ANKARA – After a year of considerable gloom, let us consider two signs of hope this holiday season. In the post-September 11 world, few modern problems stir fears like the rising tide of Islamist religious intolerance – from the banning of Bibles in Saudi Arabia, to the beheading of “infidels” in Iraq, to the teaching of hate in mosques in Pakistan, to the Indonesian Sharia judge who blames last year’s tsunami on women failing to wear headscarves. Many non-Muslims see an endless parade of zealotry and attacks on those who don’t share their vindictive and cruel interpretation of the Islamic faith, and lament that the response from “moderate” Muslims seems ineffective and too quiet.

Pope Benedict XVI recently pointed to “nihilism” and “religious fanaticism” as the two deep sources of Islamist terrorism. So as December arrived, and I began my first Christmas season in Turkey – a nation which is officially secular but 99% Muslim – I feared that any spirit of the holiday would end at my apartment door. But I was surprised to find a surprising number of signs of Christmas – or at least in Turkey’s capital city of Ankara.

The store windows are full of trees and Santas, and signs that say, “Merry Christmas.” (In fact, banners and signs saying “Season’s Greetings” or Happy Holidays” were few and far between. Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson, take note: The war on Christmas is in full retreat on this far-off front.) There are no explicitly Christian symbols like mangers or angels, of course – but just about everything short of those. And Turks take a peculiar pride in Saint Nicholas’ origins in the village of Patara in southern Turkey.

But perhaps more significantly, acknowledging, if not celebrating, Christmas seemed like a big deal to the Turks themselves. Perhaps this is a sign of Turks’ efforts to emulate Europe as they aspire to membership in the European Union. Every Turk I know took steps to wish me a “Happy Christmas.” Even a taxicab driver had heard the phrase from a friend, written it down on a note card, and read off a “Meh-Rek-reesmuss” as I departed. It’s a small gesture, but appreciated – and a sign that an intolerance for other faiths does not mark every corner of the Islamic world.

On the flip side of the coin are the recent concerns about the rise of a “post-Christian” Europe. With declining birth rates and church attendance, sparsely populated seminaries, and an increasingly dominant, hedonistic, vapidly multicultural secular culture, many look at Europe and conclude the Christian faith is on the decline.

And yet how do we explain that the continent goes nuts for Christmas? Sure, the celebrations leading up to December 25 are not entirely religious. But for a couple weeks leading up to the holiday, these cultures – usually focused on discarding the past and obsessed with the new and the cutting edge – re-embrace tradition. Europeans sing the old carols, buy the little wooden ornaments, and drink up the mulled wine, in the same manner as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Christmas markets, once a German tradition, have spread throughout the continent and are packed, from Edinburgh to Prague to Helsinki to Barcelona to Brussels. Sure, there are plenty of red-nosed reindeer and other non-religious ornaments, decorations and toys – but also lots of manger displays.

And at midnight Christmas Eve, suddenly Europe remembers that it’s Christian, and the church pews are full. (In Salzburg, the 10,000-capacity Dom Cathedral was packed, even without much heat.) It’s an easy joke to mock the Christmas-and-Easter Christians – looking around to check if they’re standing, sitting, or kneeling at the right time during Mass. And yet, they show up. Considering they find it so easy to skip church those other 50 weeks of the year, one would think it would be easy to stay home as Christmas Eve turns into Christmas morning. On December 24 and 25, millions of casual Christians feel that they ought to spend at least an hour in a church, reflecting on the true meaning of the season. The faith of these nations may not be vibrant and reflected in daily life, but it isn’t dead yet.

Almost everyone who has lived in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East has wondered if the future would be marked by a violent religious fanaticism, a spiritually unfulfilling secularism hostile to traditional faith, or the worst of both worlds. But, bit by bit, there are signs that the years to come may fulfill our hopes and not our fears.

Mr. Geraghty, a contributing editor to National Review, is writing a book on how the September 11 terrorist attacks affected American politics, to be published by Simon & Schuster in August of 2006.