PARIS, Feb. 11 (UPI) -- This has been an extraordinary week for Islam in Europe, emphasizing the potential for a clash of values, if not a clash of civilizations, between Europeans and their fastest-growing minority.

A series of events around the continent has brought into sharp focus the tensions over women's rights, Islamic law, freedom of speech and whether Turkey has a future in Europe.

Turkey's Parliament, dominated by the ruling AKP party of moderate Islamists, revoked the traditional ban on Muslim women being able to wear headscarves in universities. The strongly secular army has hitherto seen this as the kind of symbolic threat that might trigger a coup.

In the Netherlands, the government has issued warnings to Dutch nationals in Muslim countries to take special care, as the anti-immigration Dutch MP Gert Wilders prepares to release his bitterly critical film about the Koran. He has called the book most sacred to Muslims "an Islamic Mein Kampf," in deliberately provocative echo of Hitler's inflammatory book. This pushes the Dutch commitment to free speech very far indeed.

Iran has already threatened to break off diplomatic relations with Holland, and the Grand Mufti of Syria is making wild speeches about war and bloodshed. Al-Jazeera is covering the affair fully, and also looking critically at the often difficult lives of Muslim immigrants in Holland. Many are bracing for a repeat of the mass demonstrations and boycotts that followed a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed.