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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
There is widespread concern today about the "radicalization" of young muslim men, and the deprived areas of Western cities are believed to have become breeding grounds of home-grown extremism. But how do young Muslims growing up in the cities of the West really live? This book takes us beyond the rhetoric and into the housing estates on the outskirts of Paris to meet Adama, Radouane, Hassan, Tarik, Marley, and a shadowy figure whose name suddenly and brutally became known to the world at the time of the Charlie Hebdo shootings: Amédy Coulibaly. Seeing Amédy through the eyes of close friends and other young Muslim men in the neighbourhoods where they grew up, Fabien Truong uncovers a network of competing loyalties and maps the road these youths take to resolve the conflicts they face: becoming Muslim. For these young men, Islam stands, often alone, as a resource, a gateway - as if it were the last route to "escape" without betrayal and to "fight" in a meaningful and noble way. Becoming Muslim does not necessarily lead to the radicalized "other". It is more like a long-distance race, a powerful reconversion of the self that allows for introspection and change. But it can also lead to a belligerent presentation of the self that transforms a dead-end into a call to arms.
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Seitenzahl: 417
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Note to the Reader
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Call of the Ground
Friday the 13th
Behind absurdity, the social world
The magic of “radicalization”
A bad religion for “bad seeds”?
Finding Allah at street level
Notes
1 Common Histories
Making a home in public housing: a French history “Boys will be boys”
Conflicting loyalties, recognition of debts
“A white fence-post in a black forest”
Rebels without a cause, or a cause without rebels?
Notes
2 On the Margins of the City
Imprints of school
The incompleteness of le business
Common criminals
Masculine machines
Police, death, and hatred: a political trinity
Notes
3 Reconversions
Being or becoming Muslim? The “community” illusion
The Koran: reading and sharing
In the here and now: getting better
Beyond the here and now: being the best
The value of reconversion and the reconversion of values
Notes
4 War and Peace
Turning 30: the verdict
Toward a sociology of inner peace
Kif-kif
Desires for Syria: going off to war, over there
“I am Amédy”: at war, over here
Notes
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Radicalized Loyalties
Becoming Muslim in the West
Fabien Truong
Translated by Seth Ackerman and supervised by Fabien Truong
polity
First published in French as Loyautés radicales. L’islam et les “mauvais garçons” de la Nation © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2017
This English edition © Fabien Truong, 2018
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1938-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Truong, Fabien, author.
Title: Radicalized loyalties : becoming Muslim in the West / Fabien Truong.
Other titles: Loyautes radicales. English
Description: Cambridg, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity, 2018. | Translation of: Loyautes radicales. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017052169 (print) | LCCN 2018005535 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509519385 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509519347 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509519354 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Muslim youth--France--Attitudes. | Children of immigrants--France--Attitudes. | Male juvenile delinquents--France--Attitudes. | Muslims--Cultural assimilation--France. | Islamic fundamentalism--France. | Suburbs--France--Social conditions. Classification: LCC DC34.5.M87 (ebook) | LCC DC34.5.M87 T7813 2018 (print) | DDC 305.235/10882970944--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052169
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Percival Everett, excerpt from I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel. Copyright © 2009 by Percival Everett. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
NOTE TO THE READER
I hope you will make your way through this book comfortably. It is at once a tale, a study, and an essay. In it you will find life stories, known facts, theory. All invite you to move beyond your initial reactions, whether the experiences of the boys recounted here are familiar to you or foreign.
If you are keen on details, references, and sources, the notes will be useful to you. They are essential if you want to go further, and they acknowledge the texts to which I am indebted. If you don’t like being interrupted, please ignore them. They will still be there for you at the end of the book.
The quotations are from transcripts of hundreds of hours of interviews and conversations. The words are those of the subjects of the study. To have dispensed with them would have been to pretend. Almost all of these conversations were recorded. As for the rest, it will be understood that in certain situations it would have been neither desirable nor respectful. This book, then, is also to some extent Adama’s, Marley’s, Tarik’s, Radouane’s, and Hassan’s. Other than Amédy Coulibaly, all of the names have been changed to protect their anonymity. Certain identifying details have been altered. If you think you recognize someone you know, you are certainly mistaken. But it will not be by accident. All of these boys carry with them the weight of a social world that overshadows them. They represent.
Expressions in italics denote concepts and ideas that will be built up as we go. These are the linchpins of my argument. I hope you will be able to make critical use of them.
Finally, forgive me for addressing you, the reader, so informally. Carrying out research, practicing social science, and writing all have certain common purposes: to move about, to keep a record, to seek understanding. I like to think that these help us articulate our differences and better see how we are ultimately so much alike. When it comes to such a task, I am more comfortable in the mode of “you” and “I.” Especially in an era afflicted with so much “them” and “us.”
Fabien Truong
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is dedicated to Tarik, Radouane, Adama, Marley, and Hassan, as well as all those who appear in cameos or who disappeared from the text in order to be present in the study. You know who you are, I know what I owe you. I hope I have been worthy of your trust and generosity.
