veiled4allah: when secularism becomes an ideology

When dealing with religious communities that have less power, like Muslims in Europe, liberal secularists tread a narrow line between sanctimony and bigotry. The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a lone Muslim extremist unleashed a spiral of Islamophobia. Responding as though the actions of this assailant represented the wishes of an entire community (imagine if black Britons had held all white people responsible for Stephen Lawrence's murder), the Dutch government is considering the closure of mosques that spread "non-Dutch values". Would these be the values of the people who sheltered Anne Frank or those who shopped her? The notion that fixed national identities are being contaminated by fluid foreign bodies is as fundamentalist and obnoxious as anything you hear out of Riyadh or Utah. As a continent where, in most countries, the number of people voting for openly xenophobic parties exceeds the number of Muslims, let alone the tiny number of Islamic extremists, Europe poses a far greater danger to Muslims than Muslims do to Europe.

"Whether I like it or not, Islam is the second biggest religion in France," said Nicolas Sarkozy, the finance minister, and once the interior minister. "So you've got to integrate it to make it more French."

Mr Sarkozy obviously doesn't like it at all. More importantly, it clearly has not occurred to him that if this relationship is going to work, France will also have to become more Islamic, just as the French made parts of Asia and west and northern Africa become more Christian.

This is only a problem for those who believe Islam has nothing positive to offer France. It is up to them to explain why any self-respecting Muslim would want to integrate into a society that saw his or her faith as incapable of making a valuable contribution. It is the liberal left's choice to see religiosity as a potential threat or an opportunity. The trouble is that right now they don't seem to see its potential at all.