{"id":92029,"date":"2021-12-30T17:05:27","date_gmt":"2021-12-30T15:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=92029"},"modified":"2021-12-30T14:29:23","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T12:29:23","slug":"07-05-74","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=92029","title":{"rendered":"France\u2019s Great Debate Over the Sources and Meaning of Muslim Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>France\u2019s Great Debate Over the Sources and Meaning of Muslim Terror<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

MARC WEITZMANN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Three months after the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in 2015, young cartoonist Pierrick Juin joined the staff of the French satirical newspaper to, in his own words, help keep alive and safeguard the \u2018stupid and mean\u2019 spirit of a fearless publication he always loved. Now 33, his insightful, trenchant social, cultural, and political commentary appears regularly on French newsstands. For Marc Weitzmann\u2019s article, Tablet invited Juin to comment on the deadly serious French intellectual debate on Islamism and separatism. From his perch on the frontlines of that debate, Juin picked up on the fact that French Muslims are pretty much the same as other French people, rather than the exoticized subjects of opposing political and intellectual arguments. \u2018Wanna do it?\u2019 the wife in the illustration asks. Juin did.PIERRICK JUIN<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A rivalry between the country\u2019s two most prominent \u2018Islamologists,\u2019 Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, holds the key to understanding the existential and geopolitical tensions in France\u2019s bloody reality<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
Tablet Top Ten 2021<\/a>:<\/strong>\u00a0An entirely subjective list, presented in no particular order, of our 10 favorite articles from Tablet\u2019s Arts & Letters, News, Science, History, Israel & Middle East, and Sports sections in the year 2021. \u201cFavorite\u201d here means somewhere at the nexus of these pieces\u2019 intrinsic merits and the measurable ways that readers engaged with them. If you caught them when they came out, they bear re-reading. If you missed them, you\u2019re in for a treat. We feature them, two a day, this week, so you can peruse at your holiday leisure, and remember\u2014or try to forget\u2014this extraordinary year.<\/em><\/span><\/h5>\n
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During the winter of 2014, a few months before terror hit Paris, while looking for material on the strange, and at the time unknown, world of converts to \u201cradical Islam,\u201d I attended several gatherings of parents confronted with the metamorphosis of their son or daughter into a \u201cghost,\u201d they said, a ghost full of fury and hate.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These gatherings formally resembled AA meetings except that they took place in the salons of cheap hotels in the north of Paris whose addresses were kept secret for security reasons. Confined in their own hotel rooms, the parents would receive the exact hour and location of the event by text some 90 minutes in advance, leaving them just enough time to catch a cab to the location. They were coming from all over the country, did not know each other and, as far as I could tell, only had two things in common. First, they were all white, with no Muslim background at all. Second, most of them were high school teachers or at least worked for the state, which means that they had a reasonable basic education and no unmanageable financial problems. Yet all were faced by the destruction of their daily lives through a raging madness that none of them could begin to comprehend.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A couple rose up and told us about the fear they experienced each morning waking up in a house where their 15-year-old daughter wandered from room to room in a black burqa without a word, except to threaten to slit their throats\u2014a threat they took so seriously that they removed all the knives from the kitchen. (Slaughter was in the air in France in 2014, a year marked by a dramatic rise in gory, sadistic execution videos posted by the Islamic State on the internet, whose enormous appeal to the youth of Europe, and especially of France, has never been properly analyzed.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Liliane, a 40-ish small woman from Grenoble told us of her daughter Nathalie, 17, who one morning at breakfast announced her wedding the night before, from her bedroom and by text, to a man she\u2019d never met or seen and whose name she did not know. As a married woman, Nathalie said that she now had to wear the\u00a0niqab.\u00a0Pretending to accept the new situation, her mother secretly bought an electronic chip and inserted it in her daughter\u2019s phone and\u2014this being, for me, the craziest part of the story\u2014for months on end, each night, went on reading the erotic messages that her daughter and her anonymous bridegroom exchanged, along with Muslim prayers, from the neighboring bedroom. I thought I could understand my daughter better that way, said Liliane by way of an explanation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But of course, she did not understand anything, and on her 18th birthday, Nathalie vanished. The day Liliane testified, neither she nor the cops knew where her daughter was\u2014whether in Syria, living the life of a jihadist\u2019s spouse, or simply in some Paris apartment under her\u00a0burqa,\u00a0an anonymous silhouette that Liliane may have crossed each day on her way to work.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I heard other, no less disturbing stories through individual interviews I managed to arrange. One of them involved Diane, a 20-year-old woman from Nice who sold lingerie in the center of town. She had lived a seemingly harmonious life with her mother at home, until she met Nadir on a weekend trip with her middle-class friends to Nice. Nadir, who lived with his mother in one of the most dangerous\u00a0cit\u00e9s\u00a0<\/em>(the French projects) of Monaco, provided drugs to Diane and her friends. Soon after, he was put in jail, and what had begun between him and Diane that weekend as a \u201csex thing\u201d turned, for Diane, into a passionate love story. She began to speak of marriage, and of her need to better understand Nadir\u2019s culture, by which she meant religion, even though nothing indicates that Nadir was especially interested in Islam.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In any case, Nadir got out of jail and was shot dead over some fight in his\u00a0cit\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0the next day. During a silent demonstration against violence that took place in reaction a few days later, Diane\u2014symbolically anointed as the martyr\u2019s widow by the\u00a0cit\u00e9\u2019<\/em>s inhabitants\u2014was seen walking hand in hand with Nadir\u2019s mother in the first row of demonstrators. Both women then took a plane together to bury Nadir in Morocco. When they came back, Diane wore the\u00a0niqab\u00a0and became a pious Muslim. Back home, in her mother\u2019s living room, she expressed her new faith status in rather unorthodox ways, like raging against her mother\u2019s \u201cwhite privilege\u201d and against the whole Western world, which was controlled by the Jews and the Americans, and then sitting down to watch\u00a0manga<\/a>\u00a0in silence on TV for hours. Manga, she said, were like religion, they made you forget everything, which was good preparation for war.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And then there was Anabelle\u2019s story. Having been raised a perfect atheist by parents who read\u00a0Charlie Hebdo<\/em>, she converted to Islam at the age of 15 in front of her computer, and then began to sneak out of home in a\u00a0burqa\u00a0to wander the streets of the faraway suburbs in the north of town. There, she stopped at bus stations where she remained frozen and silent for as long as necessary, waiting for some stranger to approach her and propose marriage. Then, as silently as she had come, she would depart, coming back home to scream, slam doors, and insult anyone around all night. A devotee of Tariq Ramadan, she tried to kill herself twice.