Thanks to Souleymane, Hélène, and Raymonde for guiding my initial steps in Grigny, along with Gérôme; and to all the local boys and other residents who in one way or another crossed paths with them. The work continues. My profound gratitude goes to Amar for his hospitality and his sense of “interlocution”: this study simply would not have been possible without him.
This book benefited indirectly from daily discussions with all of my academic colleagues, “subjects,” friends, and comrades with whom I engage on other fronts. You, too, know who you are and you have my warmest regards: if sociology is a martial art, it is also a collective sport.
The book benefited more directly from Gérôme Truc’s close reading, our nightly debriefings, as well as astute comments from Nicolas Duvoux and Stéphane Beaud. They are in no way responsible for the content of this book, however. I cannot neglect the invaluable logistics that underpinned the research and writing: Jean-Pierre and Christophe at Saint-Ouen; support from the Université Paris-8, the Cultures et Sociétés Urbaines staff at the Centre de Recherches Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris, and from the CNRS with the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique and the REAT project; the invaluable behind-the-scenes work of “team Vladimir” (Margot, Pauline, Laurianne, Ilan, Maxime, and Vlad). For the English version, many thanks to Seth Ackerman and his clear insight during our linguistic ping-pong games, Marc Saint-Upéry for putting us in touch so quickly, as well as Emily Luytens and Les Back for their initial comments.
Thanks go to my publishers: Hugues Jallon, Rémi Toulouse, Marie-Soline Royer – who read the manuscript with her customary attention to detail – and Pascale Iltis for enthusiastically welcoming this project to La Découverte; John Thompson at Polity Press for his early confidence and suggestions – and all the editing and publicist team. Special thanks go to Loïc Wacquant for generously initiating that encounter.
A final word for my family and friends, who have been so understanding. And then, a “more-than-thanks” to Rachael for everything that I cannot write here but that mattered so much.
To Oscar and Félix for having been so curiously unperturbed. I hope someday you will better understand the meaning of those days and nights spent far from home.
To the memory of Pierre-Yves, and of Anne who is with him.
INTRODUCTION: THE CALL OF THE GROUND
The only things that ever trickles down to poor people is rain, and that ain’t much more than God’s piss.
Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poitier
Friday the 13th
It was an overcast late afternoon on November 13, 2015, when I first visited Grigny, in the southern suburbs of Paris. Accompanied by my friend and colleague Gérôme, I met up with a neighborhood group that had formed the day after the January 2015 attacks targeting the staff of Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes in Paris. Grigny, like many working-class towns in the Paris suburbs, has long held a sinister reputation among outsiders. But ever since “Charlie,” it has borne an extra weight: Amédy Coulibaly, the Hyper Cacher killer, was one of its children. Its tower blocks were swiftly branded as breeding grounds of hate. In reaction to what they experienced as yet another punishment, the locals collected hundreds of anonymous responses from residents through the streets of the town. Now, ten months after the attacks, an idea took shape: to display the messages in a ceremony of peace and commemoration. The group was overwhelmed by the outpouring of words they’d gathered, and they put out a call for help. Gérôme and I responded, as sociologists. It was a chance to work together and contribute to what we saw as a thoughtful initiative. Our first meeting, on November 13, stretched on into the evening. The encounter was full of promise. For several hours we spoke about the January attacks and daily life in the neighborhood. As night began to fall, we made plans for next steps. Gérôme went back to Paris. I stayed in the southern suburbs to meet up with two childhood friends, musicians in Alfortville: for nearly 10 years we had made the rounds of all the concert halls with our punk-metal band – a time that now seemed as if from another life. Gradually I shed my sociologist’s skin and prepared to spend a relaxed evening with old companions. As I arrived at my destination, I did not yet know that a few kilometers away, a black VW Polo was about to start up. Inside were three “boys,”* not yet in their thirties, armed with assault rifles. They were headed for Paris. Destination: the Bataclan.
When the first rounds of gunfire broke out, Tarik grasped immediately that lives were being lost in rapid succession. He was a few hundred meters away, about to see a show by Dieudonné, the comedian convicted of “defamation, insult, and incitement to racial hatred” and accused of fanning the flames of social separatism in the French suburbs. Tarik lives in one of these infamous suburban towns: La Courneuve. He happened to have chosen that evening to go see for himself whether the controversial comic was any good. Now, none of that mattered. He knew the sound of explosions too well to be left in any doubt as to their consequences. The crackle of gunfire hurtled him back to a childhood marked by the bloody raids of the Groupe islamique armé in Algeria.† And it brought back the turmoil of an adolescence spent rising through the ranks of the drug trade, where claiming a piece of the pie means carrying a piece, too. When word came that these murders had been carried out in the name of the religion he espouses, his anger exploded. By contrast, Radouane was untouched by anger when he read the news on his phone. Unlike Tarik, he didn’t linger on the endlessly looping images. Sitting on the couch in his family’s living room, he felt nothing. Not disgust, not empathy; no rage, not even joy. He stopped watching television and barely read the press, sickened by what he saw as an industry of permanent lies. He felt empty. He knew that yet another line had been breached in the all-round loathing of “us Muslims.” The idea that this really was a war between two camps seemed that much closer to crystallizing.
