By secularism, or more specifically political secularism, I mean institutional arrangements such that religious authority and religious reasons for action and political authority and political reasons for action are distinguished - so, political authority does not rest on religious authority and the latter does not dominate political authority.

This idea is central to modernity and is therefore one of the dominant ideas of the twentieth century. That does not mean that everybody in modern societies agrees with this view (of course, like all ideas it is not perfectly or purely manifested in any actual case, and people will disagree about the specific cases). Nevertheless, like democracy, political secularism is a hegemonic idea that most people actively and passively support and few argue against in a full-throated way.

But an increasing number of critics are challenging this taken-for-granted idea, and emergent modern societies do not seem to be smoothly following in the path that led to the historical ascendancy of political secularism.

So, Jurgen Habermas has famously announced that we are currently witnessing a transition from a secular to a "post-secular society" in which "secular citizens" have to express a previously denied respect for "religious citizens," who should be allowed, even encouraged, to critique aspects of contemporary society and to find solutions to its problems from within their religious views. Instead of treating religion as sub-rational and a matter of private concern only, religion is once again to be recognized as a legitimate basis of public engagement and political action. Some have gone further and speak in terms of the "global crisis" facing secularism and the "the crisis of the secular state."

Of course, there is there larger and more specifically sociological thesis about "desecularization" occurring across the world, about the development of modern economies and institutions without a decline - and, indeed, by some reversal of an earlier decline - in religious belief and practice. But my interest is limited to the phenomenon of public religion, and how religion is fighting back from its political marginalization, especially in Western Europe.

Multiculturalism and Muslim accomodation

There is no endogenous slowing down in secularization in relation to organized religion, attendance at church services and traditional Christian belief and practice in Western Europe. So, to illustrate with the British case, church attendance of at least once a month among white people has steadily declined from about 20% in 1983 to about 15% in 2008.

This is not to say that religion has disappeared or is about to, but for many it has become more in the form of "belief without belonging" or mere "spirituality" or "implicit religion." For example, while belief in a personal God has gone down from over 40% in the middle of the twentieth century to less than 30% by its end, belief in a spirit or life source has remained steady at around 35-40% and belief in the soul has actually increased from less than 60% in the early 1980s to over 70% today.

All these changes, however, are highly compatible with political secularism, if not with scientism or other rationalistic philosophies. Whether the decline of traditional religion is being replaced by no religion or new ways of being religious or spiritual, neither poses a challenge for political secularism. Non-traditional forms of Christian or post-Christian religion in Western Europe are in the main not attempting to connect with or reform political institutions and government policies; they are not seeking recognition or political accommodation or political power.

In recent decades, Western Europe has come to share the post-immigration racial and ethnic urban diversity, especially in major cities, which has long been a characteristic of the United States. A significant difference between Western Europe and the United States, however, is that the majority of non-whites in the countries of Europe are Muslims.

From the riots in the banlieues of Paris and the Danish cartoon affair to the proliferating bans of various forms of female Muslim dress, conflicts focused on minority/majority relations, questions about integration, equality, racism and Islam, and in turn their relation to terrorism, security, and foreign policy have become central to European politics.

The issue, then, driving the sense of some "crisis of secularism" that some are sensing in Western Europe is the place of Muslim identities - or identities that are or are perceived to be ethno-religious (like British Asian Muslim or Arab Muslim in France) - in the public life of the countries of the region.

Awareness of this multicultural challenge to secularism is not due to terrorism - it began to manifest itself and was perceived before events such as 9/11. Nor is it due to the fact that some Muslims, unlike other post-immigration groups, may have been involved in rowdy demonstrations and riots, because others (such as African-Caribbeans in Britain) have done so without raising such profound normative questions. Nor is it due to (Muslim) conservative values, especially in relation to gender and sexuality, though it is related to it.

The core element of this challenge to secularism is the primacy given to religion as the basis of identity, organization, political representation, normative justification and so on. These matters were thought to be more or less settled (except in a few exceptional cases like Northern Ireland) until some Muslims started to assert themselves as Muslims in the public sphere of various West European countries.

But it is not the mere presence of Muslims or Islam that creates a challenge all by itself. It is the presence of Muslims mediated by or in interaction with contemporary values of European states and politics. This hasn't to do with secularism or desecularization, or with publically assertive religions per se, but with certain kinds of claims for accommodation from within western polities and normative viewpoints in relation to minorities generally. Let us call these debates and activities, multiculturalism.

