xenophobic for Europeans to be genuinely worried about the radicalization of Islam," says Tim Winter, a British Muslim convert who teaches at Cambridge University and preaches at a mosque. "But it is not acceptable to say that Islam cannot adapt to European life."

Being religious at all, however, is unusual in European life. Though Muslims make up only 3 percent of the British population, more people attend Friday prayers than go to Sunday church, a recent survey found.

That scares many Europeans who fear that Europe could soon lose its Christian identity. The prospect of Turkey joining the European Union (EU) in 10 years' time, which would add an expected 83 million Muslims, deepens their fear.

"Europe is becoming Islamicized," warned Fritz Bolkestein a few weeks before he left his job as the EU's competition commissioner last December, noting that the two biggest cities in his native Netherlands, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, will be minority European within a few years.

That sounds like scaremongering to some Islamic leaders, who note that less than 5 percent of Europe's population is Muslim. To others, it sounds like a call to abandon their faith.

"Many European politicians, as well as average people, are prone to thinking that the only safe Muslims are those who neither practice their religion nor manifest their Muslim identity," wrote Mr. Ramadan in his book, "To Be a European Muslim."

Ramadan is the leading proponent of "European Islam," a school of thought intended to meet the needs of descendants of immigrants who have few ties to their ancestral cultures.

Last spring, Time magazine named him one of the 21st century's most influential people. But last summer, the US Department of Homeland Security controversially revoked his visa days before he was to begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. A department official said Ramadan had been barred in accordance with a provision of the Patriot Act.

Ramadan insists that many of the habits Muslims display and that Europeans revile are not Islamic per se, but rather cultural traits specific to the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. "Muslims living in Europe have an opportunity to reread our [religious] sources," he says.

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