I had first met Tarik and Radouane eight years earlier, along a different frontline. Then, we were divided by the surface of a gray desk and the frame of a whiteboard. I was starting out as an economics and social science teacher in Seine-Saint-Denis, another unpopular area encircling Paris, on the north side; Tarik and Radouane belonged to the multi-hued ranks of “my” students. That was now in the past: Tarik had left school a long time before, Radouane had gone on to pursue lengthy studies. I now teach in Saint-Denis at the University of Paris 8, having become a scholar studying the personal trajectories of my former students.1 My sociologist’s skin has thickened since then, and the setting of our initial acquaintance has become a web of lasting connections. But that Friday evening, this shared history was an insignificant detail, lost in the growing maelstrom.
In Alfortville, anguish turned to shock when my friends learned that two close acquaintances of theirs had been in the crowd at the Bataclan – a venue we knew well, and which we feared had attracted friends from our circle that night. Phones lit up, and the statistics were grim: one of their acquaintances would emerge from the carnage alive, the other would not. At this point we were still unaware that Pierre-Yves, one of “our” sound engineers, had been executed at point-blank range along with his wife. It was three days later that we discovered his death. I hadn’t seen him in several years. The echoes of his big, generous laugh now stay with me: a dim memory, tracing the contours of another life, cut down by the absurd.
Behind absurdity, the social world
Such events force us to confront the meaninglessness of existence, to acknowledge those moments when, in Albert Camus’s words, “the stage sets collapse” and we are condemned to “keeping the absurd alive.”2 And yet there’s something unsatisfying about turning senseless events into solitary observation posts, sustaining the narcissistic fiction of our isolated egos when in reality the ordeal is assuredly collective. That Friday night, the shock was compounded by the chasm between the premeditation of those on one side and the insouciance of those on the other, ignorant of the violence that was about to befall them. It was as if the stench of killing had laid bare the unsteady points of our social compasses.
As the enormity of the carnage became clear, the whole of society raised its voice. The fabric of interpersonal relations and the drama of what was collectively happening to “us” were all put on display in an uncontrolled unspooling of individual emotions. That is what Gérôme meant when he observed, in a study of the attacks in New York in 2001, Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005, that with “a multiplicity of meanings of ‘we,’ our reactions to attacks demonstrate a heightened sense of ‘I,’ which leads us to sympathize with the fate of the victims on the basis less of a shared belonging than of a shared singularity.”3 For Tarik, memories flooded back of the paternal shotgun enthroned in the living room of his Algerian home. Radouane noted the strange disjuncture between his feeling of numb disillusion and the emotion stirred in him by the misery of Syrian or Palestinian children, in a confused juxtaposition of guilty parties. For me, nights spent with Pierre-Yves, and our band’s farewell show, where he’d brilliantly handled the sound, came back like flashes of light. Such is the web of impressions spontaneously linking together our jolted individual selves – alongside a rather indistinct “We.”
Each wave of Islamist attacks on European soil heightens the fragility of a “We” that seems parachuted in from above, stripped of its trappings of “givenness” the more it is chanted like a slogan. The periods of official tribute and reflection that follow such attacks no longer yield unanimous assent: they’re also becoming times of suspicion and tension. Such moments are about being together, but also about being counted, being seen, feeling out the apparent fissures – as if, amid such emotion, differences can’t coexist without being reduced to sealed-off blocs. It’s as if “to be Charlie” or “not to be Charlie” were the only question that mattered, inviting us to sport distinctive outward markers: je suis or je ne suis pas.4 The connection between “We” and “I” seemed to vanish in the face of “Us” versus “Them.” Scapegoats, demons, moral panics, outsiders – the logic of blame is well known.5 Today, the threat has a generic name: Muslims.
Such Manichean binaries give meaning to the absurdity of violence by replacing careful explanations, connections between cause and effect, and collective responsibility with “culture talk.”6 They feed the reassuring prophecy of a “clash of civilizations” while expressing that “attitude of longest standing, which no doubt has a firm psychological foundation, as it tends to reappear in each one of us when we are caught unawares, [which] is to reject out of hand the cultural institutions … which are furthest removed from those with which we identify ourselves.”7 On the Western side, the old colonial image of Islam, layered with “cultural antipathy,” morphs into a “cultural war” against a supposed Muslim International.8 As the political scientist Arun Kundnani writes, “in the West, people make culture; in Islam, culture makes people.”9 Islamist discourse deploys a similar, if more direct, rhetoric, proposing to “manage barbarism” and “liquidate the gray zone” between Muslims and infidels.10 It stresses the depravity of Western society, an amoral world of “unbelievers” driven by passions and impulses, where culture is mere windowdressing to camouflage the basest proclivities. Ostracized “Muslims” and “unbelievers” share the same failing: they are prisoners of nature, their nature. They are “Jews” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s sense: a problem to be solved, men subject to others’ gaze, rather than fully fledged individuals.11
In such a setting, the Muslim religion becomes “racial,”12 as the essayist Moustafa Bayoumi puts it: its visible features are turned into problems and symbols. Beards, kaftans, hijabs, or burkinis eerily resemble the skin and hair of the “Negro” described by W. E. B. Du Bois in his day.13 France, in this war of imaginaries, possibly represents an even more powerful symbol than the United States. If 9/11 could appear as a strike against the West’s financial power and military dominance, attacking Paris – its cafés, streets, magazines, football stadiums, concert venues – is a declaration of war on entertainment, hedonism, or aestheticism. The fight to eradicate terrorism is no longer just a struggle for freedom of thought or the free market. Now it’s about defending a liberal and open way of life against the dictatorship of a closed and fundamentalist world.14 In this sense, the images of France under siege may well add a dash of soul to the axis of evil sketched by George W. Bush in 2002.
