INTRODUCTIONthese groups are at times merely virtual, then again all too real in their operation as ‘‘cells’’
and informal, ad hoc ‘‘networks.’’ What has emerged in some of the more careful schol-
arly and journalistic analyses of this phenomenon is the need for a theoretical matrix that
also has relevance for engagements of religion with the political and politics (or vice
versa) in major religions other than Islam, such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and
Buddhism. Since many of the current troubles have little to do with Islam per se—other
major and minor religious and nonreligious traditions and sensibilities are potentially just
as entangled with the question of the political and of politics as it presents itself globally
today—we might expect such a theoretical matrix also to illuminate some of the develop-
ments and prospects of secularism. The phenomenon of secularism constitutes more than
a modern public religion in disguise, which some have accused it of being, but its implica-
tion in our conception of the political and in our formulation of policies follows a logic
similar to that of political, public religions in the modern world. The theoretical matrix
we are seeking should thus be able to encompass religious and nonreligious or secular
systems of thought, practices, and other modes of expression. Its central concepts and
insights should hold for religious communities or groups that are numerically smaller
than the major religions, just as it should offer indirect lessons, if not for the policies of
governments and international institutions or nongovernmental organizations as such,
then at least for the intellectual and affective dispositions with which their representatives
approach religions in a post-secular world. This being said, let me now turn to our exam-
ple and discuss some of its implications.
The Western fixation on political Islam is unfortunate but consequential, not least
since it is echoed and amplified in the United States, where in some influential circles a
caricature has taken hold, that of an emerging ‘‘Eurabia’’ or ‘‘Londonistan,’’ the mirage
of an ‘‘ever-growing Muslim-Europe-within-Europe—poor, unassimilated, and hostile to
the United States.’’^7 In this hyperbolic view—which in the words of a respected European
journal,The Economist, looks very like ‘‘scaremongering’’—a fatal process would seem to
be unfolding: ‘‘Stagnant Europe, goes the argument, cannot offer immigrants jobs; ap-
peasing Europe will not clamp down on Islamo-fascist extremism; secular Europe cannot
deal with religiosity (in some cities more people go to mosques than to churches). Europe
needs to study America’s melting pot, where Muslims fare better.’’^8 Just as it downplayed
the Soviet threat during the Cold War and let ethnic cleansing rage in the Balkans, Europe
this time around lacks both the socio-political flexibility and the moral stamina to ‘‘either
give the newcomers a decent economic life or to confront extremism successfully.’’^9 In
the final analysis, so the narrative concludes, this political-cultural weakness runs aground
not only in ‘‘a godless continent’s failure to understand the depth of other people’s faith’’
but in an apparent inability or unwillingness to give quite the same public space to the
culture of free speech as is characteristic of the United States.^10
Demographically, economically, and culturally these negative and slightly resentful
assessments may soon prove false. The Muslim inhabitants of the European Union consti-
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