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It was a little bit like the \u201960s, but with no Vietnam War to justify it, no sexual revolution to energize it, and no exciting soundtrack. Instead, there was digital loneliness.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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If the adolescent mix of sex and hysteria was easy enough to point out in all of these cases, their bizarre intensity was another matter. Infantile mysticism, morbidity, and regressive rage stood in lieu of political conscience. It was a little bit like the\u00a0\u201960s, but with no Vietnam War to justify it, no sexual revolution to energize it, and no exciting soundtrack. Instead, there was digital loneliness. The result looked like a mix between a Charles Manson dream and a William Burroughs novella. In the face of this terrifying and strange phenomenon, the unrelenting normalcy of the parents, their heroic banality, sounded even stranger.\u00a0We keep up with our daughter no matter what. We don\u2019t abandon her. To keep some sort of contact is the most important thing to us right now.\u00a0<\/em>Commonplaces and clich\u00e9s seemed the only way for them to express their tenacity in fighting an enemy they could not quite identify.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I was so taken by the whole thing that it took me many weeks to realize what was wrong. The parental sessions were being set up by the Centre de Prevention des D\u00e9rives Sectaires Li\u00e9es \u00e0 l\u2019Islam (Center for the Prevention of Sectarian Excesses Connected with Islam), a \u201cderadicalization\u201d group with a complicated name, managed by an anthropologist with a complicated story called Dounia Bouzar.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Born in 1964 from a Corsican mother and an Algerian father, Bouzar was raised in a secular environment. She quit school early to marry a man she would later describe as an \u201cultra-violent Muslim,\u201d divorced him when she was 27 to get back to school and study anthropology, and, in the process, converted to Islam. When, in 2013, after a few years as a youth worker and consulting on religious issues for various cities in France, Bouzar opened her Center for the Prevention of Sectarian Excesses, it took her no more than a few months to sign a contract with the Ministry of Interior, making her the exclusive partner of the French government on the subject of \u201cradicalization.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By then, Bouzar had already been introduced into government circles\u2014she\u2019d been given a seat as an \u201cexpert\u201d inside the French Council of the Muslim Faith by the Ministry of Interior in 2003 (which she vacated after two years) and had received\u00a0l\u2019Ordre des Palmes acad\u00e9miques<\/em>\u00a0in 2009 for her books on religious radicalism. The\u00a0L\u00e9gion d\u2019honneur<\/em>\u00a0was given to her the very year she opened the center; in that same year, she was also appointed to\u00a0Observatoire de la La\u00efcit\u00e9<\/em>, a consulting structure placed under the prime minister\u2019s authority, in charge of defining a new, more open version of French secularism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The sessions of the kind I just described were meant to be, in Bouzar\u2019s view, the first step in a process that would lead to the dispelling of France\u2019s teenage \u201cghosts.\u201d After the parents met and gave their public testimonies, the team\u2019s center divided them into small task forces of three couples max, who then studied the details of each other\u2019s cases and exchanged advice on the daily management of each child. Ideally, after some months, and with the help of therapists and psychiatrists attached to the center, the child in question would somehow be convinced to come and personally participate in the sessions, first as a listener and then as a speaker\u2014AA style. He or, more commonly, she would deliver the tale of her journey toward what Bouzar called \u201cthe sectarian deviation using the language of Islam\u201d which had taken control of her mind. The fact that no estimates existed as to the likelihood of this method actually succeeding didn\u2019t appear to matter.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The team\u2019s center was mainly composed of Bouzar\u2019s family, her two daughters and their respective husbands. Like her, they were all Muslim. Although at first I did not pay attention to that detail, the contrast between, on the one hand, a team of healthy, rational Muslims, impervious to the seductions of violence, and on the other, a group of 15 to 20 dysfunctional French families, all either Catholic or secular, soon became unmissable: Where\u00a0were<\/em>\u00a0the dysfunctional families of Muslim background whose progeny accounted for most of the departures to Syria since 2012?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe work with the people who call us,\u201d answered Bouzar, when I brought up the subject to her. \u201cThe government has opened an emergency line with a number for the parents to call if they worry for their child, and that number sends them straight to us. That\u2019s how we recruit them. But, of course, the families able to pick up their phones and ask for help are the ones that are used to speaking with the system and trust it. People from the\u00a0cit\u00e9s<\/em>, migrants, on the other hand, tend to dislike social services in general. For honor\u2019s sake, if not out of fear of control, they will tend to deal with the problem themselves. Providing they see it as a problem. In any case, they won\u2019t come to us.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation. And yet, witnessing the sessions, it was hard to avoid the feeling that they were not just socio-therapeutic gatherings, but scenes staged to transmit a message. The message said: \u201cIslam is not the problem here.\u201d But how could the center be the\u00a0exclusive<\/em>\u00a0partner of the French government on the subject of radicalization if it focused only on a fraction of the population involved?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cNinety percent of the people who fall into terrorist activity inside of the European Union do so after having been brainwashed on the internet,\u201d stated the French minister of interior at the time, Bernard Cazeneuve, earlier that year. Not in mosques, not inside of underground Salafi networks, not through Muslim Brotherhood rhetoric; on the internet. The problem wasn\u2019t Islam or Islamic movements or neighborhoods run by extremists; it was French youth\u2014their loneliness and their existential crises. As we would later learn, Cazeneuve\u2019s confident-sounding statistic was an extrapolation based on a Prevention Center report that focused on center members only. In other words, it referred to native French converts to Islam, whose families had been randomly identified thanks to the emergency line and were being \u201cstudied\u201d with no group controls.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As for the majority of the Islamist radicals\u2014who constituted 75% of the French radicals going to Syria, and who were responsible for 100% of Islamic domestic terrorism on French territory\u2014they remained officially invisible.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As I delved a bit deeper into Bouzar\u2019s own background, it became obvious that the center\u2019s assessments on radicalism weren\u2019t the product of empirical observations alone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2006, the president of the jury that awarded Bouzar a Ph.D. on \u201cpolitical Islam in France\u201d was in fact none other than the political scientist Olivier Roy, one of the popes of French studies of the Muslim world, whose basic axiom on \u201cradicalism\u201d is, precisely, that the phenomenon bears no serious connection to Islam itself. Roy has advised French governments on matters of Islam for decades, and as the above story indicates, he excels at getting public grants both national and European for his own research as well as for his students\u2014among whom his reputation as an efficient rabbi is well-established. During the mid-2010s, furthermore, Roy was friendly with France\u2019s governing socialist powers, and warmly regarded the positions of the\u00a0Observatoire<\/em>\u2019s President Jean-Louis Bianco, the socialist\u00a0cacique<\/em>\u00a0who had awarded the\u00a0L\u00e9gion d\u2019honneur<\/em>\u00a0to Bouzar, whose exclusive contract with the Ministry of Interior took effect a few months later.