Radicalized Loyalties

Becoming Muslim in the West

Fabien Truong, Seth Ackerman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509519385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1
COMMON HISTORIES

In the appreciation of the passage of time, the first step is the hardest.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained (trans. D.J. Enright)

Making a home in public housing: a French history

To grow up in a housing project in Grigny, or in Seine-Saint-Denis, is to inherit a part of France’s history. At the end of the Second World War the country was morally divided, enfeebled by profound human and material losses, practically a ward of the United States. Didn’t France owe its salvation to the Marines? Wasn’t it the Marshall Plan keeping the economy afloat? The postwar reconstruction years were focused on reconquering and rebuilding a defeated country that had always seen itself as a beacon of global influence.

From utopia to U-turn

France now had to restage its entry into the twentieth century: to fully embrace modernity, find a new path to prosperity, and fulfill the founding myth of a generous Republic in solidarity with its most disadvantaged. For a long while, this new departure seemed to be birthing an “affluent society”: a “second French Revolution,” as slow and protracted as the revolution of 1789 had seemed sudden.¹ From the 1950s to the 1970s, the nation’s blossoming housing projects embodied this promise. The proliferation of collective housing, grouped into towers and compact blocks, was intended to meet the challenges of the times. The rational architecture of these projects eased congestion in aging and bourgeois central cities, bringing modern comfort to young white-collar families as well as to an incoming stream of manual workers – those from the French countryside and, later, those imported from the far-off lands that served the metropole: the colonies. Nearly every city, in its updated form, displayed the same pattern: a historic central city filled with stone-built dwellings of a glorious past; in the thriving suburbs, the concrete of a radiant future. It represented a new deal between center and periphery. The urban landscape was expanded and divided. And triumphant colonization had its last gasp: instead of colonists moving abroad to exploit an overseas labor force, now that labor force would have to migrate. Meanwhile, working-class solidarity within the neighborhood was strained by perpetual economic growth.

An initial turning point came in the 1960s: white-collar workers left the cités, auguring an end to social mixing. Meanwhile, immigrant family reunion policies and the 1970s changed the color of the scenery. Dark-skinned workers were officially recognized as heads of families: what was once seen as a temporary immigration of unattached individuals became a new population putting down lasting roots.² At the urban periphery, poor neighborhoods became immigrant neighborhoods, and then neighborhoods of immigrant children. In the wake of the 1981 Socialist Party victory and the success of the 1983 “Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme,”* these children became politicized, asserting their rights to full recognition. Grassroots organizations proliferated, but the most dedicated activists struggled to obtain positions of responsibility. The rupture with the traditional elitist political system grew more pronounced; the bitterness was all the greater given the high hopes for representation that were now dashed.³ The 1990s confirmed the implosion of the working class. Factory work became scarcer and more precarious, the service industries were proletarianized, commutes became longer and more costly, and the democratization of education gave the children of manual workers hope that they could rise in the social hierarchy. The period marked the end of Fordism and the erosion of a form of collective pride forged by workers’ struggles. Such struggles, though they often excluded immigrants, had kept workers together. Now they gradually became invisible.⁴ The social question became an urban question, urban policy eclipsed the fight against unemployment, and little by little politics was replaced by the art of keeping up appearances.⁵ Immigrant neighborhoods became “problem neighborhoods”: sieves to distribute a marginalized population for whom success meant getting out.

A utopia of ultra-modern neighborhoods looking outward to the world gave way to an other-worldly landscape. Quick to hang familiar labels on an obvious case of social and ethnic separatism, commentators drew facile analogies to the American ghetto or apartheid: France’s problems, it was said, were ultimately the same as those of the United States or South Africa. But as Loïc Wacquant has shown, such an analogy cannot withstand comparison, at least it could not in the early 1990s.⁶ The traditional function of a ghetto is to prevent contact between a stigmatized group and the “legitimate” population, while providing the former with secure living conditions so that society can benefit from its labor without being sullied by proximity to it. That was the case with the Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the black ghetto in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s. But the apparent post-Fordist symmetry between today’s American “hyper-ghetto” and the European “anti-ghetto” is deceptive. Their inhabitants share the same grievous lack of opportunities and the same social opprobrium. They’ve both become superfluous in an economy that no longer needs the manpower it once did. They live in disreputable neighborhoods, outcast zones, embodiments of an idleness and social dysfunction that are said to threaten the whole social body. Yet marginality is still a product of specific histories and geographies. The American “hyper-ghetto” is racially homogeneous; it spreads beyond the horizon over vast autarkic zones, a desolate space where police, prisons, and the underground economy regulate social life. In the hyper-ghetto, low levels of life expectancy seem as inalienable as the right to bear arms. The European “anti-ghetto,” though the majority is non-white, is ethnically more diverse. Rather than being an offshoot of racial segregation, it is the distorted mirror of the old European colonies, more narrowly concentrated in pockets that still look outward to the city center, despite great poverty. The constant flow of departures and arrivals is as decisive as the effective impossibility of escape for many. While police, prisons, and the underground economy are central, their sway is contested by the possibility of working elsewhere and by a welfare state that’s embedded in daily life. Nevertheless, rising numbers of young people born in the 1990s and afterward were forced to grow up with the feeling of being locked out. In France, the cités are not so much “another world” as a “world of others”: taxi, bus, or truck drivers, housewives, warehouse workers, the unemployed – but also, more rarely, football players, actors, or high-achieving students.

