And resolving that dilemma is much harder in a secular society that seems to have stopped struggling with these big questions altogether.

In the end, I didn’t find the answers in holy texts. I found them in literature.

I read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and Camus’ “The Plague.” I thought back on my younger days lashing out against “The Satanic Verses.” I remembered sneaking into a bookshop and seeing the book piled up ready to be read but my English was insufficient to understand it. The book turned me away; the curiosity stayed.

When I was 17, I found “The Satanic Verses” tucked away in a school library. I grabbed it, started reading and was mesmerized. Here was a young man struggling with his faith in a faithless world — an immigrant son from a deeply religious home thrown into a world where everything is embraced and nothing is sacred. It confirmed what I had felt deep inside: a free and open society is a threat to religious people. Their religion will be mocked — sometimes even suppressed — and this will provoke anger.

And now it’s happening again. The rise of extremists who lure young Muslims in the West with visions of Islamic utopia is creating nausea among European Muslims. Boys and girls are leaving their families and being converted into killing machines. They are leaving not from Baghdad but from Brussels and The Hague. We insist that this can’t be our Islam and if this is Islam we don’t want it. But I know from my own experience that the lure of extremism can be very powerful when you grow up in a world where the media and everyone around you seems to mock and insult your culture.

And European governments are not helping fight extremism by giving in to Islamophobia cooked up by right-wing populists. What I see is a lack of courage to embrace the Muslims of Europe as genuinely European — as citizens like everyone else.

One of the first people the terrorists in Paris killed was one of us: Mustapha Ourrad, an Algerian-born copy editor at Charlie Hebdo. Then they killed another Muslim: the police officer, Ahmed Merabet. The killers didn’t take mercy on them. In the name of Islam they killed Muslims. And every time a European Muslim sees that image of Mr. Merabet’s last moments, he sees himself lying there on the cold pavement. Helpless. And the next question will be: What will I say tomorrow at work or at school?

What happened last week is not about lack of humor, or a failure to understand caricature. Nor is it about hatred of the West. It’s about anger taking a wrong turn.