This is an excellent piece of reportage by The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders, looking at two prominent Danish Muslims: Naser Khader -- a liberal, secular, cultural Muslim -- and Ahmed Akkari, a conservative fundamentalist and driving force behind the protests over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.

Some excerpts:

"My parents are religious. And I was very religious until I was 18 or so — then I started to read philosophers. I started to put question marks on things."

Mr. Khader had begun a trajectory that would lead him from the closed world of the Islamic diaspora into the centre of European public life, as a member of Parliament and the leader of a new movement of moderate Muslims who favour democracy, secularism and civil liberties. As the world has exploded in riots, killings and angry denunciations over the publication of images of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, he has become part of the European answer.

Last week, he led a demonstration of Muslims demanding an apology from Saudi Arabia, for attacking Denmark's press freedoms. He has become one of several prominent voices in Europe arguing that non-religious, fully Europeanized Muslims are the silent majority and that they need to be heard. ...

His neighbour, Ahmed Akkari, 10 years younger, was the child of secular, moderate, liberal parents who had fled the violence of the Middle East and tried hard to become Danes. Young Ahmed, following the path of a surprising number of young Europeans from the Mideast, turned away from his parents' secular liberalism and toward fundamentalist religion, conservatism and active opposition to Europe's values.

While the young Mr. Khader was falling under the sway of Friedrich Nietzsche and other European thinkers, and becoming an important figure in Danish centre-left politics, Mr. Akkari was becoming a devotee of Ahmad Abu Laban, a radical imam 30 years his senior who has admitted ties to violent Islamist organizations in the Middle East and who preached a harsh adherence to sharia law.

This year, their trajectories crossed. It was Mr. Akkari who, at Mr. Abu Laban's behest, travelled to Lebanon, Syria and Egypt in December to spread the news — and some false rumours — about the cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed. And it has been Mr. Khader, the parliamentarian, who has led the moderate Muslim protest against the riots, killings, boycotts and calls for censorship that have sprung from Mr. Akkari's actions. ...

Are these "cultural" Muslims really the majority? Almost certainly.

Denmark, a fairly typical European country in this respect, has an estimated 180,000 Muslims out of a population of five million. They are served by 80 to 100 mosques, with an estimated 15,000 worshippers. In other words, fewer than 10 per cent of Denmark's Muslims are even religiously observant. A similar majority of Western Europe's Muslims are believed to be secular — in France, only 5 per cent visit a mosque weekly. The rest presumably view Islam as a culture rather than a religion or a basis for politics.

That was evident last year when France, whose six million Muslims are the continent's largest population, passed a law that bans the wearing of head scarves by girls in schools. It was fiercely opposed by the fundamentalist Muslim leadership — by the French counterparts to Mr. Akkari. But after the law came into effect, the number of girls who tried to defy it, nationwide, numbered in the low hundreds. For all but a tiny group of Muslims, expressing the orthodox version of their faith held no interest — but being French, and European, was very important.

This is a frustrating question for Danes, who have seen their nation transformed almost overnight from a byword for tolerance and peacefulness into a country that is demonized by Muslims everywhere and viewed by other Western democracies as being somehow guilty of creating a monster. It is an even more frustrating question for Danes who happen to be Muslim, like Mr. Khader. They wonder how a tiny and ill-respected group of orthodox believers in their midst have poisoned an entire community.

The article says that Arab immigration, starting in the 1970s, posed more of an integration problem than the Turkish guest workers of the past. They tended to be poor and illiterate, without an established class to help them assimilate. As a result, the orthodox religious extreme filled that particular vacuum.

This not only gave Muslims few visible alternatives, but turned them into figures of fear and revulsion.

"Our newspapers for years have been absolutely full of headlines about the perceived threat to fundamental values of tolerance and freedom from these Muslims, even though they are almost invisible and have no power to change anything," said Garbi Schmidt, who, as director of the Research Programme on Ethnic Minorities at the Danish National Institute for Social Research, is one of Europe's leading authorities on Muslim immigrants.

Because their rank-and-file are so unknown and invisible to Europe's mainstream, people hear the only voice that is speaking loudly and clearly. In many countries, this is the radical, orthodox religious leaders, who often, like Mr. Abu Laban, resemble extremist politicians more than preachers. In places like Denmark, where Hitler's rampage left terrible memories, the hateful messages of people like Mr. Abu Laban, and their calls for censorship of the media and repression of women, strike a troubling chord.

That helps explain the freedom-of-speech debate that led the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to publish the offensive Mohammed cartoons. To outsiders, it seemed a bit bizarre: Denmark's freedom of speech has never been challenged, and the country's Muslims, most of whom live in grubby neighbourhoods and work in shipping industries, and who have only three MPs in a Parliament of 179 seats, have never had the power to challenge it.

The worry, of course, is that this perception builds a high wall around Arab-Muslim groups, forcing them to make a harsh choice: to erase their roots entirely, undergoing the tough rite of passage required to become unquestionably European (as Mr. Khader has happily done) or to become a permanent outsider, defining yourself as a member of "Islam," a nation opposed to Europe's hegemony (as Mr. Akkari appears to have done).

Make sure you read the whole thing.

I found it helped move a little closer to understanding this terrible mess.

However, I would have liked to learn more about the evolution of Mr. Akkari and why he took the more religious, culturally isolationist path.