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In other words, the Center for the Prevention of Sectarian Excesses Connected with Islam, which has since all but disappeared from the public sphere, is one example of how pervasive Roy\u2019s theories were in France at the beginning of the decade, when the issue of \u201cradicalism\u201d first gained central attention in the public debate\u2014that is, when Roy\u2019s denial of the dangers of Islamist activism in France put enormous pressure on French Jews. (After the murder of Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012, Roy was foremost in arguing that the killer had nothing to do with Islam\u2014a claim that became widespread, at least officially). Roy\u2019s intellectual and professional rival, Gilles Kepel\u2014France\u2019s other prominent Islamologist\u2014interpreted events differently. In fact, Kepel\u2019s vision of Islam in France and Europe could not have been more antagonistic, earning him a reputation as a \u201cright-wing\u201d scaremonger. This was about to change.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On the evening of Nov. 13, 2015, the cloak of official invisibility that covered Muslim-born terrorists in France was torn off: A synchronized attack led by a Franco-Belgian \u201cradical\u201d Muslim group affiliated with ISIS hit the\u00a0terrasses<\/em>\u00a0of the 10th arrondissement of Paris, the Saint-Denis stadium, and the Bataclan Theatre, killing 130 and permanently injuring more than 300 people. The massacre marked the peak of a terror wave that had begun in France 11 months earlier with the killings at\u00a0Charlie Hebdo<\/em>\u00a0and at the Hypercacher kosher market\u2014a wave that would last, with an average of one attempted attack per week, until the Nice attack of July 14, 2016.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Along with the magnitude of the coordinated attack, which had required more than a year of preparation, it was the seeming randomness of the November violence that jolted French opinion. No Jews, no journalists, and no cops were targeted: The victims were anyone and everyone that happened to be around when the killers opened fire. Ten days later, in the midst of countless op-eds on the subject, Olivier Roy\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0his own piece in\u00a0Le Monde<\/em>, \u201cJihadism is a nihilist and generational revolt,\u201d which remains perhaps his best effort to summarize his view.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What France was confronted with, Roy argued in a formula that made the article immediately famous, was not a \u201cradicalization of Islam\u201d but an \u201cIslamization of radicalism.\u201d \u201cThe essential problem for France\u201d was not ISIS, he argued, but \u201cthe revolt of the youth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Given what was known of the recent attack\u2014whose main engineer, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had spent the previous years shuttling between Brussels and Raqqa, the ISIS headquarters in Syria\u2014Roy\u2019s assertion was surely a bold one. But Roy was ready to get even bolder. In order to make his point, he went on to dismiss all of the usual reasons given to explain Islamist terror. Neither the Middle East situation (\u201cISIS does not send terrorists to France to deter France from bombing its headquarters in Syria\u201d), nor solidarity with the Palestinians, nor post-colonial suffering, nor even the social fate imposed on migrants\u2019 offspring explained the violence, Roy argued. To understand what really moved these killers, all of whom were born inside of a Muslim environment, one had to turn instead to people born outside of it: the converts and their neuroses (as they were studied by the Prevention Center). \u201cWhy do converts, who never suffered from racism, want all of a sudden to avenge the humiliation endured by Muslims,\u201d asked Roy. \u201cWhat do migrants of the second generation and converts have in common?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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According to Roy, a comparison between the two groups was the key to understanding the attacks that were now tormenting France. The children of migrants, he wrote, \u201chave shared the youth culture of their generation, they have been drinking alcohol, have smoked grass and have hit on girls in nightclubs. Then, one morning, they converted to a Salafist form of Islam that rejects the very concept of culture, [and] allows them to reconstruct themselves by rejecting both their parents\u2019 moderate religion\u201d and what the West has to offer. As for the native converts, they \u201cjoin the \u2018pure\u2019 religion because cultural compromise doesn\u2019t interest them. What attracts them in the first place is radicality.\u201d Both groups, asserted Roy, stand \u201cin the margin of the Muslim communities,\u201d both \u201cfrequent the mosques only rarely,\u201d both meet in a form of Islam that, because it is \u201cculturally and politically disruptive\u201d appeals to the younger generations \u2014and both subscribe to a form of violence that is far from traditional Jihad, according to Roy, but is instead \u201ca modern violence.\u201d In other words, \u201cthey kill the way mass killers do in America.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Although a comparative analysis of these two groups may indeed have been enlightening, most of the \u201cfacts\u201d Roy confidently presented in his piece were approximate at best, and often wrong. French jihadists, for one, did not stay \u201cin the margins of the Muslim communities\u201d or away from the mosques. Farid Benyettou, the religious mentor of the\u00a0Charlie Hebdo<\/em>\u00a0killers, was a Salafi preacher at the Omar mosque in the 19th arrondissement of Paris for years. Mohammed Merah, the killer of the Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012, had a father close to the terror networks of the Algerian Salafists; Mohammed\u2019s own brother and one of his mentors, Abdelkader Merah, had studied Islam at the Al-Azhar Islamic University in Egypt, where Mohammed joined him some time before his murder spree. In 2020, Abdelkader himself was sentenced to 30 years for conspiracy to murder a policeman. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who directed the Bataclan killings, had spent a whole year studying at Al-Azhar as well, before returning to Brussels, and taking off from there to Raqqa.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also contrary to Roy assertions, Muslim kids did not wake up \u201cone morning and convert to Salafism after having spent their adolescence drinking or hitting on girls\u201d\u2014they kept doing those things even after they joined Salafist terror groups. They lived the way Mohamed Atta and the 9\/11 commandos lived on the eve their death: drinking, smoking, dancing in strip clubs before hitting the World Trade Center.<\/span><\/p>\n