But what does such an imaginary tell us about Tarik, seated with his friends at the café terrace next door to that of “La Belle Equipe,” a few minutes before 19 people lost their lives in that multicultural bistro? What does it tell us about Radouane’s impassiveness in the face of these murders, at the end of a long day spent in his Paris office as an accounts manager, a day that began at five in the morning in his neighborhood mosque? Almost nothing – except perhaps that the world runs on categorizations that reduce reality to acceptable representations. Amid so much confusion, only one certainty remains: humans are, most often, social animals without knowing it.
The magic of “radicalization”
One word has come to the fore to give meaning to these dilemmas: “radicalization.” Though now used by journalists, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, the term was first popularized by decision-makers and policy experts after September 11, 2001. According to Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence in London, the rapid spread of the term is explained by its vagueness: “the idea of radicalisation” makes it possible to talk about everything that happens “before the bomb goes off” without having to grapple with the “‘root causes’ of terrorism” – a notion always suspected of fostering an irresponsible culture of excuses.15 For profiling purposes, “radicalization” narrows the focus to the various milestones along the path taken by the “terrorist next door.” It allows us to name the indescribable, to shield ourselves from terror by placing a label on its origins.16 But as Guy Debord observed about the use of the word “terrorism”: “what is important in this commodity is the packing, or the labeling: the price codes.”17
“Radicalization” aims to describe a specific phenomenon: the emergence of what psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman calls the new generation of “homegrown terrorists,” groups of friends who turn against the countries where, for the most part, they were born.18 As long as the enemy still came from outside, there was no cause to speak of “radicalization.” The word “terrorism” was quite sufficient: the attacks were committed by foreigners, radically “other.” When the enemy comes from inside, the question of betrayal arises: the tipping point where “us” becomes “them.” The stakes here are considerable: to protect ourselves from these locally grown enemies, we must first know who they are. In France, the 1990s witnessed the rise of what the sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar terms “Islamism without Islam”: marginalized individuals whose life-courses begin in social and emotional poverty, leading to delinquency and prison, and then to an ostentatious religiosity aimed at regaining a lost dignity.19 Twenty years later, “radicalization” now helps to fill in this picture of failed “integration.” How could such hardline fundamentalism meet with a wish for murder and death – here, in France?
“Radicalization” is both a practical and an analytical category. As a practical category it’s deployed in a variety of arenas that aim to improve public safety, as a way of giving meaning to ordinary life experiences: teachers ask themselves whether this or that pupil has been “radicalized”; appeals for vigilance proliferate; the public is called upon to report “signs of radicalization”; politicians finance “de-radicalization programs.” As an analytical category, radicalization is mobilized by social scientists to denote everything that happens “before the bomb goes off,” but with different and sometimes contradictory meanings, none of which commands unanimous scientific assent.20 Despite this semantic cacophony, all these usages share something implicit: radicalization is about wayward individuals, the culmination of a succession of steps in a biographical trajectory. A slippery-slope motif emerges in all the posthumous commentaries on “homegrown terrorists” – those anti-stars whose anonymous pasts are suddenly dissected to identify the moments of personal failings and failures that led to the irreparable. The psychologist Fathali Moghaddam’s so-called “staircase” model, often used in deradicalization programs, gives a typical picture: involvement in terrorism depends on an individual’s capacity to cope with feelings of injustice and frustration, and this capacity is challenged over a succession of steps.21 That means better individual profiling is needed, a task that became all the more urgent as the portraits of would-be martyrs grew more complex over the 2000s. After Daesh supplanted Al Qaeda and Syria went up in flames, the territorial conflict moved closer to the gates of Europe. Now school graduates, members of economically prosperous families, “converts,” “whites,” girls, even children, are climbing an increasingly accessible staircase, further blurring the relationship between the “us,” the “them,” and the “I.” If sociological variables no longer seem decisive, and if free will and voluntary servitude aren’t politically acceptable explanations, then a narrative comes to the fore in which fragile individuals gradually tumble into a violent ideology. This, in turn, calls for a struggle against the persuasive force of that ideology’s accredited conduits (“the Koran,” “imams,” “Salafists,” “the Internet,” “Daesh,” “prison,” etc.). The label is bolstered with each new case, but it’s as if the word is always trying to catch up with the reality. The increasingly innovative updated versions of it – “pre-radicalization,” “highspeed radicalization,” “solitary radicalization,” “self-radicalization,” “online radicalization” – merely underscore its inability to make sense of the world. It has become a rallying cry for preventive and remedial action: as the sociologist Stuart Hall would say, it is a veritable “conductor” of the crisis.22 It seems wiser to abandon the term and, instead, to observe what it seeks to explain: the seductive power of the ideology of “martyrdom,” the call for political violence, and Islam’s attraction for a whole swath of young people.
