Ever since President Jacques Chirac announced his intention to ban the wearing of “all ostensible religious signs” in state schools, firebrand Muslim clerics have taken to Al Jazeera, lambasting the archenemy of Islam, France and its impious laicite, or secularism. At the other end of the political spectrum, libertarians and civil-society advocates at home and abroad have mounted a rear-guard offensive (in the guise of a moral crusade) against the authoritarian, racist and freedom-hating French state. Why on earth, they ask, should a few square inches of linen covering the hair of chaste and modest Muslim teenagers threaten France’s identity? What’s so special about the French–their laicite, their cuisine, their haute culture fashion that they so parade down the catwalks of Westernized life? After all, everyone knows Paris has become a mere touristic outpost of EuroDisney. So why the fuss?

The issue is being hotly debated in the National Assembly right now, drawing commentary left, right and center in most languages of the globe. All this is very different from the Frog-bashing and trashing we French grew accustomed to over the past year. Like America, France is a country of immigrants–except that, until fairly recently, it didn’t show. Open the Paris phone book to any page, and you’ll come upon dozens of names (like mine) that are not French. Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Central European and North African Jews came en masse over the last century, aspiring to become (to quote an old Yiddish saying) “happy as God in France.” And many did, judging from the register of France’s cultural, political and business elite.

Now comes the more recent immigrant wave–millions of Muslims who began arriving with the end of France’s colonial empire. It was a time when France, emerging from World War II, was greedy for cheap labor. At first they were politically and culturally invisible; most were bachelors. But they didn’t go back as expected and instead made France their home. They brought their wives, kids and fathered more children in France, most getting French citizenship. Yet the success that previous immigrants enjoyed did not grace them. The ’70s and ’80s were years of massive unemployment, and unskilled labor from North Africa paid an especially high toll. Fathers on the dole were hardly role models. With no upward mobility, the social attractiveness of French society got blurred. The kids were French; often they spoke no other language. But many felt estranged as traditional engines of integration–the workplace, unions, schools and Army–failed them.

Meanwhile, on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Islamist movements started to replace nationalists as the beacons of cultural identity. Around 1989–the year the Berlin wall toppled, on the 200th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille–they made a momentous breakthrough in France itself. Muslim brothers and their ilk started to build, brick by brick, a cultural fortress–those so-called suburbs of Islam. Wearing a veil at school was its symbol. The idea was to erect a cultural barrier, a no trespassing sign. Schooling, the zealots claimed, echoing their counterparts in Egypt or Algeria, led nowhere but to cultural adulteration–a betrayal of Islamic identity that was not even rewarded by jobs.

To them, assimilation into French society amounts to apostasy. By contrast, veiling is the means to rebuild on the shores of impiety a Community of the Faithful. Within its walls the newborn Islamist can find a pious spouse. Children can be raised “traditionally.” The great causes of the Muslim world can be espoused as Islamists elsewhere see them: Palestine, Bosnia, jihad in Algeria or the United States. Pressures on “bad Muslims” who do not wear higabs, on Arab-looking youth who do not fast for Ramadan in projects patrolled by salafi tough guys, has increased. Videos praising armed war against the infidels in general, and Jews in particular, have sneaked onto Web sites. In class, teaching the Shoah meets with hostility, while fights with Jewish kids break out on playgrounds whenever Al Jazeera displays the previous day’s scenes of Israeli repression in Gaza or the burial of a “martyr” of the intifada.

These phenomena have been extremely worrying to authorities–and devastating for the traditional French public. Not all higab-covered pupils condone such attitudes, obviously, but the veil is part and parcel of a splintering of the schools and the broader community along religious fault lines. That undermines the very purpose of education: to instill shared knowledge that allows pupils to develop not only themselves, but a shared future and freedom. The controversy over veils, yarmulkes, crosses and headscarves is but a symptom. The deeper problem is social–the underlying failure of French (and European) economies and programs to lift up Europe’s immigrant poor.

Critics say that banning headscarves is thus a Band-Aid, a conservative effort to halt the ripping of our schools’ fabric. Clearly, it is not meant to cure broader ills. But it stops France’s social unraveling on at least one front, and with luck and political leadership could initiate the process by which France finds its way to a new secularist covenant between all children of the country, whatever their origin or creed. Jean Jaures, a father of French socialism, once remarked that the republic could not be secular if it were not social–if it did not meet the material needs of its disparate citizens. In those days, schools spotted promising young immigrants early and boosted them with scholarships into the elite. If we are to ask the new Muslim generation to enter mainstream French culture, we must put Jaures’s social elevator into motion once again.