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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.
In Paris, President Nicolas Sarkozy launched his plan to address the problems of the predominantly Muslim youth in the banlieues, the grim public housing suburbs that spawned the riots and car burnings that have swept France twice in the last two years.
So far, it looks heavier on the policing than on the social reforms, with 4,000 new cops to be drafted in to crack down on the drug-trafficking and its gangs who have made many of these high-rise estates into no-go areas for the French authorities.
Pledging "a war without mercy against drug-traffickers," Sarkozy rather drowned the more positive measures like "second chance" schools for dropouts and 100,000 new job-training positions and $700 million in public transport to "de-ghettoize" the banlieues.
And in Britain, Rowan Williams, the spiritual head of the Anglican Church worldwide as Archbishop of Canterbury, has provoked huge controversy by suggesting that the introduction of Shariah Islamic law is "unavoidable" in Britain.
The spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown rejected the notion, saying, "British laws should be based on British values." The opposition Conservative party said it was "unacceptable." Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal-Democrat party, said, "We cannot have a situation where there is one law for one person and different laws for another."
The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that Shariah is incompatible with democracy, because of its treatment of women, its code of punishment and its denial of religious freedom. (If a Christian missionary succeeds in converting a Muslim, in theory they could both face the death penalty under strict Shariah law.)
The archbishop argues that British law has traditionally been rather relaxed about accommodating other faiths. Catholic doctors in the National Health Service are not required to perform abortions. Jewish religious courts in Britain settle issues like divorce, and the British government is already planning to issue Treasury bonds that conform to Shariah financial law against usury.
Since there are close to 2 million Muslims in Britain, the Archbishop counsels against giving them the stark choice between obeying the state law or their religion. That could alienate them from British law altogether.
"There's a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law," he notes.
The archbishop stresses that Shariah law and Islamic traditions need to be better understood and not left to "sensational reporting and opinion polls" that make reasonable discussion impossible. The difficulty will be in drawing the line and defining where Shariah stops and where British (or European) law and custom prevail.
In practice, this would mean that "honor killings" of Muslim girls who date Christian boys are treated as murder, and religious freedom to convert from one faith to another must be accepted. It would certainly mean that Muslim women are entitled to wear headscarves if they wish (which they may not in French schools). But what of Muslim women who refuse a subordinate role in a family? What of the right of Gert Wilders to exercise his free speech on Islam, or the right of radical Muslims to publish articles praising al-Qaida?
These issues and not only difficult in themselves and symbolic of a serious clash of values on which each side may find it tough to compromise, but they also involve the nature of that intriguing work-in-progress, the European Union.
With the French government already giving a firm "No," can the EU accept a predominantly Muslim state like Turkey into the club? It has already in principle said it is prepared to accept the predominantly Muslim Bosnians and later this month is likely to be faced with a unilateral declaration of independence from the Muslims of Kosovo, who also expect a swift transition into the EU.
The statement Saturday at the Munich security conference by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, insisting that he will not accept anything short of full EU membership, keeps the issue high on the EU agenda. It now jostles for space in the headlines alongside the demands from senior figures in the Church of England that their Archbishop retract his remarks on Shariah law or resign. So much for his free speech.