Ghost of a flea

"Where this kind of gaudy Middle Eastern building goes up, with a dome and minarets, the next thing will be an application to the authorities for permission to do the call to prayer," a passage on the Pro Germany Web site reads. It's visions like this that are leading more and more Germans to see the construction of mosques as the expression of a "kind of land grab," observes Claus Leggewie, a political science professor at the University of Giessen in the western state of Hesse.

This impression is aggravated not only by right-wing agitators but also, according to Leggewie, by careless or sometimes even deliberately provocative statements by Muslim builders. Many seem to think like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In words spoken in 1997, Erdogan made mosque construction seem like part of a strategy of Islamization: "The minarets are our lances, the domes our helmets, the believers our army."