These discourses and practices of non-discrimination, rights, equal accommodation and respect are largely discourses that have emerged from within Western European normative debates (though influenced by a larger climate of opinion led particularly by Anglophone, colonial settler and immigration-based countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia). They are picked up post-immigration and when Muslims or other groups utilize them, the reference is to the status and resources available to other groups in the West.

It is the presence, adaptation and disputation of these ideas that gives the question of the accommodation of Muslims the character it has - namely, a multiculturalist character. The result is that to talk about the integration of Muslims in Western Europe today is to argue about multiculturalism. Indeed, the converse has also become true: to talk about multiculturalism today in Western Europe is to talk about - pro and con - the accommodation of Muslims.

Moderate secularism and the decline of public religion

It is undeniably true that in terms of vocabulary and institutional practices, each country in Western Europe is a secular state, though each has its own distinctive take on what this means. Nevertheless, there is a general historical character, which I call moderate secularism, and a lesser strand. The latter is principally manifested in French laicite, which seeks to create a public space in which religion is virtually banished in the name of reason and emancipation, and religious organizations are monitored by the state through consultative national mechanisms.

The dominant Western European approach, however, sees organized religion not just as a private benefit but as a potential public good or national resource, and which the state can in some circumstances assist to realize - even through an "established" church. These public benefits can be direct, such as a contribution to education and social care through autonomous church-based organizations funded by the taxpayer; or indirect, such as the production of attitudes that create economic hope or family stability; and they can be to do with national identity, cultural heritage, ethical voice and national ceremonies.

Western Europe has been a site of a historical struggle between public churches and political secularists, yet during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this has taken the form of various shifting compromises. The compromises consisted of a successful accommodation of an expanding number of Christian churches within the business and symbolic workings of the state, yet marked by a gradual but decisive weakening of the public and political character of the churches.

The 1960s right up to the end of the century then witnessed a particularly strong movement of opinion and politics in favour of the secularists. The cultural revolution of the 1960s was broadly accepted; not only has there been no major, sustained countervailing movement, but it broadened out from north-western Protestant/secular Europe into Catholic Europe. So, for example:

The national system of "pillarization" in the Netherlands, by which Protestants and Catholics had separate access to some of the state's resources emerged in the nineteenth century, declined sharply in the middle of the twentieth and was formally wound up in 1983.

The Lutheran Church in Sweden was disestablished in 2000.

In the UK, disestablishment of the Church of England was embraced in the early 1990s by the Liberal Democrats, the third political party in the country, by the influential think tank, the Institute of Public Policy Research, by the left-wing of the Labour Party and the two liberal-left national newspapers.

Catholic countries - Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland - in the 1980s and 1990s showed rapid signs of the secularization characteristic of Protestant Europe.

Of course, none of this has meant that public religion, even the formal connections to the state and direct access to governments, disappeared altogether. There has been a trend toward less public recognition, but it has not led to anything like a terminal endpoint, not even in France. Nor, on the other hand, has there been much political challenge from organized religion or political conflict involving religion (Northern Ireland's exceptional character proving the rule).

The place of religion in Western Europe has been relatively uncontroversial in the last decades of the twentieth century because religion has not been particularly visible and there has been a general assumption - perhaps shared by many religious people, perhaps even by religious lobbies - that the decreasing public presence of religion is irreversible and better than a political fight to reverse the trend or to take decisive action to take it to its endpoint.

Religion did not cease to be public, but because it was not felt to be too challenging or threatening, it was noticed less. For example, a political campaign on a religious matter or led by religious people was less likely to be reported by the media than, say, an antiracist or environmentalist protest.

This, then, is the context in which non-Christian migrants have been arriving and settling and in which they and the next generation were becoming active members of their societies. The rising multicultural challenge and the gradual weakening of the political status of Christian churches - and, in particular, the national churches - were taking place at the same time.

The intersection of these two trajectories is nicely captured in two policy initiatives in the Netherlands in 1983. In that year in which the national system of "pillarization" - which had at one time made the country a bi-religious communal state - was formally wound up, a new Minorities Policy (Nota Minderhedenbeleid) was announced that created post-immigration ethnic minorities (allochtones) as a mini-pillar, giving them state funding for faith schools, ethno-religious radio and television broadcasting, and other forms of cultural maintenance.

Some of that policy began to be reversed in the 1990s, but looking beyond the Netherlands, the pivotal moment was 1988-1989 and was, quite accidentally, marked by two events: the protests in Britain against the novel The Satanic Verses by Sir Salman Rushdie; and in France, the decision by a school head-teacher to prohibit entry to three girls till they were willing to take off their headscarves in school premises.