Olivier Roy, 2018\u00a9 JEROME PANCONI\/OPALE\/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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But Roy wasn\u2019t trying to be accurate; he was trying to make an existential point. Namely: ISIS did not arouse radicalization among \u201cyoung Europeans\u201d\u2014<\/em>modernity did. Hence the existential drama of the converts. If converts could be used as a control group, as it were, to shed light on the more global phenomenon of \u201cradicalism,\u201d it was precisely because they did\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0come from a Muslim background. Their journey was therefore all the more revelatory. \u201cISIS,\u201d he wrote, \u201ctaps into a reservoir of radicalized young French who, regardless of what happens in the Middle East, have already dissented, and are looking for a cause, some label, a great narrative on which to sign in blood their personal rebellion.\u201d It was indeed a strong idea\u2014spoiled, unfortunately, by the author\u2019s overtly politicized need to dismiss Islam\u2019s role in the situation altogether.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the French political context of the pre-Bataclan era, the words \u201cradical Muslim\u201d were mostly reserved for the youth that took the road to Syria to fight the Assad regime. One of the first moves of President Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, elected in 2012, was to provide weapons to the anti-Assad rebels. In 2013, after Assad used chemical weapons against his own population, thus crossing President Barack Obama\u2019s purported \u201cred line,\u201d Hollande had prepared France for war. He only came to an abrupt halt when Obama showed sudden confusion about whether his \u201cred line\u201d was actually red or not.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since then, however, the feeling has remained in France that the anti-Assad cause in Syria was a worthy one. This was a perfectly decent feeling\u2014Bashar Assad was and is a butcher, and his role in the Middle East chaos has been amply demonstrated\u2014which nevertheless provided a certain misplaced understanding of \u201cradicalized\u201d youth. After all, so what if aimless, jobless French youth of the Muslim persuasion, confined in the French\u00a0cit\u00e9s<\/em>, tempted by drug traffic, and deprived of any larger reason to live, suddenly found their life\u2019s purpose in fighting Assad? So what if that meant joining Islamist groups, for logistics\u2019 sake? Luc\u2019s mother, for one, believed that her son was, above all, \u201ca good kid revolted by injustice\u201d\u2014an image she struggled to balance with the thought that he was a brainwashed killer, as if he couldn\u2019t be both. As preposterous as it may sound, it wasn\u2019t so rare, at the time, for the French left to compare the anti-fascist movement in Spain joined by Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Malraux with the global recruiting efforts by terror groups such as al-Nusra and al-Qaida for the fight in Syria.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course, electoral considerations were by no means absent from this analysis. During the electoral campaign of 2011, the Muslims of France, appalled by the populist-nationalist campaign of President Sarkozy\u2014for whom they had voted in large numbers in 2007\u2014had massively rallied behind Sarkozy\u2019s opponent, the socialist candidate Hollande, who based his own campaign on analysis provided by the main left-wing think tank of the era, Terra Nova. According to that analysis, the \u201ctraditional\u201d left-wing electorate of the prosperity decades\u2014a mix of the white working class and civil servants\u2014was now leaving the stage, to be replaced by a melting pot of young, well-off urban gays and lesbians, and the young Muslim offspring of migrant families. Hollande mistook the rallying of anti-Sarkozy Muslims to his campaign as a confirmation of that view.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In November 2013, Hollande sent his minister of justice, a former independence activist of French Guyana called Christiane Taubira, to the National Assembly to defend and pass a law legalizing gay marriage in the name of \u201csocialism.\u201d A similar measure that passed in conservative England two months earlier had triggered no ideological storm. Yet in France, to have the gay marriage law lyrically defended by a Black woman was seen as good politics. That would send, it was assumed, the correct message, which was that a new multicultural agenda was on the march in France.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The move proved disastrous. In January, while the municipal campaign was being set off, a bizarre mix of reactionary Catholics and conservative Muslims fueled with Salafi propaganda took to the streets and, with the support of the antisemitic Black comedian Dieudonn\u00e9\u00a0M\u2019bala M\u2019bala,\u00a0helped foment a \u201cpre-riot\u201d atmosphere across the country, targeting the godless, socialist government which was being manipulated by \u201cthe Zionists.\u201d As antisemitic incidents exploded that same spring inside the\u00a0cit\u00e9s<\/em>\u00a0and beyond, agitprop activists campaigned door to door to sell a conspiracy theory: There was a secret plan inside the government to change Muslim boys into girls. As one of these activists told me when I interviewed her, \u201cIt worked wonderfully.\u201d The result, in March, during the elections, was that the Socialists lost most of the towns it had held since the 1920s. Yet by default, or because it had nothing else to hold onto, the Socialist Party stuck to its new doctrine, according to which Muslims would accept and vote for a party that put gay rights at the center of its politics. In order to entertain that notion, it was necessary to dismiss the idea that conservative Muslim and Islamist networks had any real influence within their communities.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Maintaining that doctrine was Olivier Roy\u2019s job. On March 23, 2012, three days after the murder of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse\u2014that is to say, before any investigation into the killings had begun\u2014Roy\u00a0penned<\/a>\u00a0an op-ed in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0titled \u201cLoner, Loser, Killer.\u201d In it, he stated with absolute certainty that Abdelkader Merah, the killer, \u201cwas not known for his piety: He did not belong to any religious congregation; he did not belong to any radical group or even to a local Islamic movement. A petty delinquent, psychologically fragile, he … found in Al Qaeda a narrative of solitary heroism and a way, after months of watching videos on the Internet, to achieve short-term notoriety and find a place in the real world.\u201d The same day, in Paris, Bernard Squarcini, then head of the DCRI (the French FBI), gave an interview to\u00a0Le Monde<\/em>\u00a0arguing essentially the same thing: Merah the \u201clone wolf\u201d (Squarcini\u2019s expression) had no connections among French Muslims.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As was intuitively obvious then, and has been amply demonstrated since\u2014most notably during Merah\u2019s trial in 2019\u2014this was complete bullshit. Merah was in fact an active part of a Salafi terror network which had been under surveillance for years. In turn, three years later, the voices of his mentors, the Clain brothers, would be heard on the ISIS tape claiming responsibility for the Bataclan massacre.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a sense, Roy\u2019s 2015\u00a0Le Monde\u00a0<\/em>piece on nihilism in the aftermath of Bataclan was a reprisal of his 2012\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0op-ed on Merah, except smarter. But in the interim, France had changed, and brutally so. Whereas the killings of French soldiers and Jews in 2012 had passed as \u201cunderstandable,\u201d the random murder of more than a hundred people in a single night could not be understood as something that could only happen to other people. In the following months, the contract between the government and the Prevention Center came to an end, and French authorities began to turn toward a completely different intellectual figure as their spirit-guide to Islamist violence\u2014Roy\u2019s longtime antagonist, Gilles Kepel.