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.