There is a mosque on Rovsingsgade in Copenhagen.
It opened in 2014 and was paid for with 150 million kroner from the former Emir of Qatar, and the building went up almost unnoticed, without much debate and without many of us asking what would be taught inside - or who, in the end, would be in charge.
I have to admit, I did not give it a single thought at the time.
When someone finally asked whether conditions came attached to a transfer of that much money, there was never really an answer. Then in 2020 the newspaper Berlingske reported that people from the circle around Qatar had taken the majority on the board of the foundation behind the mosque - and that at least 227 million kroner in total had come from there.
In other words, we treated it as if it were a building permit.
Let us turn toward the United Arab Emirates for a moment - because there, a course of events like that would be unthinkable. And we do not even have to guess what they think of us.
Their foreign minister said it in 2017 -
"There will come a day that we will see far more radical extremists and terrorists coming out of Europe because of lack of decision-making, trying to be politically correct, or assuming that they know the Middle East, and they know Islam, and they know the others far better than we do."
He called the state we are in pure ignorance.
How cheeky.
And how true.
In the UAE the state itself writes the Friday sermon and sends it out to the mosques, imams are licensed, and the Muslim Brotherhood is banned.
In Saudi Arabia there is not one single legal Christian church.
And in the Emirates, where churches actually are built (a very few), they stand on land the ruler has granted, for expatriates only and with no right to evangelize among Muslims.
Back to ourselves in Europe.
Here we have for decades let Turkey send and pay the imams of around 900(!) mosques in Germany, and for many years the German state let it happen without asking what was being preached, or by whom.
Are you catching the scent?
It is just one example among many of how differently we are built, and how differently we understand this.
One can think a great deal about that, and I do not wish for a state that writes sermons, neither theirs nor ours. But notice what the Muslim states KNOW - both when they govern the mosque at home and when they pay for it up here.
They KNOW that a mosque is a place where human beings are formed, where children learn who they are and to whom they answer - and that whoever forms human beings will sooner or later form the street, the neighbourhood, the town, the municipality, the region and the country.
I know, it is logic for battery hens.
But we seem to have completely lost our grasp of the simplest formative mechanisms here at home.
So let us go back in time a little.
The mosque in Medina was from the beginning prayer room, school, court and council chamber under one roof.
We once knew that here too -
Walk into any Danish village and see which house stands highest, in the middle of everything. You know it without thinking - but you may never have asked yourself why.
We have forgotten what a house like that does to people, and I think the forgetting has a very simple explanation, which is not especially flattering - we look at the mosque with the same eyes we look at our own churches with.
For us a house of God has become a beautiful building with a cosy concert in nice clothes at Christmas and plenty of room the rest of the year - and so we imagine that the faith of the Muslim newcomers is as thin and watered-down as our own. A kind of cultural hobby with different holidays. And dates instead of Christmas cookies.
It is not. It is faith.
The deepest thing laid into a human being.
And here I want to say something plainly, because it is so easily heard as something else.
There has been a synagogue in Krystalgade since 1833, and Catholics, Hindus and Buddhists pray in the same city, without it having shaken anything at all. Judaism even has a law nearly as comprehensive as sharia - the difference is that it binds Jews and no one else. It could not care less about you and me.
Islam, in its classical jurisprudence, is built differently - it carries a law intended for all people, an outer order for the whole of society. That is an architectural feature of the faith - and not a trait of the individual Muslim, who can perfectly well say his prayers without wanting anything from your life or mine - if, that is, he or she is allowed to by their own - by the family, the mosque and the community around them.
But two orders cannot lie on top of each other on the same piece of ground as equals.
The Muslim countries know this, and so they are never in doubt about whose house they live in and who is the guest. Who gets to build, and who does not.
We knew it too, when we wrote our Constitution, which in section 4 makes the Evangelical Lutheran Church the church of the people, and in section 67 gives everyone the right to worship God according to their conviction, as long as nothing is taught or done that is contrary to good morals or public order.
Freedom, yes. But freedom in a house.
Christianity's.
The freedom we have kept, and the name we have forgotten. And everything we are proud of - conscience, the worth of the individual, the king under the law, even the right not to believe at all - is built from the view of Man that the name covers, whether we know it or not.
Man created in the image of God, with the Law laid into the heart and not down over the head.
So it is not the mosque I wonder at. It knows what it is - a place where Islam forms human beings, and where a law intended for the whole of society is handed on to the next generation.
It is us I wonder at.
We who stand beside the raising of a house that leaves some of the deepest marks in a human being, with a zoning plan in our hand, calling ourselves neutral - as if a mosque wanted nothing with Man, with the Law, with society and the order we live in.
Denmark is a Christian country.
Not because everyone believes, but because everything we live on - freedom, conscience, the worth of the individual, the right to say no - grew out of Christianity's view of Man.
And Islam is not Christianity with different holidays. It is in fact disrespectful to Muslims themselves to imagine so. Islam is another faith with another view of Man and another law, and the two cannot both be the foundation of the same country.
A country that does not know what it believes cannot tell anyone what they are welcome to.
This is where we are.