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ever since, the debate in France over its relationship with its Muslim citizens has been framed by Olivier Roy\u2019s existential theories on the one hand, and Gilles Kepel\u2019s data-driven rebuttals on the other. While Roy provided the official narrative about Islam and domestic terror until the end of Hollande\u2019s presidency, Kepel feeds the Macron government with data on Islamist entryism and geopolitical connections. The outcome of the debate between Roy and Kepel is therefore likely to shape the future of France for years to come. Needless to say, the debate is fueled by personal antagonism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The discord between the two leading interpreters of Islamic radicalism in France has been characterized by the French press as everything from a social competition between an academic mandarin (Roy) and an\u00a0arriviste\u00a0courtesan<\/em>\u00a0(Kepel), to an ideological war between an alleged \u201cliberal Anglo-Saxon left\u201d (i.e., Roy, for whom religious communities should have a say in the public debate) and a stricter conception of state authority (i.e., Kepel, who is said to represent the French version of secularism known as\u00a0la\u00efcit\u00e9<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In fact, Roy\u2019s vision owes more to postmodern French writers, and to the French Orientalist school, than to any \u201cAnglo-Saxon\u201d tradition, whatever that may mean. As for Kepel, despite his avowed atheism and his support of the freedom to blaspheme, he hardly fits the definition of a \u201cla\u00efcard<\/em>\u201d (to use the derogatory slang that the far right once used to label the enemies of the church in France, and that is now part of the far left\u2019s daily rhetoric): Not only does Kepel\u2019s last book insist on the need to \u201crespect\u201d the \u201cdignity\u201d of believers, it also expresses the utmost contempt for\u00a0Charlie Hebdo<\/em>\u2019s \u201cignorance,\u201d \u201cstupidity,\u201d and \u201cobscenity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Perhaps a less trivial and more fruitful way to see the Roy-Kepel distinction would be to acknowledge that, although pacing the same field of study, the two men do not actually study the same things.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The few points the two have in common mainly serve to underline their differences. They are both former leftists\u2014born in 1949, Roy was a Maoist in 1968; Kepel, six years younger, was briefly a Trotskyite\u2014and both left for \u201cthe Orient\u201d during the mid-1970s. In their youth, helped along by the hippie movement, Roy and Kepel shared the same orientalist folklore and the same attraction to Islam\u2014an attraction rooted in the romantic European quest for an alternative to the rising urban modernity and its discontents, whose paradoxes would plague the colonial era and resonate to this day. In the late 1970s, Roy and Kepel also shared the same mentor, R\u00e9my Leveau, the first professor in France\u2019s elite institutes to introduce modern sociology and factual research into \u201cOriental\u201d studies. It is telling that, at the same time, Leveau himself was a high-ranking \u201cOrientalist\u201d in the Quai d\u2019Orsay (France\u2019s State Department) and served as legal adviser to the Moroccan Ministry of Interior, during Hassan II\u2019s brutal reign. France\u2019s colonization, its attraction to \u201cthe Orient,\u201d and its concessions to the dictatorships of the Muslim world after the collapse of its empire have always been part of the same dynamic.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It is tempting to see Roy and Kepel as the two faces of French ambiguity toward the Muslim world, caught between a fascination with \u201cthe Other\u201d and the cold gathering of facts. Something about their respective journeys does favor such an interpretation. Olivier Roy was 19, when, after traveling to Kathmandu in 1969, he discovered Afghanistan for the first time\u2014a country he saw as unchanged since Kipling\u2019s novels, if not since Alexander the Great. He kept going back there, and in 1980, as a young historian appointed to the French National Centre for Scientific Research, he went back again\u2014this time to fight with the mujahedeen against the Red Army. \u201cMy generation,\u201d he said in a biographical interview in 2017, \u201cfirst loved Guevara and Mao and in the seventies, discovered the realities of the Communist regimes and became anti-totalitarian. Some went to Poland to help\u00a0Solidarnosc<\/em>, but I, who knew Afghanistan and spoke the language a little, choose to go there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What is striking here of course is the comparison between the struggle of democratic dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Afghan jihad that in less than 10 years would give birth to al-Qaida and the totalitarian Islamist currents in Algeria (among many other places). Yet Roy was by no means the only one to draw such a comparison. In the United States, Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson famously had the U.S. Congress financing the Afghan jihadists on the very same grounds.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Because Roy really spoke only French and some English, his contacts in Afghanistan were limited to the members of what the Afghans called \u201cthe foreigner\u2019s movement,\u201d a unit composed of volunteers from all over the world\u2014including Osama bin Laden\u2014and that, indeed, defined itself as an Islamist version of the Spanish Civil War\u2019s communist International Brigades. If Roy did not meet bin Laden, he did sympathize with the French-speaking foreigners there, and particularly with the Algerian Abdulla Nass, who a decade later would preside over the founding in Algeria of the\u00a0Front Islamique du\u00a0Salut, or the Islamic Salvation Front, one of the main actors in that country\u2019s bloody civil war throughout the 1990s between a corrupt secularist government and radical Salafists.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But in his own eyes, the most fascinating episode of Roy\u2019s long journey remained his flight from Afghanistan to Pakistan disguised as an Afghan peasant, with his then-wife hidden under a\u00a0burqa, to escape border controls. The experience was so profound that in 2017 he still called it \u201can initiation\u201d (to what remains unclear): \u201cIt was a symbiotic moment. \u2026 I think we can speak of physical mutation, can\u2019t we? And when you become the Other like this, you begin to see things from a completely new angle. I had become the husband of a wife in\u00a0burqa. This changed my every social interaction.\u201d Olivier Roy never became a Muslim himself. But by his own admission, the episode was central to his later interest in what he calls \u201cthe religious phenomenon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 1980, around the time Roy was beginning to enjoy life as a Kipling character, Gilles Kepel was traveling to Cairo as a young researcher to study a group of Salafi Islamists there called Al Jihad\u2014a group that was so small and marginal almost no one had heard of it. But perhaps because his father, Milan, was Czech\u2014and a French translator for V\u00e1clav Havel\u2014there was in Kepel something naturally cosmopolitan, something that, after his first trips to the Middle East, had led him to study Arabic in Paris. As a result, his attraction to Al Jihad, indeed his very awareness that the tiny group existed at all, came from the fact that he was one of the few foreigners able to follow the writings of its members as well as the sermons of their preachers in the mosques. He was not too surprised when, one year after his arrival, Egypt\u2019s peacemaking President Anwar Sadat was killed in a spectacular attack by Al Jihad terrorists for having signed the famous Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1984, Kepel turned his thesis,\u00a0Islamist Movements in Contemporary Egypt<\/em>, into his first book,\u00a0The Prophet and the Pharaoh<\/em><\/a>, which was translated into English quickly and became an international scholarly landmark. But a bigger turning point came when his mentor Leveau suggested that he turn his attention to the Muslim families of France\u2014another group that, in the early 1980s, no one thought was terribly important.