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But it is not only because of Europe's Muslims that the old patterns are changing. Recent controversies have inspired a broader and deeper re-examination of what it means to be European, reviving the ancient struggle between Christian and secular values. The Spanish parliament's recent decision to legalize gay marriage, for example, was met by severe disapproval from the Vatican, as were the 2004 objections to Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione's candidacy for European Justice Commissioner on the grounds that he had labeled homosexuality a "sin." In a secular Western Europe, Roman Catholics are now often claiming that they are victims. "In the Western world today, we are experiencing a wave of drastic new enlightenment of secularization," Pope Benedict XVI said recently. "It is becoming more difficult to believe." But in parts of Eastern Europe, religious politicians are pushing back, demanding that traditional beliefs be taken seriously in the political domain. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the new Polish Prime Minister from the ardently pro-Catholic Law and Justice Party, prefers Catholic pilgrimages to football games. The government is proposing a new constitution that will begin "In the name of God Almighty" and describe Polish independence as a "gift from God." Still, however much Christians may be demanding social and political respect for their beliefs, Islam remains the driver for the new debates between religion and secularism. Nowhere is that more true than in Turkey, where issues that some — perhaps naively — thought had been resolved 80 years ago have now been reopened. In the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the new Turkish Republic, sought to stampede his native land into modernity by restricting public displays of a religion whose expression he saw as an impediment to progress. He banned the fez, purged the education system of any reference to Islam, and paraded his wife bareheaded through rural parts of the country. His successors outlawed head scarves from public buildings, requiring conservative young women, including the daughters of the current Prime Minister, to go abroad to study. When a woman named Merve Kavakci won election to the Turkish parliament wearing a head scarf in 1999, she was booed out of the Assembly and subsequently stripped of her citizenship.
Now the country's conservative Muslim Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to lift the head-scarf ban, and millions of conservative Turks would be pleased if he did. But Erdogan risks provoking the ire of hard-line secularists. At a recent secularist demonstration in Ankara, a chanting mob surrounded a woman passing by in a head scarf and ordered her to take it off; she pleaded with the crowd, but eventually removed it. In the run-up to elections next year, confrontations over Turkey's secular constitution are likely to grow.
How will European governments respond to the claims of the religiously observant for protection? There is no single pattern applicable to all countries, but some — Germany, France and the Netherlands, for example — are now planning to help select and train "homegrown" imams instead of relying on a supply of less acculturated clerics from nations such as Turkey and Algeria. European politicians are beginning to recognize, as the German Interior Minister said recently, that moderate Muslims are the best possible defense against religious extremism and its violent wing. "We need the cooperation of the Muslim organizations," Wolfgang Schäuble said in Berlin, "to fight against extremists from their own ranks."
In time, perhaps, the perceived contradictions between Europe's secular and religious traditions will wither away. Liberal values do not exclude religious practice; they can help it flourish. The reason Turkey's pro-Islamic government is so eager to join Europe, for example — and the reason it has been so disappointed by the opposition it has encountered on religious or cultural grounds — is that Europe's liberal traditions promise Turkey's conservative Muslims a degree of protection they do not have now. Europe has never — not even in the 1960s and '70s — been an entirely secular society. The need now is for Western Europe to find ways in which its secular traditions can coexist not just with those of the Continent's traditional faiths, but with those that have, 500 years after the reconquista, returned to its shores. Islam is in Europe to stay. There will be no more pressing challenge to the next generation of Europeans than to reconcile its practice with the best of the old Continent's humanist tradition.