A study by a domestic French security agency, leaked to the media in 2005, found that Saudi Arabia was financing only a dozen imams who, in fact, were not Saudi citizens.12 The troublesome clerics across Europe have not been the dreaded Saudis but the so-called freelancers of various nationalities who set up their own mosques or associations, about two dozen in all. It is they who have been in the news with fiery sermons or connections to terrorists. When they are charged or deported, European Muslims cheer because they are as repelled as anyone else by these clerics. The main criticism of the deportations has come not from Muslims but from civil libertarians, concerned about due process.

The biggest foreign presence in European mosques is that of the imams sent from Turkey, Algeria and Morocco under long-standing agreements with the German, French and Dutch governments. Turkey dispatches about 1,200 a year and wants to get out of the business of paying for them. The imam of the main mosque in Paris has been an Algerian paid for by the Algerian government, much to the annoyance of many French Muslims. But the French and other European governments prefer these visiting clerics who, being on the payroll of friendly and generally authoritarian governments, toe the line and pose little danger of becoming the voice of the voiceless. Contrary to popular belief, European Muslims would rather not have foreign clerics but local ones, trained at European universities and seminaries by Islamic experts. Several initiatives are underway to train imams locally.

Another disconcerting development has been the sentiment in Germany that sermons in mosques should be delivered not in Turkish but in German — ironic, given that Germany and other European nations have been pressing Turkey to grant Turkish Kurds their basic human right to use the Kurdish language.

The most hypocritical accusation against Muslims is that they do not respect the separation of church and state, when it is the European states that don’t. The Church of England remains the official religion in Britain, even if as a hangover of history. Germany and France have long provided funding for both Catholic and Protestant churches, Christian denominational schools and cemeteries. In the case of Germany, the subsidy runs to 18.5 billion Euros a year.13

There is double jeopardy at work. Most European nations not only keep their Muslim minorities on the political, economic and social margins but blame them for being there. This is reminiscent of the colonial tactic of telling the colonized that they had only themselves to blame for their subjugated status.