It is possible, in the years ahead, that Islam will become something it has not been in 1,400 years. But it is unlikely. If Islam continues its backward direction or even if the current grip of the Islamic conservatives remains, Muslims in the West are going to continue to feel an increasing and deeply painful pull on their identities. In that situation Europe could go in a number of directions. Setting aside alarmist predictions of civil strife, it seems far more likely to me that what we will see developing in our societies will be people leading neighbouring but parallel existences and inhabiting increasingly different cultures under the roof of a splintered country. Those who wish to live strictly religious lives will probably always be able to find a community. And if the rest of us are endlessly told that we must accept the differences that migration has brought, we will have to make a simple calibration. Yes, it will be true that we will have access to a greater variety of food, languages and cultures than we had half a century ago. And we will have to get used to the downside that there will be more forced marriage, female genital mutilation and beheading than there used to be. My suspicion, not to be too flippant, is that a lot of people, especially those in positions of power, have already made their peace with that deal. There is no plausible reason, if they have not, why so much attention is paid to muffling those voices who raise criticisms of Islam and so much help given to those often highly regressive figures who carry water for the fundamentalists.

Britain will continue to have certain types of problem. The glimpses of school life in Blackburn and Birmingham are one type. There may be tinkering, and lone voices speaking out against such developments, but there will be no significant force from inside or outside Islam persuading Muslims that the path of segregation and separation denoted by the veil is wrong. Our politics will inevitably follow the same sectarian lines. Already there are stories — I know of two cases, from different political parties — where Jewish candidates have not been chosen to contest certain parliamentary seats because the proportion of local Muslims is too high. With one in ten young Britons being Muslim, there is already a change in the pressures on politicians. What will it be like when it is two in ten? Will some of our closest political alliances survive?

The best we may be able to hope for is the right to pursue the type of British lives that our ancestors lived. You can see this, in rural and other communities in Britain where the concerns of the global battle for Islam, even when they are in a nearby town, appear to be thousands of miles away. There will, of course, be those who can do nothing about this — born into poorer backgrounds and unable to pick or choose who their neighbours are. These people will continue to live on the faultlines of the problem. As the recent history of the English Defence League may have shown, any non-Muslim, grassroots yet non-racist resistance to Islamic extremism may well be impossible. Perhaps such people will accept that fact and accept their lot. Perhaps they will not.

In any case, it certainly appears to have become the view of the British governing class that, if there is a problem within or from Islam it is beyond the control or influence of the political class, let alone any single here-today gone-tomorrow politician. The pretence is now so strong that it is assumed that Islam is like all other religions, that suspicion of Islam is as dangerous as suspicion of any other religion. In short, they have tried to treat Islam like any other faith. And the problem is that it is not. Not just because Islam behaves in significantly different ways from other faiths, but because at the very point  that it is swiftly growing in our own countries its global direction of travel is consistently regressive. Perhaps it always will be.

As I said at the outset, in the battle for the soul of Islam the extremists tend to win. There may be nothing we can do to stop this. And while the moderates and progressives will still deserve our good wishes and help where we can give it — and we should certainly wish them luck — we must also accept at least the possibility that they might lose. There was a time when this loss would just have been a loss within Islam. At one stage I hoped that the West might insulate itself from the repercussions of this loss. But I now think that hope was wild-eyed in its optimism. If Islam falls over the cliff it will do so in our embrace. Too late to disentangle ourselves, if it falls backwards here, it is now inconceivable that we will not all go over the cliff together.