Men forcing women to remove their clothes is never going to look like freedom, equality, and encouraging “good morals”, no matter the justification. There are now 15 French towns that have targeted beach-loving Muslim women in the wake of July’s terrorism-linked murders in Nice and Normandy. When the inevitable pictures of French police enforcing the burkini ban emerged this week, we saw not an effective counter-terrorism measure, but a clumsy attempt to push back against Islam’s visibility in France.

Keen to win over anti-immigration supporters from the right in his forthcoming bid for the French presidency, the former head of state Nicolas Sarkozy jumped in to the debate yesterday evening, claiming that burkinis are a sartorial prison and a “provocation” that supports radicalised Islam.

It’s a theme being repeated all over Europe, where the palpable fear of Islamic religiosity conflates its most extreme, violent and – as Charles Kurzman argues in his book The Missing Martyrs – rare form with the peaceable faith of ordinary Muslims. Yet we know from researching the lives of Muslims in western countries that most do not want to hide away in isolated ghettos, or abandon their cultural heritage and assimilate into invisibility. They want to find a happy balance between the two: adapting and integrating into western societies, and being acknowledged as fully contributing and worthy citizens in the nation states they call home.

It’s in this middle way between isolation and assimilation that the burkini emerged in Australia more than a decade ago. It was the creation of Aheda Zanetti, who wanted to design swimwear for Muslim women keen to splash around in the water with everyone else, but who still wanted to observe aspects of traditional Islamic modesty.

It’s the same reason that a plethora of hijabi fashionistas have sprung up on social media, the most popular of whom is a young British woman known as Dina Tokio. With an Egyptian father, an English mother and a London accent, she has over half-a-million subscribers on YouTube who watch her reviewing halal nailpolish (the ordinary stuff is no good as water cannot permeate during washing for daily prayers) and give make-up and turban-wrapping tutorials for trendy Muslim girls. Tokio epitomises the fusion of an Islamic religious identity with the multibillion-dollar beauty industry that has barely begun to tap the female Muslim market.

It’s not just clothes and fashion that the religious are adapting to meet the needs they have as western Muslims. You can watch non-swearing stand-up comedians joke about “flying while Muslim”, as you eat turkey bacon on your pizza and drink non-alcoholic beer. Modern Islamic finance was developed in the Muslim-majority world as a response to western markets and global banking in the 20th century, designed to avoid interest-based lending and non-halal investments in pork, alcohol, and gambling; and to encourage risk-sharing: all pillars of sharia-based commerce.

These, along with the burkini, are examples of how Muslims are evolving and adapting to living western lives. Stretching extra material around your arms, legs and head is not the provocative symbol of foreign subjugation. There is no place for a beach-loving, burkini-clad woman in Islamic State’s perverted vision of female segregation where women are completely hidden and trapped. But I suspect even French politicians know that.

The rise of rightwing anti-immigrant movements, such as Pegida in Germany, who find their greatest support among the struggling working class and unemployed, is worrying – as is the almost phobic reaction of political elites to any form of public religiosity. This is the context in which marginalised Muslims are vulnerable to terrorist recruiters.

The good news is that the vast majority of Muslims are resilient. Those who are religious – not all Muslims, it must be recognised – are successfully finding ways of adapting reasonable faith requirements to daily living in western nations. Whether western political leaders can afford to recognise this, and undermine rightwing nationalism, is another question.