Security analysts, particularly in France and the United States, say that Europe has let itself become a breeding ground of Islamist terrorism. Events in Britain and the Netherlands have made it clear that it is not only a question of foreign extremists coming to Europe, but also that the problem is now home-grown.

Robert Leiken, director of national security at the Nixon Centre, wrote in the latest issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairs: “Jihadists’ networks span Europe. In smoky coffee houses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and Londonistan, and the prisons of Madrid, Milan and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad.”

A study by Leiken of 373 jihadists in Europe and America found that a quarter were EU citizens. Matthew Levitt, director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in recent testimony to the US House of Representatives: “The rise of jihadist movements in Europe is alarming, not only because of the threat such movements pose to our European allies but because Europe has served as a launching pad for terrorists plotting attacks elsewhere.”

There are about 15 million Muslims in Europe, or 3 per cent of the population, with the communities generally arriving in the 1960s and 1970s. The Muslim population is still growing fast — by more than 7 per cent a year in Austria, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Denmark — and the US National Intelligence Council projects that Europe’s Muslim population will double by 2025.

The first to confront its Islamic terrorist threat was France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim community, which faced a series of bomb attacks in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of France’s five million Muslims are Arabs from its former colonies in North Africa, particularly Algeria. The attacks on Paris were seen as revenge both for the past colonisation of Algeria and for supporting the present military regime.

The French Government clamped down on radical Islam in a way that no other country has. No mosque or Islamic prayer hall is off limits to police. Imams preaching hate are regularly deported. France stopped giving asylum to Islamic extremists wanted in their home country, and was disgusted when many of them were given refuge in Britain. As a result of France’s draconian anti- terror laws, the country is thought to be comparatively free of terrorist networks.

Germany has Europe’s second-largest Muslim population, but they are predominantly from Turkey, a more secular and Westernised country.

German Turks, as with Turks elsewhere, have integrated better and been less tempted by religious extremism than the Muslims of Arab descent living in ghettoes in France.

Instead, concern about Islamic extremism in Germany has focused on its tiny Arab community, many of whom were Muslim activists who arrived as refugees. Attracted by Hitler’s anti-semitism, many Islamic radicals in the Middle East were supporters of the Nazi regime and sought refuge in Germany after the end of the Second World War.

The Hamburg cell that plotted the September 11 attacks on the US comprised Saudi and Egyptian students. The Netherlands’ largest Muslim group are of Turkish origin, but again it is the North African community, particularly Moroccan, that has fuelled home-grown jihad. The murder of Theo van Gogh last year by the Dutch-Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri led police to discover the so-called Hofstad group of Muslim extremists of North African origin.

The group, 15 members of which face trial on terrorism charges, is alleged to have plotted to blow up a nuclear power station and is thought to have connections to terrorist groups in Spain. Dutch intelligence services caution that there are hundreds of Islamic radicals in the Netherlands prepared to wage holy war. The Spanish Government paid little attention to the threat from Islamists because it was confronting other terrorists.

Spain’s Moroccan community made it easy for the terrorists who planted the March 11, 2004, train bombs to operate. It acts as a trunk route for North Africans entering Europe. Many pass on to Italy, whose small Muslim community based around Milan is renowned for its forging abilities, providing jihadists with visas and funding before they head off to Iraq.

In Britain, the Muslim community is different from anywhere else in Europe, mainly South Asian in origin — particularly Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi — with very few North Africans. Indian and Bangladeshi Muslims, like Turks, have been little tempted by extremism. Although many Arab extremists have been given refuge in Britain, it does not have France’s and Spain’s alienated underclass of Arab and North African youths.

However, many young British Pakistani men, who often maintain close contact with their parents’ country, have been influenced by the rise of Islamic militancy in Pakistan.

Despite the different backgrounds of Europe’s Muslims, they have often presented their governments with the same problems of ghettoisation, poverty and radicalisation.

David Masci, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said: “The successful integration of Muslims is crucial to the future of Europe.”

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