These created national and international storms, and set in motion political developments which have not been reversed and offer contrasting ways in which varieties of Western European secularisms are responding to the Muslim presence. Let me lay out four such responses.

1. Accomodationist multiculturalism: The "Satanic Verses"

The Satanic Verses was not banned in the UK as the protestors demanded and the conduct of some Muslims, especially those threatening the life of the author, certainly shocked and alienated many from the campaign. In that sense, the Muslim campaign clearly failed. In other respects, however, it galvanized many into seeking a democratic multiculturalism that was inclusive of Muslims.

A national body was created to represent mainstream Muslim opinion, initially in relation to the novel (UK Action Committee on Islamic Action) but later, with some encouragement from both the main national political parties, especially New Labour, it led to a body to lobby on behalf of Muslims in the corridors of power. This new body, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), was accepted as a consultee by the New Labour government of 1997 until the middle of the next decade when it looked for new interlocutors.

The MCB was very successful in relation to its founding agenda. By 2001, it had achieved its aim of having Muslim issues and Muslims as a group recognized separately from issues of race and ethnicity, and of being itself accepted by government, media and civil society as the spokesperson for Muslims.

Another two achieved aims were state funding for Muslim schools on the same basis as Christian and Jewish schools, and securing certain educational and employment policies targeted on the severe disadvantage of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (nearly all of whom are Muslims) as opposed to on minority ethnicity generally. Additionally, it played a decisive role in getting Tony Blair to go against ministerial and civil service advice and insert a religion question into the 2001 Census. This meant that the ground was laid for the possible later introduction of policies targeting Muslims to match those targeting groups defined by race or ethnicity - or gender.

The MCB had to wait longer to get the legislative protection it sought. Laws against religious discrimination were introduced in 2003, strengthened in 2007 and again in 2010, making them much stronger than anything available in the rest of the European Union. Incitement to religious hatred - the legislation most closely connected to the protests over The Satanic Verses - was introduced in 2006, though there is no suggestion that it would have prevented that novel.

Moreover, even as the MCB, because of its views on the government's foreign and security policies, fell out of favour, local and national consultations with Muslim groups have continued to grow and probably now exceed consultations with any Christian body and certainly any minority group.

Inevitably, this has caused occasional friction between Christians and Muslims. But on the whole, these developments have taken place not only with the support of the leadership of the Church of England, but in a spirit of interfaith respect. (Given how adversarial English intellectual, journalistic, legal and political culture is, religion in England is oddly fraternal and little effort is expended in proving that the other side is in a state of error and should convert.)

2. Secularist exclusionism: The burqa ban

If the response to the Satanic Verses controversy was a mobilization of a minority and the extension of minority policies from race to religion in order to accommodate the religious minority, then the response in France to the head-teacher who refused to have religious headscarves in school was one of top-down state action to prohibit certain minority practices.

From the start, the majority of the country was in support of the head-teacher's actions. And Muslims either did not wish or simply lacked the capacity to challenge this dominant view with anything like the publicity, organization, clamour or international assistance that Muslims in Britain bore to bear on Rushdie's novel.

The Conseil d'Etat, France's highest administrative court, emphasized freedom of religion as long as the religious symbols were not "ostentatious," and so ruled that the issue should be treated on a case-by-case basis. This quietened things down till they blew up again in 1994 in relation to another state school. On that occasion, the Minister of Education forbade the wearing of any ostentatious symbols, which explicitly included the headscarf.

Then, in 2003, President Chirac appointed a national commission, chaired by Bernard Stasi, to consider the issue. The Stasi Commission recommended the banning of the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in state schools, and a law to this effect was passed with an overwhelming majority by Parliament in February 2004. A few years later, the target of secularist and majoritarian disapproval was the full face veil, as favoured by a few hundred Muslim women. This was banned in public places in April 2011.

Belgium followed suit in July 2011, the Netherlands in January 2012, and Italy is in the process of doing so. Similar proposals are being discussed by governments and political parties across Western Europe. Even in Britain, there is popular support for a ban, though the major parties have no truck with it.

But while the radical secularist trajectory of banning headdresses favoured by some Muslim women was taking place, another was simultaneously taking place in countries like France, which does not so easily conform to the common understanding of French laicite.

