The presence of Muslims in Western Europe is at once a new and an old phenomenon. At the present moment, several million people with an Islamic background work and live in Europe, but the relation between Europe and what has been coined the ‘Islamic world’ did not start with the arrival of migrants after the Second World War, the ‘third wave’ of Islam as Cardini has called it. This relation dates back to the earliest Islamic history and it is mainly a relation between Islam and Christianity. In more recent times, many Western European states have developed a history of colonial relations with the Islamic world. Said has demonstrated how these shaped the image of ‘the Islamic world’ and how this image in turn legitimated colonial rule. Moreover, it has set the scientific paradigm for the study of Islam in the 20th century.

More relevant for the issue at stake is the fact that the image of Islamic society as one devoid of any rational basis, contributed to the selfimage of the post-revolutionary secular nation-states, both in Europe and in the Middle East. The French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan (1823-1892), famous ideologue of the (secular) nation-state, wrote extensively about Islam and even went into debate with the equally famous Islamic modernist Jamal ad Din al-Afghani. Renan's critique had much to do with the idea of Islam as a pre-modern religion and the idea of the secular nation-state as the highest stage of societal development thus far. As Djait put it: ‘His [Renan’s] harsh treatment of Islam is tied in with a grand egalitarian vision of cultural progress’. 6 Thus what concerns us here is not the accuracy of the images themselves, but the role they played in the development of the self-image of Western European nation-states in the 19th and 20th century. Not so much the age-old controversy between Islam and Christianity is relevant, although it does play a role as a canon for rhetoric, but rather the image of Islam as a pre-modern religion that by definition does not separate between state and religion.