Fears

In France, the great fear is the prospect of voluntary secession by a group of people who seem like the neighbors one never speaks to. That would mean the end of republican integration, confirming that a nation that managed to make room for its children from deep in the nineteenth-century countryside has failed, in the early twenty-first century, with the children of the children of its overseas colonies. This anxiety can be boiled down to a distinctively French phobia, one so deeply rooted in national history that foreigners struggle to understand it: “communautarisme.”

In a nation that achieved unity on the basis of universal and abstract ideals (“liberty, equality, fraternity”), particularistic or “communalist” claims seem to threaten social cohesion, as if open displays of belonging were inevitably mutually exclusive.⁷ According to this logic, because residents of the cités live by rules, values, and beliefs that are their own, they go against the nation. An era of mounting inequality has become an era of “others”: “Arabs,” “blacks,” and, now, “Muslims.”

The Muslim religion is assumed to serve as a unifying force within the ethnically heterogeneous neighborhoods of this anti-France, resembling a kind of revolt, a return to the past. A Republic that thought it had replaced God once and for all in the race to mold people’s minds now finds itself confronting Him once again. For many, indeed, sacred commitment has become a way to engage in politics at a time when the professionalization of French political life has exacerbated an already glaring democratic deficit, and when the fencing-off of decision-making arenas is seen as an embodiment of a latent racism.⁸ Organizing around Islam can thus provide a sense of honor, history, and collective life. This implicit rebuke by “problem neighborhoods” has led outsiders to imagine them as Muslim enclaves, dens of potential Islamists. Since the Bataclan attacks, the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels, where some of the terrorists lived, has seen its name become a generic identifier. Within these “Molenbeeks,” marginality has been conflated with a religious identity, placing secular France at the forefront of a new struggle. In a country that esteems its literary luminaries, Michel Houellebecq’s latest bestseller epitomizes the spirit of the times in the concision of its title: Submission. Submit or succumb, in other words.

This, in broad outlines, is the tone of the “culture talk” in which boys like Tarik, Radouane, Marley, Adama, Amédy, and Hassan are immersed.

“Boys will be boys”

In the cités, age makes a difference. A boy’s age gives him a place in local society, positioning him vis-à-vis others and embedding him in a neighborhood’s history. The passage of time and the succession of generations take place in a three-part cycle: “kids,” “grown-ups,” “old-timers.”

Three “kids” …

Tarik, Radouane, and Marley are 24, 25, and 26 years old, respectively. They belong to the same “generation” – a roughly three-year period during which one cohort of boys in a cité will succeed another at the local school, in the community centers, on the football fields, or in the streets. They entered adolescence in the early 2000s: the post-September 11 world, and the France of the 2005 suburban riots.

Tarik has never walked and is confined to a wheelchair. A series of lethal abnormalities were diagnosed while his mother, Aïcha, was pregnant with twins. Though she and her husband Mohamed had planned to move to France permanently, they returned to Algeria instead, convinced they would have to bury a stillborn son in the land of their ancestors. Tarik survived, unlike his brother. He spent the first 11 years of his life in Kabylie, in limbo: between school, Koranic instruction, and daily care, his childhood was marked by lengthy stays at the Hôpital Necker in Paris. There it was confirmed he would survive, provided he received continual medical attention – an impossibility in an Algeria rocked by terrorism. Mohamed decided to move with his son to the northern suburbs of Paris, leaving Aïcha and Samia, Tarik’s little sister, 11 years his junior, in the family home. Mohamed left behind a business that had offered him a livelihood and recognition in Algeria, becoming a warehouse worker in several factories around the Paris region – a job he still holds today. With his meager pay and help from the welfare system, he took care of his son, who alternated between six months in a rehabilitation center and six months in school. School is where I first met him, when he was 16. Tarik heaps praise on “France’s public services,” to which he owes his life, though there are many wounds they can’t heal. Father and son never speak of this family saga of exile and paternal care. Such sacrifices aren’t meant to be dramatized or explained. Among men, certain things are done rather than talked about: Mohamed did what he had to do, without complaint or emotional display. Tarik attributes this to the inexorable divergence of the sexes: “My father let my mother and sister have an easy life over there, and since he’s a man and I’m a man, we came here and had a shitty life!” Mohamed didn’t hesitate to...