"surrounded by secular Western culture and by what many Muslims see as a subtle bigotry among the French against Arabs."
The French are bigots? Against Arabs? No! The French are too tolerant, enlightened and sophisticated for such base emotions.
Absolutely.
It is a little know fact of Galactic history that Vulcans are descended from the French, when a piece of the Nexus brushed Earth in the late 19th Century, and sucked a French village to ancient, unpopulated, Vulcan.
That is why the Vulcans able to develop their unemotionally logical abilities later.