In the blighted housing projects that ring Paris, the meandering rhythms of North African and West African pop music have merged with the jumpy rasp of urban hip-hop to express the growing alienation of the country's young immigrants.
"Police patrols always there to bug us," goes one popular tune.
"The only way to make yourself heard is to burn cars."
The young men who listen to the music loiter in communal entryways, wearing hooded sweatshirts, backward-turned baseball caps and sullen stares. More often than not, their mothers and sisters wear the headscarves and shapeless gowns commanded by the local mosque.
Bondy is typical of the banlieues - suburbs - on the outskirts of France's major urban areas. Its 48,000 inhabitants come from 65 countries but mainly from North Africa. In overwhelmingly Catholic France, about 70 percent of Bondy's residents are Muslim.
The banlieues also are home to soaring crime and to the country's highest unemployment.
The result is a widening cultural and economic fissure that undermines France's cherished values of liberte, egalite and fraternite.
When Abdoul Sissoko, an 18-year-old high school student born in Mali, takes the brief bus ride from Bondy into Paris, he said he feels like he is entering a "different country," one where he does not feel welcome. Many Parisians would no doubt have the same feeling if they ventured out to Bondy. In the political arena, the division has stirred a nervous and contentious national debate on who and what is French.
Growing doubts about the nation's ability to integrate Europe's largest Muslim community help explain why 6 million Frenchmen voted for the far-right xenophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2002 presidential elections. And why Nicolas Sarkozy, the law-and-order interior minister who has cracked down on the young men of the banlieues, is France's most popular politician.
It also helps explain why, in recent days, a dispute over whether Muslim schoolgirls should be allowed to wear headscarves in the classroom has turned into a constitutional crisis.
Jean-Yves Tarnier, 19, who arrived nearly two years ago from Brazzaville, in the Congo, was hanging out recently on a street corner with his friend Sissoko. Tarnier said that he felt "half French and half not."
"The French half is on paper," he said tapping the identity documents in his pocket. "The other half is the reality of our daily life."
He has no job. None of his friends has a job. "How? Where?" he asks with a shrug. "The police see a young immigrant and they see a suspect. And for us, the police are our bete noire."
Already strained relations between police and the young immigrants in the housing projects worsened after the 2002 elections when Interior Minister Sarkozy introduced a package of laws that made loitering in public areas an offense that carries a two-month jail sentence and swearing at a police officer a crime with a two-year sentence and $30,000 fine.
Sarkozy, who has ambitions for higher office, also lowered to 13 the age at which young offenders can be sent to juvenile detention centers.
Polls suggest the crackdown has wide public approval. These days, a common sight in the Paris Metro is that of a half dozen police officers checking the identity papers of two or three dark-skinned youths. French police are not squeamish about racial profiling. Some social scientists warn that the crackdown only further alienates the immigrant youths, pushing them toward crime, drugs and militant Islam.
For hard-line Islamists, the housing projects have long been a fertile recruiting ground. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the U.S. in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, spent part of his youth in a housing project outside the coastal city of Bayonne before hooking up with al-Qaida in London. In recent days, there have been media reports of young radicals from France making their way to Iraq to fight against Americans.
Bilal, a 29-year-old convert to Islam and youth worker who lives in Bondy, complained that French media played on popular misconceptions about Muslims, but he also offered an insight into his own sense of identity.
"For me, first and foremost is my identity as a Muslim," said Bilal, whose family is of European background and who declined to allow his full name to be published.
"Certainly, I would feel closer to a Chechen Muslim or an Iraqi Muslim than I would to a non-Muslim French citizen," said Bilal, who wears a skullcap and wispy beard. "My nationality is my faith."
Karim Mansouri, 29, another youth worker in Bondy, took strong exception to Bilal's view.
"He should distinguish between nationality and religion. They are separate things," Mansouri said.
Like many French citizens of North African origin, Mansouri insisted he feels completely French. His family emigrated from Algeria when he was an infant. He speaks very little Arabic, and when he visits relatives in Algeria, he feels "completely lost and out of place."
He argued that being Muslim was entirely compatible with being French. "Do you have to eat pork to be French?" he said.
"The authorities say we (Muslims) have a problem with integration, but that's an excuse," he continued. "The real problem is jobs. If they spent money on education and training and jobs, there wouldn't be a problem in these neighborhoods. Instead they spend it on these Sarkozy laws which contribute to this feeling of exclusion and discrimination."
Vincent Geisser, an academic and author of a recent book called "The New Islamophobia," has studied the behaviors of the young men in the banlieues. "Ninety-nine percent of them don't speak a word of Arabic. Their parents' country is not their country," he said. "They feel French. They have national pride, and they feel that democracy is what allows them to practice Islam … (which) is part of their identity."
The problem, he said, is that France, unlike the U.S., was generally "uncomfortable" with religion and "especially Islam because it is the one that is the most dynamic now."
On a recent evening, Muslims and non-Muslims gathered in a Bondy community center for an iftar, the traditional meal that is eaten at the end of the dawn-to-dusk Ramadan fast. The occasion was sponsored by the municipality. The food was North African and so was the music, but without the hostile lyrics.
"They come from so many different places, but you can see the big majority really want to be integrated," said Brigitte Fouvez, a jovial Frenchwoman who is Bondy's deputy mayor and one of the organizers of the iftar.
During the day, the community center offers a range of classes aimed mainly at women.
"We teach them how to spend, how to buy, how to count, how to survive in this country," Fouvez said. "They have to understand the system they live in. The women especially. It's the women who will transmit the values to the children."
Asked what she considered the main obstacle to integration, Fouvez had a blunt answer: "The husbands."