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gilles Kepel, 2018STEPHANE REMAEL\/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The situation of French Muslims in the 1980s as Kepel encountered them was complex. The Muslim migration to France that had started during the colonial area gained in volume in the years following the wave of independence in the early 1960s. This was reshaped as part of the domestic front in a new French \u201cArab Policy\u201d that would replace the defunct Empire, and whose other components included gas and oil contracts with the former colonies from which these migrants came. (The Arab policy also included a diplomatic shift away from Israel, which France had strongly supported in 1948 and 1956). Good relationships between Paris and the new regimes of the former Maghreb colonies were\u00a0de rigueur,\u00a0of course\u2014but what this implied, for both sides of the deal, was that the migrants weren\u2019t in France to stay. Any other option would have sounded preposterous to the French and insulting to the newly independent countries. The Algerians were particularly touchy on this point, as their national honor would never tolerate the idea that some of their citizens would choose to live in a country whose army had killed and tortured Algerians during the long struggle for independence. Morocco was of the same mind, to the point that in 1993, in an interview on French national television, King Hassan II still admonished Moroccans to \u201cnot integrate\u201d into France, and advised the French not to try to integrate them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This unspoken rule of nonintegration, agreed upon between France and her former colonies, remains one of the most underestimated reasons\u2014in addition to racism and French bitterness over the loss of empire\u2014for the lack of any active French policy of integration. Even after France passed a law of family reunification in the mid 1970s, authorizing migrants to raise their children in France and acknowledging de facto that these kids were French, the rule remained in place. Any action by the French to stop the rising ghettos of the future\u00a0cit\u00e9s<\/em>\u00a0(providing that they had any desire to do so) would have been deemed a\u00a0casus belli\u00a0by the Algerian and Moroccan regimes, whose oil and gas were vital for the French economy\u2014and which also controlled the mosques in France, thereby also serving as the (selective) eyes and ears of the French state within French Muslim communities.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Moreover, feelings of loyalty to their birthplaces and a determined lack of interest in or connection to France often plagued the migrants themselves. In patriarchal immigrant families, fathers only rarely acknowledged in front of their children their own decision to plant roots in France; where a mythological return was not entertained, a convenient fog surrounded most of the problematic questions as to who these families were, and to which side of the Mediterranean they properly belonged. The default rule was not to ask. Even religion, which began to gain traction among the migrants as a palliative identity after they silently and more than a bit passively decided to stay in France, appeared as something distant and imprecise. To put it simply, although French by right, the children in these families were being raised in a fragile in-between space, whose rules were: Don\u2019t ask questions, don\u2019t make trouble, please everyone from your dad to the cops.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That in-between space began to shake during the civil rights movement of the early 1980s, when the kids, then known as \u201cthe Beurs\u201d (French slang for Arabs), took to the streets to ask social recognition from (and integration into) French society. In large part because of France\u2019s inability to adequately answer their demands, the unintended consequence of the movement toward integration was to bring political discussions back to the family table, thus overtly raising the silenced question of French Muslim identity: What are we? Are we French or not? Are we Muslims or not? If indeed they were French, how come the father was so humble in his daily interactions? And if they weren\u2019t, why wasn\u2019t he prouder of his origins?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It was in this moment that Kepel began to turn his attention to these families\u2014and to note the rising influence of Muslim Brothers and Salafis, whose activism in nearby Algeria was preparing the coming civil war there, and whose propaganda was beginning to penetrate the French\u00a0cit\u00e9s<\/em>\u00a0through family connections in the countries of origin. In 1987, Kepel\u2019s first book describing this new phenomenon, Banlieues de l\u2019Islam\u00a0<\/em>(Cit\u00e9s of Islam<\/em>), earned him the accusation of \u201cplaying Le Pen\u2019s game.\u201d It was the beginning of a misunderstanding between Kepel and the left, which was due largely to the fact that, among French researchers, Kepel was virtually the only one, at the time, who could follow the debates in Arabic.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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During the following decade, both the Salafi networks financed by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood funded by Qatar (and today mostly by Ankara) reached France from Algiers. This changed the face of Islam in France from benign to bellicose, more in tune with the reality of the disgruntled youth. Kepel would be one of the very few able to diagnose that change, in a time when most, if not all other researchers were framing the question of the migrants\u2019 children in strictly French and moral terms like \u201cintegration,\u201d \u201cracism,\u201d and \u201cuniversalism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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First among these interpreters was Olivier Roy. In books such as\u00a0En Qu\u00eate de l\u2019Orient Perdu<\/em>\u00a0(Looking for the Lost Orient<\/em>) and\u00a0La Sainte Ignorance<\/em>\u00a0(The Holy Ignorance<\/em>), Roy kept investigating the crisis of European modernity through its nihilist avatars, who were incidentally Muslim. Kepel, meanwhile, wrote\u00a0La revanche de Dieu\u00a0<\/em>(God\u2019s Revenge<\/em>), Allah in the West<\/em>,\u00a0Fitna<\/em>,\u00a0Passions Fran\u00e7aises<\/em>, and\u00a0Terreur dans l\u2019Hexagone<\/em>\u00a0(Terror in the Hexagon<\/em>)\u2014books whose most distinctive quality was the ability to shed light on France\u2019s local circumstances through geopolitical insights that were then mostly invisible to everyone else. As a result, Kepel became one of the first to correctly point out, aside from social factors within France, the poisonous influence of what had become a global movement within Islam itself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While Roy\u2019s views may have been less precise than Kepel\u2019s, they were (and are) more immediately intelligible to the French, and therefore more easily usable in French public debate and by the French state bureaucracy. This utility began to change after November 2015, and kept changing after Emmanuel Macron became president. The recent debate in France over \u201cseparatism\u201d is not fully understandable without this shift in mind\u2014or without a proper account of the seemingly disconnected and strange events of last fall, which Kepel has since managed to illuminate.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These events began on Sept. 4, 2020, with the opening of the trials for the\u00a0Charlie Hebdo<\/em>\u00a0and kosher market attacks (which\u00a0Charlie\u00a0<\/em>chose to hail by reproducing some of its original caricatures on the magazine\u2019s front page, scandalizing some part of public opinion). In response, on Sept. 12, and in a rising climate of tension surrounding the trial, al-Qaida\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0a five-page statement threatening the magazine and the country as a whole for letting\u00a0Charlie<\/em>\u00a0have its way. Some 20 days later, a 25-year-old Pakistani refugee, Zaheer Mahmoud,\u00a0tried<\/a>\u00a0to set fire to the magazine\u2019s former offices, and wounded two journalists from a different press agency that happened to be on site that day. On Oct. 2, Emmanuel Macron went on TV to disclose his plan to counter \u201cseparatism,\u201d which had been cooked for months, if not for years by the president, and was soon trashed by the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, who accused Macron of being \u201c\u2019obsessed with Islam\u201d and \u201cmentally disturbed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Two weeks later, on Oct. 16, a history professor, Samuel Paty, was beheaded in front of his students for having briefly shown one of the\u00a0Charlie Hebdo<\/em>\u00a0caricatures in class. His killer, Abdullah Anzorov, 18, a Chechen refugee, had time to post pictures of Paty\u2019s head on social networks before he was killed by police while resisting arrest. (His body was sent back to Chechnya to be buried in his native village, his casket followed by a crowd of 200 men chanting his praise.)<\/span><\/p>\n

