If we're lucky, the clash of civilizations will not end with a bang but a whimper, not with a mushroom cloud but the cry of the baby that brings a Muslim majority to Western Europe.

Demographers say that shift could happen as early as 2050. It might take longer. But unless something really frightening happens, it appears inevitable.

The U.S. population is also changing due to Hispanic and other immigrants. But where America's evolution is interesting, Europe's is alarming.

Bruce Bawer probes this difference in his indispensable new book, "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within" (Doubleday, $23.95, 247 pages). In troubling detail he describes the social and economic problems strangling Western Europe -- epitomized by last summer's Muslim-led riots across France -- and its leaders' inability to confront them. The result is a portrait of a powder keg continent.

Bawer is a gay American writer best known for "Stealing Jesus" (1997), a withering critique of the values and increasing political power of Christian fundamentalists in the United States. After completing that book, he moved to Europe because of its enlightened social policies, especially its embrace of same-sex marriage. During his eight years in the Netherlands and Norway, where he still lives, Bawer became increasingly disturbed by the dark side of Europe's celebrated tolerance.

Unlike in the United States, where immigrants are considered Americans when they set foot on our soil, indigenous Europeans put great stock in bloodlines. Europeans, he writes, are "intensely aware of ethnic difference. ... The single most important thing about you was whether you were one of them or not."

The children of immigrants, and their children, he says, are considered outsiders, despite their European roots. "Even those Muslim immigrants who openly try to distance themselves from the Muslim community," he writes, "are seen as members of a group whose common identity is determined entirely by skin color."

Facing immense obstacles to integration, immigrants and their children tend to anchor their identity in the accepting arms of their faith. Where most immigrants come to the United States hoping to become Americans, Bawer writes, "Many Muslim immigrants arrive in Europe with very different ambitions. All want a share in Western prosperity; fewer care to adapt to Western ways."

Unwilling to assimilate these new immigrants, European nations have established policies that discourage intermarriage and expand Muslim-only ghettos. Bawer says many European Muslims arrange marriages for their daughters with residents of poor, rural villages back home. These men "put the brakes on -- or even reverse -- whatever progress the European-born spouse might have toward becoming Westernized."

No one can doubt the seriousness of this problem. A society cannot remain healthy when its fastest-growing group feels disconnected. The more challenging part of Bawer's argument rests on two ideas: that many of European Muslims reject the West's bedrock values and that the continent's leaders and her people have little interest in aggressively defending the best parts of their culture.

On those points, Bawer is both fuzzy and compelling. On the one hand, it is almost impossible to make useful generalizations about any group. To suggest, as Bawer does, that European Muslims are hostile to "pluralism, tolerance, democracy and sexual equality" begs innumerable qualifications.

However, he redresses this through an important qualification between Muslims and Islamists. The first group is akin to what Americans might call the "silent majority" -- those who may not feel comfortable in their adopted land but are not actively hostile to it. The Islamists are the fire-breathers who preach hatred against their new homelands. Their vocal members hope to turn Europe into a Muslim nation under strict religious laws hostile to homosexuals, Christians and other infidels.

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