One way of approaching discussions of Islam in the West is to probe questions of religious diversity and secularism. Is the West as secular as it presents itself? What of the deep entanglements (symbolic, legal, and financial) of Christian churches and European states? Does the presence of Muslim communities expose the limits of the religious tolerance that is officially espoused? While Peter O'Brien is interested in these questions, he is also, especially, interested in a more fundamental set of questions. O'Brien wonders to what extent the presence of Muslim communities in Europe makes explicit, or complicates, broader philosophical commitments held by European political actors. He concludes that by examining “the Muslim question” we can see how fragments of several political philosophical positions are assembled by political actors addressing the practical challenges of living with diversity.

O'Brien begins by offering sketches of the three political philosophies he suggests are employed in Europe today: liberalism, nationalism, and postmodernism. For each he describes key ideas and key thinkers as well as variations (e.g., perfectionism as a variant of liberalism, communitarianism as a variety of nationalism, and hospitable postmodernism as a variety of postmodernism). The rest of the book is arranged in four chapters, each addressing an issue raised by the presence of Muslim communities in Europe: citizenship, the veil, secularism, and terrorism. These chapters are brimming with rich and fascinating details, they evince a thorough knowledge of German, French, and English language scholarship, they attend to the diversity within Europe, and they examine the variety of forces seeking to represent Muslim immigrants, from xenophobic partisans to the embassies of oil-rich nations. Rather than treating the four organizing topics in the abstract, O'Brien focuses on specific conflicts, such as contest over the swimwear to be worn by Muslim schoolgirls in Germany, and he demonstrates how elements of each of the three regnant political philosophies are strategically invoked in these conflicts.

In the chapter on citizenship, it becomes clear just how committed European states are to excluding Muslim immigrants even when their official message is one of welcome and even when anti-discrimination policies are in place. To explain this, O'Brien points to tensions between nationalist commitments and commitments to a conjoined liberalism-postmodernism, commitments that manifest themselves in different ways in different circumstances. The Hague Program of 2004 affirms that immigrants should have equal access “to public and private goods and services” and should be able to participate “in the democratic process and in the formulation of integration policies and measures, especially at the local level” (68–69). In Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, and other countries, non-citizen immigrants are able to vote in some local elections. On the other hand, citizenship tests often rely on nationalist ideas that exclude Muslim immigrants from full political rights. The Hague Program itself points to a requisite knowledge of “culture” and “values” for naturalization. In the city of Rotterdam, this manifests as a requirement that immigrants speak Dutch in public; in the UK, it manifests as a need to demonstrate national loyalty; and the Austrian citizenship test asks, “In which Upper Austrian town are there two famous winged altars?” (95). O'Brien suggests that such nationalism is at times articulated together with a liberal perfectionism, a sense that the state must cultivate certain values in its citizens in order for liberal democracy to be sustained.

One of the particularly fascinating arguments that O'Brien makes is that it is not only Christian Europeans but also Muslim Europeans and Muslim immigrants who make use of the available political philosophical options he limns. For example, he notes how Shehzad Tanweer invoked protecting the rights of “our women and children, our brothers and sisters” against a subjugating West in justifying his bombings of the London subway in 2005, ideas that O'Brien associates with “Hobbesian postmodernism” rather than with Islamic roots. (O'Brien is careful to point out that secular, indigenous terrorism is a much more numerically significant issue in Europe, even though terrorism associated with Islam receives much more attention.) O'Brien also examines hybrid spaces, such as those Muslim organizations that operate with the financial support of European states. He shows how the ambitions of European states to produce a kinder, gentler version of Islam as part of hospitable postmodernism sometimes conflict with the desire on the part of European states for their interlocutors to adopt liberal principles as a prerequisite for support.

O'Brien's text illuminates the dialectic between philosophical commitments and practical political engagement, making a compelling case that his approach is more useful than purely abstract discussion about, say, how liberal principles should be applied in a specific case. Philosophical positions certainly do form the range of possible responses available to political actors, but political action involves, as O'Brien helpfully puts it, bricolage, bringing together a varied set of intellectual resources that respond to specific circumstances. Some readers might complain that O'Brien over-emphasizes the novelty of such bricolage: to suggest (as he sometimes does) that it is new implausibly suggests that once, in an earlier era, political actors mechanistically applied principles derived from their philosophies. Moreover, O'Brien leaves unexamined what the implications of this conclusion might be for future studies. In our era of bricolage, is the political philosopher out of a job, replaced by the historian of political ideas and the political actor who shops among those ideas for what she needs? Or might it be possible for the political philosopher, or the intellectual more generally, to imagine new constellations of ideas and practices that open new avenues for addressing pressing questions of multiculturalism and religious diversity?