NEW IMAMS

For all their coziness with governments, few of these new Muslim establishments have much say in state policy. France's fledgling council was unable to prevent the recent ban on headscarves in public schools. In Belgium, Muslims complain that they have made little headway in securing long-promised funds for building mosques or appointing homegrown imams. "None of our rights have materialized," says Mohamed Boulif, acting president of the Executif des Musulmans de Belgique. "The government worries about being targeted as racist and xenophobic by the Muslims, but it also doesn't want to increase right-wing fears," notes Marco Martiniello, a political scientist at the University of Liege. "So it always tries to move one foot left, one foot right."

Perhaps the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that Europe's Muslims need more European imams. Parents want imams who won't turn off their European-born kids; governments want ones schooled in Western values. And yet, even after 9/11, most mullahs still come from abroad. In Germany, more than 90 percent of the country's 2,250 imams are "imported," either from Turkey, Saudi Arabia or Morocco. Turkey has its own system of dispatching imams to Europe, paying and sending scholars from its Diyanet, or directorate of religious affairs, to serve in Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia and the Netherlands. For decades, governments didn't mind this influx of what were, essentially, Turkish civil servants. Unlike the Wahhabis the Saudis sent, they're all moderates. Unlike the rural mullahs South Asians frequently import for themselves, they're well educated. But increasingly, both Muslims and European governments are asking why Ankara--or Riyadh or Algiers, for that matter--should be funding and shaping European Islam.

Creating a cadre of European Muslim scholars won't be easy. Governments talk about establishing European seminaries, but nobody's quite sure who will fund and run them. There are private imam-training courses in Britain, the Netherlands and France, but no systems for regulating them. Since 2001 the Dutch government has established courses to school foreign imams in local values. By law, they're supposed to be conducted in Dutch, but in practice the instruction has been in Arabic or Turkish, since most subjects don't speak enough Dutch to study in it. And the chasm between Old World and New World expectations can be massive. One December workshop, intended to prepare imams for the role religious figures play in Dutch society, included a discussion of what to do if a member of your mosque confesses to being gay. That's not part of the job description back home.

Europe's preoccupation with religious leaders may be misplaced, however. Reason: they're less and less important to the younger generation. In 2001, when Muslim youths rioted in cities in northern England, the police turned to mosque elders. Steven Vertovec, author of "European Islam in Europe," recalls that "the youths' response was 'These guys don't represent us.' " A Guardian/ICM poll of young British Muslims this fall found that only 36 percent felt that either the Muslim Council of Britain or Islamic leaders reflected their views.

This is a potentially dangerous disconnect. The more governments try to codify a European Islam, the more they risk re-creating the situation found in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, where official religious scholars have lost credibility--often to radical and underground movements--because they were seen as the agents of repression. By trying to craft their own brands of Islam, says British Muslim Lord Ahmed of Rotherham--a Pakistani-born, British-raised peer--European governments make themselves targets. "You'll get a young, educated man. He'll think his religion has been messed up by the state--and so he'll try to take revenge on the state."

It's Western-educated Muslim parliamentarians like Lord Ahmed who provide hope that a genuine Muslim establishment will indeed eventually evolve. Brandeis University sociologist Jytte Klausen, who's writing on Europe's Muslim political elites, says Muslim integration has been smoothest in countries like Sweden and Britain, which have worked hard to include Muslims in the political process. Watching Lord Ahmed tease staff and pour tea in the hushed and plush House of Lords, you know he's not just in the Muslim establishment. He's made it to the British one.

WITH TRACY MCNICOLL IN PARIS, STEFAN THEIL IN BERLIN AND MARIE VALLA IN LONDON

© 2005