From French president Nicholas Sarkozy’s declaration that the burqa, the Muslim face veil for women, “will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic” to Switzerland’s recent ban on minaret construction, Europe has seen a wave of Muslim immigration and subsequent anti-Muslim sentiment in recent years. Instead of accepting and assimilating its immigrants, however, many European countries, particularly France, have isolated and discriminated against them in an attempt to protect their own culture, a flawed and ultimately counterproductive policy that they must quickly change.

France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, at over four million, many of whom are very young — 20 to 30 percent of all people under 25 in the nation are Muslim. It proclaims itself strictly secular in its constitution, and takes a very different approach to religious differences than the United States. While Americans embrace religious equality by allowing everyone to practice anything they wish, the French enforce a policy of laicite, in which religion is confined to the private sphere. France does not have an official religion, and all religious symbols and practices must stay out of the public realm, as enforced by France’s ban of all religious insignia in public schools. Though this includes Christian and other religious symbols, it has in recent years become the battleground for France’s relationship with its Muslim population. By completely banning the headscarf and branding it a “debasement of women,” as Sarkozy did, the French are only encouraging more xenophobia and racism and fanning the flames of hostility already present.

While much French hostility is caught up in the global hysteria over Islamic fundamentalism, their policy of forced assimilation — the belief that one must embrace the dominant French culture in order to be French — is simply counterproductive. It does not encourage patriotism and French identity, but rather alienates, angers and drives many people, particularly the young, toward the fundamentalism that is, ironically, exactly what the French government hopes to prevent. A recent European study found that 55 percent of Muslims feel that religious discrimination has increased in the last five years, and by stereotyping all Muslims as religious fundamentalists and extremists, the French are only helping those very groups by swelling their ranks with frustrated, alienated young Frenchmen who feel unwanted by their own society.

What is most ironic is that many French Muslims do not primarily identify themselves by religion. They see themselves as French first, but are forced to be Muslim before anything by the government’s laws regulating them, the racial stigmas and the controversy over their identity and existence. As Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France, told The New York Times that when he was abroad, “I’m French; I feel French. But in France, in Marseille every day, you have these same questions, repeated stupidly: what about the burqa, the mosque, terrorism?” While its commitment to secularism is commendable, the French government must tread carefully between secularism and discrimination; it must also ensure that secularism does not entail a preference for any religion over another.

This problem is not solely a French one, though theirs may be the most publicized. Switzerland, the place that many historical French dissidents fled to for protection, has undermined its own reputation for tolerance by banning the minaret, the spire that identifies many mosques, highlighting just how widespread and pressing the issue is. As Europe seeks to come to terms with its Muslim population, it ultimately comes down to a question of identity: is Europe, the birthplace of the ideals of democracy and equality, truly a place where all are equal and welcome? Liberty, equality and fraternity cannot be only for white, or Christian Europeans, but for all.