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For two thousand years, essentially the same people have posed the same dangers to us. Aren't the Iranian mujahidin the descendants of the Persians who were defeated at Marathon; isn't the Islamic World, now striking at Europe's frontiers and slowly penetrating her, composed of the sons of the Ottoman Turks who reached Vienna, and the Arabs whom Charles Martel routed at Poitiers?(Jean-Marie Le Pen) 1

In the aftermath of the Berlin Wall's collapse, western Europe has been forced to rethink its identity. If in the recent past its conception of itself as a haven of democracy and civilization depended-in part-on a contrast to the evils of the Communist Empire, today an idea is being revived of Europe as Christendom, in contradistinction to Islam. Only this time around, the Islam in question is not being held back at Europe's Spanish or Balkan frontiers but has penetrated its very core, in the shape of new" minority" populations of Muslim background. Questions about the nature of Europe's identity and the place of Muslim immigrants within it are now among the most contentious on the Continent (Morley and Robins 1990). So acute