Since 1990, each French government has set about trying to create a national Muslim council that would be a corporate representative of Muslims in France and the official government consultee. It would be the state's recognition of Islam comparable in some respects to its recognition of the Catholic Church, Protestant churches, and the Jewish Consistory. After at least three abortive attempts by previous governments, then Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy inaugurated the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman in 2003. Even now, this Council has not yet come to be accepted by the majority of Muslims in France and has had little influence on the French media, civil society or government.

I mention this because it exhibits how even a laicist, anti-multiculturalist state which is supported by most citizens in attacking fundamental religious freedom is creating institutional linkages to govern Muslims in a way which is prima facie contrary to laicite.

Interestingly, the secularist strand of opinion in Britain which looks to France as a model is opposed to the government giving special consultative status to Muslim organizations and sees this as consistent with the older demand for the disestablishment of the Church of England, the removal of bishops from a democratized House of Lords, and a reduction in the number of state-funded faith schools.

3. Assertive nationalism: "Christian values"

More recently, it seems that the presence and salience of Muslims has been a factor in stimulating some sense of Christian identity. An analysis of the voluntary religion question in the 2001 UK Census shows higher "Christian" identification in areas near large Muslim populations.

The emergence of a new, sometimes politically assertive, cultural identification with Christianity has been noted in Denmark, and in Germany, Chancellor Merkel has recently asserted that "[t]hose who don't accept [Christian values] don't have a place here." Similar sentiments were voiced in the European Union constitution debate and are apparent in the ongoing debate about Turkey as a future Union member.

These assertions of Christianity are not necessarily accompanied by any increase in expressions of faith or church attendance, which continue to decline across Europe. What is at work is not the repudiation of a status quo secularism in favour of Christianity, but a response to the challenge of multiculturalism (as Merkel made explicit by asserting that "multi-kulti" had failed and was not wanted back). Giscard d'Estaing, the former President of France, who chaired the Convention on the Future of Europe, the body which drafted the (abortive) EU constitution, expresses nicely the assertiveness I speak of: "I never go to Church, but Europe is a Christian continent."

Such political views, however, are also being expressed by Christian organizations, especially by the Catholic Church. In a speech at the Bavarian Catholic University at Regensburg in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI suggested that while reason was central to Christian divinity, this was not the case with the God of Islam, which licensed conversion by the sword and was deeply antithetical to the European tradition of rationality.

In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe , Christopher Caldwell argued that Pope John Paul II "looked at the essential cleavage in the world as being between religion and unbelief. Devout Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists had more in common with each other than with atheists." By contrast, Pope Benedict "thinks that, within societies, believers and unbelievers exist in symbiosis. Secular Westerners, he implies, have a lot in common with their religious fellows." The suggestion is that secularists and Christians in Europe have more in common with each other than they do with Muslims.

That many secularists do not share Pope Benedict's view is evident from the fact that the proposed clause about Christianity was absent from the final draft of the abortive EU constitution. Moreover, it is indicative of the place of Christianity in Europe relative to radical secularism, that it emerged as a third, not a first or second, trend. That is to say, it joined an existing debate between an accommodationist multiculturalism and an exclusionist secularism allied with nationalism.

Yet, while there is little sign of a Christian right in Europe of the kind that is strong in the United States, there is to some degree a reinforcing or renewing of a sense that Europe is "secular Christian," analogous to the term "secular Jew" to describe someone of Jewish descent who has a sense of Jewish identity but is not religiously practicing and may even be an atheist.

4. Liberal intolerance: "Muscular liberalism"

A fourth response focuses on Muslims' conservative or illiberal moral values and practices. These are likely to centre on issues of gender and sexuality and so this trend overlaps with that which has led to legal restrictions on the wearing of the headscarf and the face veil, but is worth identifying separately as it goes much wider and can be independent of questions of religion-state relations.

It is alleged that the state needs to take special action against Muslims because their attitudes toward, for example, gender equality and sexual orientation are retrograde and threaten to undermine what has been achieved in western countries. This argument is found across the region and across the political-intellectual spectrum, but is particularly strong in the Netherlands.

Pim Fortuyn's call, for example, for a halt to Muslim immigration because of their views on sex and personal freedom achieved considerable electoral success. The Dutch government produced a video to be shown to prospective Muslim immigrants which included a close-up of a topless woman on a beach and gay men kissing in a park to assist in the process of assessing applicants for entry into the country.

In neighbouring Denmark, the newspaper Jutlands-Posten famously published satirical and irreverent cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to, according to its cultural editor, assist Muslims to be acculturalized into Danish public culture. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch MP of Somali-Muslim origin, became an international figure through her argument that the subordination of women was a core feature of orthodox Islam.

