Required Reading

Reuel Marc Gerecht has an article on Europe’s homegrown Islamists for the Weekly Standard. A sample:

What was once unquestionably an import has gone native, mutated, and grown. Some of what the Europeans are now confronting–and for the United States this is very bad news–is probably a locally generated Islamic militancy that is as retrograde and virulent as anything encountered in the Middle East. “European Islam” appears to be an increasingly radicalizing force intellectually and in practice. The much-anticipated Muslim moderates of Europe–the folks French

scholar Gilles Kepel believes will produce “extraordinary progress in civilization,” a new “Andalusia” (the classical Arabic word for Moorish Spain) that will save us from Osama bin Laden’s jihad–have so far not developed with the same gusto as the Muslim activists who have dominated too many mosques in “Londonistan” and elsewhere in Europe. Moderates surely represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe, but like their post-Christian European counterparts, they usually express their moderation in detachment from religious affairs.

Though Europeans often fail to see it, the secularization of the Muslims living in their midst has been, by and large, a great success. It explains why Muslim activists gain so much attention, be they arch-conservatives, like the devotees of the Tabligh movement in Britain and on the continent who espouse segregation in Europe, or “progressives,” like the Switzerland-based intellectual Tariq Ramadan, who refuses forthrightly to declare the Muslim Holy Law null and void as a political testament for Muslims in a European democracy. The moderates have abandoned the field. They have become European. The militants, who perhaps should be seen as deviants from a largely successful process of secularization, are the only ones left ardently praying.

We’re still a long way off from Eurabia, and that day may never come. If enough of Europe musters the will to fight the radicals, and to keep turning the majority of Muslims into Europeans.

Anyway, read the whole thing and all that.