The takeaway line from the Gallup poll (pdf) on Muslims and integration in western Europe is very simple: there is no correlation between religious observance and feeling alienated from the society around you; but this is what the society around Muslims believes.

Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies, said at the report's launch that:

If the integration debate defines people as people looking the same or thinking the same in terms of morality, then it's natural for general public to assume Muslims are not loyal, but if the focus is widened and takes into account how people actually identify with their country and how much they identify with institutions, then it would draw a different picture. The data would suggest that the public is getting a narrow picture of integration and thereby drawing a false conclusion.

The figures that Gallup has produced are quite startling, and apply both to beliefs and symbols. In England, Germany and France, the three countries surveyed, Muslims are twice as likely as the general public to suppose that Muslims are loyal citizens. In Germany and the UK, they have higher confidence in the police and the judiciary than the general public (in France, where they are also over-represented in the prison system, they also mistrust the authorities more).

They are also, in all the countries surveyed, much less likely to want to live in communities made up predominantly of their own ethnic and religious population than the general public, though British Muslims are those most favourable towards the idea in Europe.

The second, startling fact, is that while almost everyone agrees that having a job is very important if you are to integrate into wider society, British Muslims place less value on both jobs and education as necessary for integration than any other group. Even so, 70% of them agree that finding a job is necessary to integrate, and 76% that education is (compared to the 95% of German Muslims, for instance, who hold these views.) In this light, it is frightening that the actual employment for British Muslims is only 38% – again, a huge outlier from all the other populations surveyed.

These polls are not ideal. The sample size, though large in absolute terms (with 500 Muslims and 1000 non-Muslims surveyed in each country) is not large enough to eliminate a large margin of error (5% for the Muslim figures, 3% for the general public) so only the broadest pictures are trustworthy and some results, such as the 0% of British Muslims apparently tolerant of homosexual acts are not to be taken literally. The full report is available here as a pdf for anyone who wants to poke at the figures.

Within this broad and blurry picture, it is possible to see the outlines of a clear argument between the British, or multicultural, model of integration and the French, secularising one. On some measures, the British come out worse, or at least more boorish: only half of British Muslims strongly agree that they always treat of other faiths with respect, compared to two-thirds of French Muslims; in both cases, the figure for the general population is about 10% higher. Similarly, and this is surely part of the legacy of the Rushdie affair, five times as many non-Muslim as Muslim Britons feel that integration demands that people accept public comments they perceive as offensive about their faith or ethnicity. In both France and Germany, Muslims are less sensitive and non-Muslims less keen on their right to offend.

In practice, however, 90% of all the groups surveyed agree that they had been treated with respect all day the day before.

The French, however, are much more divided about issues of religious symbolism, and much less likely to tolerate headscarves as legitimate symbols of loyal diversity. More than half the British public thinks that removing the veil is necessary to integrate minorities, compared to only an eights of Muslims. But that was the only item of religiously identifying clothing which a majority of the British rejected, whereas clear majorities of the French rejected headscarves, yarmulkes, turbans and "visible large crosses" as well. About a quarter of French Muslims also thought these were obstacles to immigration.