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On Oct. 28, in a suburb near Lyon, a demonstration of \u201cGrey Wolves\u201d\u2014a far right nationalist Turkish group\u2014took to the streets to cries of \u201cDeath to the Armenians.\u201d The next morning in Nice, Brahim Aouissaoui, an undocumented Tunisian migrant, age 21, entered the Basilique Notre-Dame and slaughtered two women and a man praying there. (Aouissaoui had entered the country only two days earlier through Italy; whether or not he was sent to commit an attack remains to be seen. Wounded by police, he is in custody as of this writing.) Finally, on Nov. 2, a terrorist commando opened fire on the main synagogue of Vienna, killing four.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Terror was back in Europe. The effect on public opinion was particularly strong in France, where the series of events seemed, once more, disconcertingly senseless. As details began to emerge in the press, Paty\u2019s murder proved especially shocking. There was the 10-day smear campaign targeting Paty before the murder\u2014how, after he announced to his class he was going to show them a drawing from\u00a0Charlie<\/em>, the father of one of his students, helped by an Islamist activist, began to post a series of videos accusing the professor of Islamophobia, obscenity, and harassment; how one or several of these videos reached Anzorov, a hundred miles away; how Anzorov, once on site, paid a few students to identify Paty as the teacher walked out of the school, and how the students complied, knowing more or less intuitively what was to happen; how some of the students filmed Paty\u2019s body as it laid headless on the ground. But above all, it was Paty\u2019s profession as a teacher that gave the case its traumatic aura\u2014an aura that has not yet dissipated, seven months later.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Most of Paty\u2019s colleagues in France are on the left. Most, also, have had to face years of incidents involving Muslim students in class, incidents related to the teaching of Darwin\u2019s theory, to the place of women in society, or, of course, to the Shoah. Because these incidents have since been systematically downplayed by the Ministry of Interior, as well by the teachers unions, teachers are left to deal with them alone, and the tension is real enough to encourage self-censorship. According to a French think tank\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0published after Paty\u2019s death, 49% of professors across the country admitted to silencing themselves on some subjects in class, rather than having to deal with angry students. To these teachers and school administrators, Paty appeared like a hero\u2014and like someone let down by the state\u2014and by his own union.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Paty\u2019s death had the effect of opening up a crisis within the profession, and also among the left, that had been forced underground until then. During the demonstrations set up all over the country in Paty\u2019s memory, which were filled with high school teachers, the tension was perceptible. In Paris\u2019 Place de la R\u00e9publique, where I was, teachers were seen crying in anguish, and union delegates were booed for their complacency.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the consequences of the new climate that followed the fall attacks and Paty\u2019s death was the hardening of Macron\u2019s original plan on \u201cseparatism.\u201d Suspect mosques were closed, and Islamic \u201ccharity\u201d organizations known for their connections in Syria were dismantled. A \u201cRepublican chart\u201d was written for the Muslim organizations to sign, attesting they would comply with republican principles\u2014authorizing apostasy and condemning racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny. Two refused to sign, among them Mili G\u00f6rus, the No. 1 Turkish organization in France. Meanwhile in the press, the minister of education launched an offensive targeting what he called the \u201cIslamo-leftists\u201d inside of the universities, naming the professors and researchers who either by lack of information or by conviction were said to be complicit in Islamist propaganda. Most of them turned out to be intellectually close to Olivier Roy. Finally, early last April, the government announced the dismantling of the\u00a0La\u00efcit\u00e9 Observatory<\/em>, whose president had given the\u00a0L\u00e9gion d\u2019honneur<\/em>\u00a0to Dounia Bouzar in 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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To say that Kepel has won would be an overstatement. But it seems safe to say that his theories on Islamism have gone mainstream, and that Olivier Roy and his acolytes are now on the defensive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is a summary of what Kepel\u2019s work has helped to establish: Since the early 1990s, France has been subjected to two major Islamist influences, the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Both are Sunni, and, in France at least, one of their two main differences is strategic: Like the hippies and the Trotskyites of old, the Salafi preach a complete break with society in favor of a \u201cpure\u201d way of life imitating the Prophet\u2019s, while the Muslim Brothers are more into agitprop, trying to change the system from within by adopting the rhetorical codes of the society they mean to subvert. In France during the 1990s and 2000s, for instance, Tariq Ramadan was the main public figure among the Brothers, passing in the eyes of the secular left as a kosher, third-worldish ally figure, a bit like Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar does in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the risk of simplifying a bit, one could argue that from the mid-1990s onward, the rise of Islamist violence in France that culminated with the terror wave of 2015-2016 was essentially a Salafi undertaking. Originally more contemplative and peaceful, the drift of the Salafi school toward violence began in the early 1980s, when the Saudis thought it was smart politics to support the Afghan jihad against Moscow in order to compete with the influence that the recent (Shiite) Iranian revolution was beginning to exert inside of the Muslim world. The \u201cInternational Brigades\u201d Olivier Roy discovered in Afghanistan were thus partly composed of Algerian Muslims whose travel and bin Laden-led training had been paid for by the Saudis. These men were later sent back to Algeria while other \u201cBrigadists\u201d coming from Croatia returned. In the 1990s, Croatian fighters played a central role in the Balkan war, while Algeria was plunging into a series of mass killings that left some 200,000 victims among the civilian population. In France, Algerian Salafi killers arrived with the status of political refugees, and set up the nucleus of future terror groups.