Ideological explanations are, at best, tautological: it’s obvious that any young person ready to die for the glory of the Prophet adheres profoundly to a firm system of belief. But political allegiance and moral justification are at least as much consequences as causes. Scott Atran, one of the finest ethnographers of Middle East jihadism, made this clear when questioned by the US Senate about the threat posed by radical imams. He suggested that such clerics stand at the end of a long-distance race. Rather than genuine recruiting agents, they act more as “attractors,” thriving on convictions already deeply held.23 Radicalization by ideology functions as a myth. It offers a narrative about the origins and spread of evil, but ultimately says little about the phenomenon it supposedly describes. Its primary function is to “empty reality,” thus revealing our intimate relationship to it.24 Its focus on ideology signals a magical conception of religious belief, common to both jihadist propaganda and Western fears of radicalization. Faith in radical Islam is seen as leading to either paradise or barbarism, as if ideas float – and strike – in the air. But no religious belief or conception of the world can have sufficient weight to guide what people do unless it resonates in some way with their needs, practices, power relations, institutions. In short, it must deal with preexisting social expectations and constitute an effective and acceptable response to concrete problems. As Max Weber says, ideas are mere “switchmen” on the “tracks of action,” not impetuses to it. This was one of sociology’s very first findings.25 There is no religious essence contained within pure texts, impressing itself into blank minds – however adrift those minds may be. Islam is no exception to this universal dependence on historical context and sociological setting.26 If there is something like a staircase of terror, its woodwork is made from composite raw materials, a mix of social, economic, and political forces without which no one will ever ascend to their death in the serene certainty of their own election.
This magic of radicalization is a result of “culture talk” that pictures Islam as a body of frozen beliefs guided by an irrational logic (faith versus reflexivity), by withdrawal (a lack of integration versus civic participation), and by subordination (submission versus contestation). Such a uniform picture has no empirical basis. Every specialist in Islam contests it – starting with Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, though they frontally oppose each other in the debate on the origins of Islamist terrorism.27 Kepel sees contemporary jihadism as the expression of a “radicalization of Islam,” while Roy instead stresses an “Islamization of radicalism.” Kepel points to changes in the tone and targets of Islamist propaganda, and in interpretations of religious texts. In his view, these interpretations advance an increasingly uncompromising reading of the sacred texts and address themselves to the social margins of Western countries, assuming a seductive posture of victimhood. For Kepel, therefore, the spread of radicalization and the emergence of “third-generation jihadists” have been brought about by changes in ideology and Arabic texts. Olivier Roy instead sees continuity in the attacks France has experienced since the 1990s, pointing to their shared connection with working-class, outer-city neighborhoods, and the disappearance of any transformational political horizon in the era of globalization: Islamist fundamentalism now serves as the black flag of a “nihilist generation.” These alternatives – “third-generation” versus “nihilist generation” – besides being wholly theoretical, show where we end up when we start with a label that reduces everything that happens “before the bomb goes off” to the consequences of an ideological degeneration within the Muslim culture or faith. The issue then becomes a matter for Islamologists. Such experts are solicited for their opinions about “homegrown terrorists,” whom they only know from posthumous portraits in the press, and working-class neighborhoods which they don’t visit, or no longer do. Gilles Kepel’s explanation, centered on the ideology of Arabic texts, is puzzling in light of the fact that the young people who seem to be “radicalized” come to religion initially knowing little Arabic, and with only a sketchy understanding of the hadiths or the Koran. Unless we assume that beginners are always manipulable (though in that case, the number of terrorists should be significantly higher), this means we have to situate religious instruction within the context of tumultuous social, familial, educational, emotional, and spiritual trajectories. As for Olivier Roy’s thesis of the “Islamization of radicalism,” it frees itself of the “radicalization” label by providing an explanation centered on nihilism. But this is rather empty: “Islamization” rests on convictions, decisions, aspirations, projections, links of reciprocity or antagonism – not on “nothing.”
A bad religion for “bad seeds”?