The position I am referring to could be said to be a form of liberal perfectionism - that is to say the view, in contrast to a Rawlsian neutralism, that it is the business of a liberal state to produce liberal individuals and promote a liberal way of life, perhaps what Charles Taylor once called liberalism as "a fighting creed" or what David Cameron has called "muscular liberalism."

Its actual political dynamic has been to nurture popular anti-Muslim hostility, as in the form of Geert Wilder's comparison of the Qur'an with Mein Kampf and campaign to ban the former as long as the latter is banned. His campaign against the "Islamisation of Europe" has many echoes across Western Europe and not just the Netherlands, where the party he founded in 2005, the Party for Freedom, became the third largest party in the 2010 elections and a negotiating partner in the formation of a government.

Islamophobia

This "muscular liberalism" is perhaps squarely with the radical secularism of the hijab and burqa bans, but I mention it separately because it underscores the way that the dynamic to which political secularism - and indeed, liberalism - is being subjected is the presence of Muslims and anti-Muslim hostility from various intellectual and political directions.

The current challenge to secularism in Western Europe is being debated, not just in terms of the wider issues of integration and multiculturalism, but also in terms of a hostility to Muslims and Islam based on stereotypes and scare stories in the media best understood as a specific form of cultural racism that has come to be called Islamophobia, and is largely unrelated to questions of secularism.

A meta-analysis of opinion polls between 1998 and 2006 in Britain concluded that "between one in five and one in four Britons now exhibits a strong dislike of, and prejudice against, Islam and Muslims." A Pew survey in 2008 confirmed the higher figure and found its equivalent in France to be nearly double (38%) and just over 50% in Germany. These views are growing, are finding expression in the rise of extreme rightwing parties, and even in terrorism, as happened in Oslo and the island of Atoye in July 2011.

This, to put it mildly, is not a favourable context for accommodating Muslims and underscores the point that the so-called crisis of secularism is really about the presence and integration of Muslims which, obviously, depends in part on how some Muslims behave - such as acts of terrorism or declarations of disloyalty to the country.

So, looking at the four trends and the wider Islamophobic climate of opinion, it looks as if the radical secularist trend and the Christianist trend could unite through a cultural nationalism or a cultural Europeanism animated by an Islamophobia. I hope not. I would like to think that the spectre of a populist, rightwing nationalism, not to mention racism, will make enough people rally round a moderate secularism, which they will recognize has to be pluralized.

Either way, what this analysis suggests is that the real choice is between a pluralist, multifaith nationality or Europeanism and a monoculturalist nationalism or Europeanism. Or to put it another way, the crisis of secularism is best understood within a framework of multiculturalism.

Of course, multiculturalism currently has few advocates and the term itself is highly damaged. Yet the repeated declarations from senior politicians that "multiculturalism is dead" are a reaction to the continuing potency of multiculturalism which renders obsolete liberal takes on assimilation and integration in the face of new forms of public gender and public ethnicity, and now public religion.

Muslims are late joiners of this movement, but when they did so, it slowly became apparent that the secularist status quo, with certain residual privileges for Christians, is untenable as it stands. We can call this the challenge of integration rather than multiculturalism, as long as it is understood that we are not just talking about an integration into the day-to-day life of a society but also into its institutional architecture, grand narratives, and macro-symbolic sense of itself.

The dynamic for change has not directly to do with the historic religion nor the historic secularism of Western Europe; rather is the appearance of an assertive multiculturalism which cannot be contained within a matrix of individual rights, conscience, religion freedom and so on. If any of these were different, the problems would be other than they are.

My claim is that a multiculturalist sensibility today is present in Western Europe and yet it is not comfortable with extending itself to accommodate Muslims, but nor is it able to find reasons for not extending to Muslims without self-contradiction.

***

I have argued that the so-called "crisis of secularism" is not only exaggerated but misleading. The problem is more defined by issues of post-immigration integration than by the religion-state relation per se. The "crisis of secularism" is really the challenge of multiculturalism.

Far from this entailing the end of secularism as we know it, moderate secularism offers some of the resources for accommodating Muslims. Political secularists should think pragmatically and institutionally on how to achieve this - namely how to multiculturalise moderate secularism, and thus avoid exacerbating the crisis and limiting the room for manoeuvre by pressing for further, radical secularism.

Tariq Modood is the founding Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. His books include Still Not Easy Being British: Struggles for a Multicultural Citizenship and Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. He was recently in Australia to deliver a keynote address at the Faith and Culture: The Politics of Belief lecture series organized by the Wheeler Centre.