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet on the ground in France, things were in fact more nuanced than a binary Sunni rivalry: While Mohammed Merah, the killer of the Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012, did belong to a Salafi group (known among police as the Artigat network, from the village where it is based), the Izard mosque of Toulouse where that group used to recruit its members was managed by Muslim Brothers. Depending on the circumstances, the two groups both rivaled and help each other\u2014both spread radical propaganda and had connections to terror cells. Since 2016, however, that Salafi influence in France has begun to recede, while the Brothers have taken over.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kepel\u2019s latest book,\u00a0Le proph\u00e8te et la Pand\u00e9mie<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(The Prophet and the Pandemic<\/em>), published in January, helps us understand why, sheds new light on what happened in France last fall, and suggests what is likely to follow. One major factor in the changing landscape of French Muslim radicalism is an awareness among the oil monarchies that global concerns over climate change, large state investments in alternative energy sources by Germany and now the United States, and U.S. policy promoting shale oil discovery and pipelines, will all have consequences for their traditional sources of revenue. In Saudi Arabia, the societal reforms introduced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman aim at weakening the idle class that has lived off the oil rent for decades\u2014and which is also the most religiously conservative\u2014in favor of a younger, more entrepreneurial populace. As a result, the funding for international Salafism has dried up.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Meanwhile, having fled Cairo after the 2013 coup that put Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in power and watched its Qatari financing dry up, the Muslim Brothers have found refuge in Turkey, where Erdo\u011fan was looking for new allies to help harden his regime. In 2016, using the pretext of an attempted coup against him, Erdo\u011fan established his power along two ideological lines: the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand, and the fascist-nationalist Grey Wolves on the other. One year later, in 2017, Erdogan signed a series of agreements endorsing a partnership with Russia and Iran that was openly directed against the European Union.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was more or less the state of things when, in 2020, the COVID pandemic hit the region and the price of oil fell dramatically, reaching the astonishing negative rate of $38.94 in April 2020. In July, sanitary concerns forced Saudi Arabia to practically cancel the hajj\u2014or at least to reduce its size dramatically\u2014depriving the Muslim masses of the annual TV broadcast that normally serves Riyadh\u2019s image as the leader of the Sunni world.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Erdo\u011fan, who was trained as an imam in his youth, seized the occasion. On July 24, for the Friday Muslim prayer, in front of nearly every TV station in Turkey, he inaugurated the ancient Byzantine Saint Sophia basilica, the Hagia Sophia, as a mosque. This \u201chighly symbolic gesture,\u201d as Kepel calls it, made Turkey the most serious contender to usurp the Saudi claim to represent Sunni Islam. During the rest of the summer and the fall that followed, Erdo\u011fan threatened Greece with a new war and deployed his armies to no less than five countries, including Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This general Turkish offensive has been opposed by the EU, most notably by France. In August, Macron publicly stated his support for Greece, and in September, he announced at an EU summit that Erdo\u011fan \u201cis no longer a partner for Europe\u201d or in the oriental Mediterranean. One of the Islamic charity organizations dismantled in France in October, Barakacity, announced its intention to relocate to Ankara, and eventually did. As of this writing, the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s activism in France has shown no sign of weakening.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There is a civil war in Islam today, a war that knows no borders, and it explains what\u2019s been going on in France much better than any abstract debate over la\u00efcit\u00e9.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kepel\u2019s vision is important in the sense that it reinstates France within the political turmoil of the Mediterranean, where it belongs. To imagine that the oligarchic powers of the region will quietly allow a tolerant, enlightened version of Islam to rise at their Mediterranean borders and undermine their influence\u2014to suppose that they will not exploit every social weakness in France to compete for influence among Muslims there\u2014is, at best, na\u00efve. There is a civil war in Islam today, a war that knows no borders, and it explains what\u2019s been going on in France much better than any abstract debate over\u00a0la\u00efcit\u00e9<\/em>. What Kepel\u2019s vision shows us, in other words, is that France\u2019s future will be bloody.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But then, what do we do with Roy\u2019s existential problem? What do we do, specifically, with the converts we met at the beginning of this essay? Should we dismiss them once and for all as meaningless?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe are not in a war between civilizations,\u201d wrote Roy in\u00a0Le Monde<\/em>, \u201cbut in a war between values. The conflict is not between the Enlightenment and Islam, but between the values inherited from the\u00a0\u201960s (women\u2019s rights, LGBT rights, sexual freedom, abortion, etc.) and the conservative values that religions stand for.\u201d A suggestive sentence, even from a man who denies any role of Islam in terror.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One could argue that Roy\u2019s main problem\u2014aside from his ideology\u2014is his classicism. He\u2019s a follower of Dostoyevsky, for whom, morally speaking, religion and nihilism are like matter and anti-matter. But how true is this poetic idea in the 21st century? Everywhere one looks, from Trumpism to Salafism, if the last decades are any indication, the transgressors and the prophets of order and are in fact one and the same. Orthodoxies and heresies have melted to create conceptual and humans monsters.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At their best, both Kepel and Roy hold part of the key to understanding France\u2019s new reality. One reflects \u201cexistentially\u201d on how religions and postmodern nihilism fight and influence each other, the other focuses acutely and pragmatically on geopolitical chaos in the Middle East and its deleterious consequences for France and Europe. As for the social competition, while Kepel was among the guests at Macron\u2019s inauguration party on May 14, 2016, Roy maintains the upper hand on control of the funding, and coordinates the EU grants on Islamic studies. Roy remains a major influence on academia, whereas Kepel figures more as an outsider. It therefore seems likely that as France endures continued turmoil and bloodshed, we will be hearing more from both in the decade to come.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Marc Weitzmann is the author of 12 books, including, most recently,\u00a0Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France (and What It Means For Us)<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span> He is a regular contributor to\u00a0Le Monde\u00a0and\u00a0Le Point.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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France\u2019s Great Debate Over the Sources and Meaning of Muslim Terror MARC WEITZMANN Three months after the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in 2015, young cartoonist Pierrick Juin joined the staff of the French satirical newspaper to, in his own words, help keep alive and safeguard the \u2018stupid and mean\u2019 spirit of a fearless publication […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92029"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92029"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92054,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92029\/revisions\/92054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}