We thus need to return to the patient observation of human beings. We must trace the connections between headlines and social reality, between minority life and majority life, between ordinary paths and extraordinary paths. Although French law prohibits tallying the population by religious adherence, in 2015 the Muslim population was estimated at around 4 million individuals – 6.8 percent of metropolitan France.28 For a majority of Muslims, religion is an important dimension of social identity, accentuated by higher levels of attendance at houses of worship and, above all, the ritual practices that punctuate daily life (consumption of halal meat, Ramadan, wearing a veil or a beard, etc.), especially among the youngest and descendants of immigrants.29 This phenomenon is made all the more visible by the fact that Muslim houses of worship are few in number and Muslims highly concentrated in neighborhoods relegated to the periphery of French cities.* The so-called “radical” version of Islam, usually associated with the Salafist current, remains a small minority. According to the Interior Ministry, it involved between 12,000 and 15,000 individuals in 2012, with the highest estimates ranging up to 30,000 individuals.30 As for the use of physical violence in the name of Islam, the government in November 2015 had official files on 10,500 individuals for “membership in or links with the Islamic movement.” For those who actually go on to take action, the primary outlet is overseas: departures for Syria and Iraq reportedly involved between 1,200 and 1,800 individuals, including around 250 who returned to France, with a recent increase in departures recorded since 2015.31 Finally, 21 “homegrown terrorists” have carried out deadly strikes on French soil since 2012. They are known for their repeated attacks, claiming 335 victims so far.†
Underlying this funnel-shaped set of figures is a relationship between continuities and ruptures. The staircase metaphor sketches a kind of continuity between religious faith, submission to dogma, increasingly rigoristic religious practice, and advancing to the point of violent action, punctuated by moments of psychological rupture that, through a weeding-out process, lead individuals to climb the ladder of radicalism. When we sound out the woodwork of the staircase and situate the turn to Islam within the time-scale of individual life-courses and collective histories – rather than the lightning speed of biographical radicalization – intermediate-level questions crop up, involving distinctions between the three principal objects of collective concern: (1) “homegrown terrorists” who want to strike their own country; (2) “candidates for departure” to Syria or Iraq; and (3) adherence to so-called “rigoristic” religious practices that are prescriptive in terms of lifestyle.
For “homegrown terrorists” who see themselves as being at war here, there is, indeed, a typical profile: boys, with immigrant backgrounds and “culturally Muslim” parents; working class, living in stigmatized urban outcast neighborhoods, with pasts in petty or large-scale crime; arriving late to religion. There are two overlapping questions here. First, how do these elements combine to form a system? And how do they constitute fertile soil for terrorism? Such consistent patterns are never trivial. If psychological fragility were the trigger in the majority of cases, the profiles of “homegrown terrorists” would be more heterogeneous.32 And, second, how do we explain the fact that these elements, even when combined, ultimately result in a small number of individuals actually taking action? Why don’t hundreds of thousands of young people with similar biographical details climb the staircase of terror more quickly? Are they stuck on lower levels, like time bombs? Or simply somewhere else? What is it that continues to act as a safety valve for them, despite all the difficulties? And what is the role of Islam in all of this? Can religion also be a pathway to certain forms of integration, pacification, or remediation for the nation’s “bad seeds”?
As for the “candidates for departure,” what attracts them to a religion of combat? What image do they hold of the war over there before their departures actually take place? Can an act resembling an escape to some “better” place really be put in the same category as obsessive planning and execution for a local attack – a classification that heedlessly adopts Daesh’s rhetoric about an International of “soldiers of the Caliphate”? Are these exactly the same logics? Compared to “homegrown terrorists,” the jihadists-in-training who cross borders to join the ranks of Daesh are more diverse in terms of background and gender. This should give us pause. Does it suggest a random distribution of individual fragility? Or is it, conversely, a sign that there are common logics running through the entire social body, crossing lines of gender or age? And now, another population which cannot be solely contemplated as “candidates” has emerged: the returnees.
Finally, what of the attraction to Islam and the value placed on an apparently “rigoristic” way of life, where religious rites and obligations mark the rhythm of daily life – this in a country that was built on the expulsion of God from the organized life of the polity? What accounts for the greater visibility of these practices, which serve as sources of tension in public spaces? How have they evolved over time? Why do a growing number of young people seem to adopt the Muslim religion as a second homeland, or as what Karl Marx called a “chimerical nationality”?33 What leads them to such powerful symbolic categories when, ultimately, religious practice governs a relatively small portion of the day? What demand for meaning and transcendence are such practices responding to? Are sacred values always about “identity”? What is the significance of this generational experience of faith and fidelity, which seems to reach beyond the circle of so-called “culturally Muslim” families? In this sense, is the usual distinction between “converts” and “non-converts” really relevant?
Finding Allah at street level
I am neither a Muslim, nor an Islamologist, much less a prophet. And if it must be confessed, I don’t think I believe in God. I’m a sociologist who has been crisscrossing the working-class neighborhoods of the Paris suburbs for more than 10 years. To put it simply, I observe and participate in the social life of people who inhabit the world differently from the way I do. I try, as Germaine Tillion has written, to watch and to live at the same time.34 That is how the presence of “Allah” revealed itself to me, how it appeared without my looking for it.
