Turkey’s relative poverty and its huge, relatively young population of 72 million raise the specter of an influx of cheap labor and arouse understandable insecurity among European workers, especially in the shrinking industrial sector. But there is no doubt that religious bigotry was a key factor in the 2004 referendum defeat of the EU draft constitution in France and the Netherlands.

Cardinal Ratzinger, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, opposed Turkey’s entry into EU on religious grounds. “Turkey should seek its future among Islamic organizations, not in the Christian-rooted Europe,” he said. In September 2006, the Pope inflamed Muslims with a prepared speech, which was described as scholarly but was anything but. He quoted the anti-Islamic rant of a fourteenth-century Byzantine king, a Christian warrior entrenched in a losing war with the Muslim Ottomans. Manuel II had characterized the teachings of Prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhuman,” particularly his “command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” But the Prophet never issued such a command, nor does the Qur’an, which recognizes only the doctrine of self-defense (see The Faith).

Worse, the Pope advanced three questionable propositions of his own. He said Christianity is “the profound encounter of faith and reason,” implying that Islam wasn’t, even though the Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes reason and logic. He also argued that the Qur’anic injunction There is no compulsion in religion (2:256) was revealed in the early period of Muhammad’s life when he was powerless and that the injunction was overtaken by later ones concerning jihad. “The Pope was wrong on both counts,” said John Esposito, professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University and a Catholic himself. He told me: “2:256 is not an early verse but from a later period, and the interpretations of jihad were developed long after the Prophet’s death.”

The Pope thus managed to recycle the worst stereotypes of Islam and Muslims, namely, that Islam is evil, that it converts by the sword and that its adherents are irrational. The speech drew worldwide condemnation.

It was not until three months later when he visited Turkey, prayed in a mosque and seemed to drop his objection to Turkey’s entry to the EU that His Holiness was able to restore some sense of normalcy between the Holy See and the Muslim world.

Radical Imams

European Muslims are also accused of being the recipients of, and hence unduly influenced by, foreign funding, a code word for petro-dollars from Saudi Arabia; or of being under the sway of radical foreign-born imams; or, more sensationally, of being the advance guard of the “Islamic re-conquest of Europe.”