W alking down Wallensteinstrasse, a main artery of Vienna’s Twentieth Bezirk, or District, there are nearly as many women wearing hijabs as there are in jeans. The area is a magnet for immigrants. Sitting in the local branch of Aida, a coffee shop chain with blond waitresses in bright pink 1960s uniforms, German is just one of the languages spoken by patrons. At Koc, a local grocery store, the coffee, vegetables, and even cleaning supplies originate in Istanbul. So imagine the shock when, amid this multicultural mélange, you first encounter the tram-stop signs posted by the Freiheitliche Partei ˜sterreichs (the Austrian Freedom Party, formerly headed by Nazi sympathizer Jí�rg Haider). The signs demand, among other things, that ˜sterreich Bleib Frei! ("Austria stay free!") – a message that entails keeping Turkey out of the European Union (EU), keeping immigrants out of the country, and disentangling Austria itself from the EU. Other advertisements, featuring a white woman wearing a full burka, ask "Should this be our future?" Equally surprising are the letters to the editor in the Kronen Zeitung, a popular newspaper, that warn against a coming "third Turkish siege of Vienna" – a reference to the Ottoman attempts to take the city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, apparently, still a font of Austrian anxiety.

Austria is not alone. Across Western Europe, there is an uneasiness about Islam that ranges from the palpable xenophobia of the far-right Vlaams Belang party in Belgium and Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France to the softer bigotry ...