It started in 2005 in Seine-Saint-Denis, in the northern suburbs of Paris, when I received a teaching appointment at several high schools (lycées) located in neighborhoods where the statistical indicators fool no one: large majorities of immigrant families, parents with unskilled jobs when they’re not unemployed, school achievement below the national average and inversely proportional to the surrounding economic poverty. After I left high-school teaching for a university post in 2010, I continued to track the fortunes of some of my former students. Over the course of their personal journeys marked by spells of crime and early school-leaving, I regularly found Islam along the way. In the social lives of many young people, religion unquestionably has become a moral resource with few equivalents, even as it has also become a mark of stigma vis-à-vis “the outside.” Above all, it generates a malleable set of practices, the result of a constant bricolage that changes depending on the moment, the place, the individual.
It was on the back of that work that I first set foot in Grigny, a town with serious difficulties: almost one in two Grigny residents lives below the poverty line, compared to one in three in Seine-Saint-Denis. The fateful turn taken by the night of Friday, November 13, 2015, became the point of departure for a new study, which I carried out both alone and with Gérôme.35 In Seine-Saint-Denis, I had learned to move with my former students, both in time and in space. In Grigny, I lived on the ground several days per week. Time was swallowed up by multi-sided encounters that intensified each time I returned. My repeated stays yielded their share of local references and habits. Back in Seine-Saint-Denis, the trust others were willing to place in me had been the chance result of an imposed situation: the classroom. That trust solidified over time, as the masks and the scenery changed, with the former teacher becoming a university professor, a confidant, an advisor, and then just “someone who writes books.” In Grigny, there was nothing I could cite in my personal life to justify my presence. And yet at the same time there was every reason in the world for me to be there, in a town accustomed to dodging journalists inquiring about its young people and its famous homegrown terrorist. To get started, I had to explain my way of working in detail. The moral contract was transparent: I knew “la banlieue” and its youth well, but didn’t know the first thing about Grigny; I would give the floor to whoever wanted to speak – so I could learn and possibly make public what I heard, but also so that I could take it on board and make my own meaning from it. I enjoyed spending time with the people I met and didn’t know exactly what I would do with what I saw. Most importantly, I came back. Things started moving more quickly than I’d imagined. I soon met people whose stories and engaging personalities made them first-rate allies: because of the rich conversations I had with them, of course, but most importantly for their role as protecting guides. Thanks to them, I met individuals who would have avoided me had I introduced myself directly. When suspicion is a rule of survival – and my presence was, inevitably, a suspicious curiosity – being seen in public with figures who mattered, pillars of neighborhood life whose motives were above all reproach, was almost a necessity. It was absolutely indispensable if I wanted to glimpse what lay behind the surface of distrust, the narrow circles of solidarity: generosity and hospitality, which loosen tongues, open doors, and allow respect to be earned, step by step. Trust is built through persistence: calling, insisting, coming for no reason, calling back, coming at the last minute, showing your face, hanging around, turning up, helping, surprising, coming again. That is how, little by little, I came to be identified alternately as either “the sociologist” or “so-and-so’s friend.”
These behind-the-scenes details about my work are essential. Making clear where one is speaking from, restricting oneself to talking only about what one has seen and seen again, is a question of morality and mutual consideration. That is what I owe to Tarik, Radouane, Pierre-Yves, and others. It’s also an intellectual safeguard. To work over an extended period of time – time spent with people, time that passes in their lives – is to think in terms of repeated visits, testing the soundness of each little discovery through constant re-checking. That is the challenge of what the sociologist Michael Burawoy calls the “ethnographic revisit”: trying to “disentangle movements of the external world from the researcher’s own shifting involvement with that same world, all the while recognizing that the two are not independent.” That way, ethnography can “emancipate itself from the eternal present” rather than remaining “trapped in the contemporary.”36 Revisiting sites, individuals, situations, sentiments, means cultivating what, for me, is the heart of my vocation, what sociologist Les Back calls “the art of listening.”37 It’s almost an anachronistic art in a society where everyone can claim their 15 minutes of digital glory, where everyone has the freedom to speak without having to listen to those who, actually, have an urgent need to articulate the contradictions of their lives. It was by devoting myself to this with perseverance and humility that I learned to know Tarik, Radouane, Hassan, Marley, Adama – and a ghost: Amédy.
