Islam is considered a ‘threat’ by millions of French and Germans to their national identity.
A poll by France’s Le Monde newspaper also found a majority in both countries believe Muslims have ‘not integrated properly’.
Le Monde ran the results under a headline which brands efforts to get different religious communities to live side by side as a ‘failure’.
German Chancellor Merkel said her country’s cultural integration had failed, while in France Sarkozy’s government has displayed an increasing hard line towards religious extremism, recently banning Islamic veils
France, with seven million, and Germany, 4.3 million, have the largest Muslim communities in Europe. There are 2.4million in Britain.
Last year German Chancellor Angela Merkel conceded that her country’s multicultural society had ‘failed’, while French president Nicolas Sarkozy has also complained about the growing influence of radical Islam.
According to the Le Monde poll, carried out with marketing firm IFOP, 68 per cent of French and 75 per cent of Germans believe Muslims are ‘not well integrated into society’.
42 per cent of French and 40 per cent of Germans consider the presence of Islamic communities ‘a threat’ to their national identities.
Others – 55 per cent in France and 49 per cent in Germany – believe the ‘influence and visibility of Islam’ is ‘too large’, while 60 per cent in both countries say the reason for the problem is Muslims’ own ‘refusal’ to integrate.
Just as crucially, 42 per cent of French and 40 per cent of Germans consider the presence of Islamic communities ‘a threat’ to their national identities.
An editorial in Le Monde adds: ‘As Islam becomes a permanent and increasingly conspicuous fixture of European societies, public opinion is clearly tensing up, though disparities do appear between young and old and between Left and Right wing.’
Jerome Fourquet, of IFOP, said the results ‘go beyond linking immigration with security or immigration with unemployment, to linking Islam with a threat to identity’.
Two Muslim women wearing niqab in northern France. Sarkozy’s government recently banned Islamic veils and Sarkozy has courted the voters of hard-right parties as he tries to reassert traditional values
Mr Fourquet said he would like to extend the research to countries like the UK, where he believed the results would be much the same.
The threat of terrorism has increasingly been linked with Muslim communities in all European countries since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the 7/7 atrocities in London in 2005.
In France, Mr Sarkozy’s government has displayed an increasing hard line towards religious extremism, recently banning Islamic veils.
French foreign minister Michele Alliot-Marie said it was important not to confuse moderate Muslims with radical or fundamentalist parties.
She said: ‘The trap set by Al Qaeda was to push us towards a general confrontation, towards a war between the Muslim and Western worlds. We must watch out for anything that goes in that direction. We must not confuse Islam and terrorism.’
The poll questioned 1,600 people in France and Germany last month.
The intolerance that people condemn Islam today does not spring from rival vision of God but quite from other sources.
The West also has a problem. The fundamental weakness of both western civilization and Christianity is their inability to recognise that they share the planet not with inferiors but with EQUALS. Unless the Western civilization intellectually and socially, politically and economically, and the Christian church theologically, can learn to treat other men with fundamental respect, these two in their turn will have failed to come to terms with the actualities of the 21st century. The problems raised in this are, of course, as profound as anything touching on Islam. The reality is that Islam and the West share a common tradition. From the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims have recognised this, but the west cannot accept it.
Today, some Muslims are beginning to turn against the cultures of the People of the Book which have humiliated and despised them. A rejection to build a mosque near WIC site may help to turn the radicals against the West more. They have even begun to justify their hatred in the name of Islam which vehemently condemns hatred, pride and arrogance
The West should understand that a healthy and functioning Islam is crucial because it helps Muslim people to cultivate decent values and ideals which people in the west cherish. The West finds it difficult to cope with Islam because its ideas have been crude and dismissive. It belies its avowed commitment to tolerance and compassion for the pain and distress in the Muslim world (Siege of Gaza). Islam is not going to disappear or wither away. It would have been better if it had remained healthy and strong