But the work of the blasphemy police cannot stop the tide of critical progress forever. A greater appetite for critical scholarship of Islam’s origins has begun and the internet among other tools has made it easier to spread and disseminate this than at any period in history. The Danish former extremist Morten Storm, for instance, abandoned his belief in Islam as well as his membership of al-Qaeda when in a rage one day he opened his computer and typed into the search engine ‘contradictions in the Quran’ and began reading. He later wrote, ‘The whole construction of my faith was a house of cards built one layer upon the next. Remove one, and all the others would collapse.’4 Storm was by no means a typical Muslim, but the fear he had of inquiring into the origins and meaning of Islam, and the need to satisfy that urge, is something many Muslims sense. Many are fighting this urge and will hold it back, and will have to try to hold back others, because they know what it would do to their faith. You can glimpse this fear when the leading cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi said in an interview in 2013 that if Muslims had got rid of the death penalty for leaving the religion, ‘Islam would not exist today’. Such leaders know what is coming their way and they will fight with everything they have for everything they believe. If they fail – as they probably will – then the best that can be hoped for is that Islam will at some point in the future be brought to the same state as the other religions: deliteralised, wounded and defanged. This would solve one problem, but whilst alleviating Western Europe’s problems it would not in turn solve them.

The desire for radical change and the sense of emptiness of people like those converts would continue. There would still be a desire and search for certainties. Yet still these clearly innate desires run against nearly all the assumptions and aspirations of our time. The search for meaning is not new. What is new is that almost nothing in modern European culture applies itself to offering an answer. Nothing says, ‘Here is an inheritance of thought and culture and philosophy and religion which has nurtured people for thousands of years and may well fulfil you too.’ Instead, a voice at best says, ‘Find your meaning where you will.’ At worst the nihilist’s creed can be heard: ‘Yours is a meaningless existence in a meaningless universe.’ Any person who believes such a creed is liable to achieve literally nothing. Societies in which that is the case are likewise liable to achieve nothing. While nihilism may be understandable in some individuals, as a societal creed it is fatal.