These six boys from the cité (housing project) will be the main characters in this story. But not the only characters. Since “the real is relational,” they exist only in their relationships with others – parents, brothers, sisters, friends, girlfriends, etc. – whom we will encounter by extension.38 And then there are all the absent figures, boys and girls, for whom this group stands in.39 This sextet did not emerge from random encounters or the vagaries of the writing process. Rather, it represents “the evolution over time of a system of relationships between characteristics borne by individuals.”40 These boys form an ensemble: because they are bearers of characteristics repeatedly observed in many studies; but also because the differing arrangements of their individual characteristics help to bring out the meaning of the differences, the divergences. The characteristics function in relation to one another. They’re significant, as well as rich in their density and uniqueness. Finally, each of these characters embodies something that is regularly defined as a problem: involvement in the Muslim religion by marginalized Western youth. My answers will be imperfect: some points will appear head-on, others will emerge through mirroring effects. But they will be grounded in facts – “won, constructed, and confirmed.”41
Tarik and Radouane are two former students whom I’ve known since 2008. They are now 25 and still live in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Marley, Adama, and Hassan are residents of Grigny, from different generations. Marley is the same age as Tarik and Radouane, Adama is entering his thirties, Hassan his forties. Hassan and Adama knew Amédy Coulibaly: the former rather distantly, as a street educator; the latter intimately, as a close friend. They are two physical points of contact with Amédy Coulibaly; others will almost always remain in the background. For a sociologist, researching a deceased person or a celebrity is an almost counterintuitive pursuit. It requires clear choices. In my case, I’ve preferred to examine “Amédy” and leave “Amédy Coulibaly” aside. Of the latter we know a great deal, thanks to detailed portraits in the press and a meticulous police investigation. One can follow his trajectory as a terrorist, as well as the logistics of the attacks, rather precisely. It’s as if – and this was probably his intention – the jihadist had effaced the person “from before,” the one his friends and acquaintances described to me. This is the Amédy I was told about, though few wished to discuss him openly, out of a combination of delicacy, incomprehension, uncompleted mourning, and shame. In addition, a number of archival materials make it possible to follow his itinerary, and even to hear him speak. This Amédy will be the book’s sixth character. I did not personally know him, my information is obviously partial, but I have chosen to write “as if.” As if Amédy had his place with the living, and as if the episodes and emotions that will bring him into being were the result of direct observation. There are two main reasons for this: the promises I made to those who spoke to me to protect their anonymity by making them disappear from this text; and a determination to find a measure of humanity and ordinariness in his trajectory, despite the atrocious nature of the acts he committed. Not to accept this measure would, I believe, be a failure to fully acknowledge the issues at stake. Accepting it also makes it possible to move beyond moral condemnation, impulses toward hate or resentment, deterministic miserablism, or bleeding-heart indecency. It is about trying to better understand the loyalties and reversals that make what people become, between well-worn paths and back-road crossings. The turns are sometimes sharp, as Amédy and Adama knew all too well. These were two children cut from the same timber, two friends who passed through the same predicaments and were ultimately separated by their fates, or, to use the sacred terminology, their takdir.
What if the real ruptures and continuities lie not where we assume they do, but in hidden, long-lasting loyalties – and the conflicts between them?
What if the loyalties that lie at the heart of the desire for Islam among marginalized Western youth have their roots – as the word “radical” implies – in a collective history still not fully aware of itself; in a troubled model of society, in anguish about an uncertain future?
What if the forces at play arise from an ensemble of radical loyalties – in the here and now – rather than from some titanic clash maintained by a permanent state of emergency?
And what if learning to know “them” could help “us” better understand ourselves?
Notes
*
Translator’s note
: In familiar French,
garçons
(boys) is sometimes used to refer to males of any age – not unlike the colloquial English expression “good old boys,” or “the boys on the bus.” Throughout the text, I have preserved this usage by translating
garçons
as “boys,” even when the word refers to individuals who are well into their adult years.
†
The Groupe islamique armé (GIA) appeared in Algeria following the cancellation of legislative elections won by the Front islamique du salut (FIS) in 1991, and sought to install an Islamic state. In the 1990s, it carried out a long series of targeted attacks and civilian massacres – a period of conflict described as a “dark decade,” claiming some tens of thousands of victims.
*
According to the Interior Ministry, in 2014 there were 2,368 prayer halls in France, including 90 mosques.
†
Since 2012 (and through November 2017), responsibility has been claimed for 10 fatal attacks on French soil: Toulouse and Montauban in 2012; Paris and Montrouge in January 2015; Villejuif in April 2015; Saint-Quentin-Fallavier in June 2015; Paris and Saint-Denis in November 2015; Magnanville in June 2016; Nice in July 2016; Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in August 2016; Paris in April 2017; and Marseille in October 2017.
1
For an initial study featuring Tarik and Radouane, see Fabien Truong,
Des capuches et des hommes
.
Trajectoires de “jeunes de banlieue”
(Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2013). For a second study about the academic trajectories of my former students, see Fabien Truong,
Jeunesses françaises
.
Bac +5 made in banlieue
(Paris: La Découverte, 2015).
2
Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1955), pp. 12, 54.
3
Gérôme Truc,
Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks
, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 225.
4
On the “problem of moral equivalence” posed by the “making of silence” after an attack, see ibid., pp. 108–15. On the “to be or not to be Charlie” debate, see Emmanuel Todd,
Who Is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class
(Cambridge: Polity, 2015) and Nonna Mayer and Vincent Tiberj, “Who were the ‘Charlie’ in the streets? A socio-political approach of the January 11 rallies,”
International Review of Social Psychology
, no. 29 (2016), pp. 59–68.
5
See, in order, Michael Rogin,
Les Démons de l’Amérique. Essais d’histoire politique des États-Unis
(Paris: Seuil, 1998); Michael Rogin,
Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); René Girard,
The Scapegoat
, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Stuart Hall, Brian Roberts, John Clarke, Tony Jefferson, and Chas Critcher,
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order
(London: Macmillan, 1978); Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson,
The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems
(London: Sage Publications, 1994).
6
