The idea of “traditional change” is a paradox, like familiarity with a difference. Yet both might make some contribution to debates about Muslims in Europe, where Islam — or religion overall — is sometimes seen as an unchanging, permanent threat to democracy. Islam in Europe is no more static than any other aspect of culture. A European Islam emerges as a modern European Protestantism and Catholicism emerged (which in turn differ from their counterparts in earlier centuries or in present-day Latin America, Africa, and so on). It is the process of “traditional change” which both fundamentalism and assimilation obliterate — fundamentalism by insisting on a usually-idealized fixed past, assimilation by demanding a quick-fix shift to a modern Western model which can provoke a backlash or simply not be taken seriously by the confessional community to begin with.

Traditional change proceeds in a pluralistic framework where it has time and space, and where devout immigrants have pragmatic access to the economics, education and politics of their new countries. Without these, Europe demands assimilation before participation in an economy immigrants can’t get into anyway. This is a ticket to the ghetto, where self-segregation abets discrimination, where the normal shifts in religion is impeded, and where host societies allow their anxieties to run national policy. Given that secular modernity aims at keeping the irrational out of government, this would be a pronounced and sad failure.

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