Wandering Souls

Tobie Nathan, Stephen Muecke

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509534968, 9781509534951
• eBook ISBN: 9781509534975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In September 2014, the French government entrusted Tobie Nathan with the task of counselling radicalized young people who had been drawn to jihadism and in this book he recounts his experiences of some of the young people he met and counselled. He describes what he heard, felt and perceived in his encounters with these young people and their loved ones as he tried to understand the forces running through them and tried to grasp what their fate held in store for them. In so doing, he shows that the history of radicalizations is not the history of 'natures' but of metamorphoses – an unpredictable journey, with moments of immobility punctuated by sudden intoxication at the thought of other futures. It is a history of wandering souls who find themselves unable to form a narrative of origin and in thrall to harmful forces but who may find a way home one day.

This deeply humane and engaging book will be of great interest to everyone concerned with the issue of radicalization and with the deep and growing challenges our societies face in accommodating difference.

1
Secularity and the War of the Gods

Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another. What is hard for modern man, and especially for the younger generation, is to measure up to workaday existence.¹

Max Weber, Science as a Vocation

We were children, just boys! Our games were often fights; arguments could escalate into insults. We knew that words attacking family, race or religion were the last words before the first punch. And when a mediator, a teacher or teacher’s assistant, tried to reason with us, he would call upon the law: ‘You don’t have the right to call him a dirty Jew …’ he would remind us. ‘Why?’ the other would protest, ‘we are in a Republic!’ At the time, the Republic was all about rights, not constraints. It didn’t forbid, it authorised; it didn’t hinder, it unleashed. It’s true we ventured to the limits of these rights, pushing our educators to their last line of defence. Nevertheless, it was still the case that we perceived ‘the Republic’ (we wouldn’t be able to give a definition of this entity) as a kind of divinity that put rich and poor, strong and weak, boss and subject, teacher and pupil, on the same footing. Childish naivety … but also candour in a time of opportunities.

I was terrified of school – even to this day. I had a visceral sense of its desire to destroy our modes of belonging, to make a mockery of them. There was a simple principle: after being subject to a series of critiques, gibes, making fun, one inevitably felt all alone in one’s Jewishness, Arabness, probably even in one’s ‘Auvergeness’ (should one be from that province), and yearning to come and melt into the common mass of ‘secularity’ [laïcité]. So, we kept our singularity to ourselves, even if it was pretty obvious. We pretended. We even developed critical responses, as in ‘reaction formations’. We made ourselves out to be more French than the French, more secular than the secular. At the time we didn’t use the word laïcité, that came later …

Today, it is repeated over and over, as if its meaning were clear. And yet it is an ambiguous word; if you analyse it, you find a few unexpected meanings.

The French word laïc comes from the Greek, laos which means people. If you refer to its etymology, laïc goes back to ‘popular’, and therefore to ‘common’. The meaning is not too far from the word ‘vulgar’, which in turn derives from a Latin root, vulgus, the ‘crowd’ or the ‘multitude’.² ‘Vulgar’ has remained close to its root, still designating that which is of the greatest number and which, in consequence, is ‘primary’. ‘Laïc’, being more scholarly, took a more specific meaning in its opposition to ‘cleric’. Apparently in the Middle Ages, ‘laïc’ signified ‘ignorant’, without religious instruction, the contrary of the cleric, who was a lettered man, supposedly knowing the scriptures. By keeping this first distinction in mind – laïc as ‘ignorant’ opposed to cleric as ‘initiated’ – we will see that it has not entirely disappeared!

Following the religious wars that devastated France in the sixteenth century, the word took on other meanings. ‘Laïc’ came to designate an institutional reality. The word did not imply that all French people should be laïc (ignorant of the religious), but that the State, the law of the land, philosophy and above all teaching should be freed of all religious influence. This meaning, that made ‘laïc’ an adjective that could be applied to organisations, is today contradicted (even though it is fairly robust) by semantic shifts running through society on the move …

At the beginning of the twentieth century, at the height of the Third Republic, the State succeeded for the first time in unifying the country and normalising souls by putting in place obligatory and secular³ public schooling. In the space of a generation, the country saw the disappearance of regional languages,⁴ and a great number of the pagan rituals that have still survived in the countryside⁵ as cults associated with springs or wells or death rituals. The Republic came to impose a more aggressive connotation on the word ‘laïc’, which got closer and closer to ‘anticlerical’. Henceforth, a laïc is not just someone ignorant in religious matters, no longer simply actively supporting the independence of the institutions of the State, liberated from the tutelage of the Church, but he begins to be a priest-hater. After Rabelais, he will sometimes be defined as a papefigue,⁶ or a prêtrophobe, a sixteenth-century term meaning a man with a ‘phobia’ of priests. ‘Prêtrophobe’ … We are not far from certain terms that appear today when people are being critical of a widespread attitude, as in ‘homophobe’ or ‘islamophobe’.

In addition, there is an implicit notion that attaches itself to this secularity without speakers being aware of it, a sort of double unconscious emerging like that enhanced violence of the long repressed. If the State, having fought savagely, as we know, against heretics, Cathars, Jews and witches until the last moments of the Inquisition, then devastated whole regions to eradicate Calvinists and Protestants; if, having swept through the countryside during the Terror, beheading, drowning and burning people, animals and crops in order to annihilate nobles and ecclesiasticals; if, after all that, the State still needed to legislate and impose peace on society through the much-touted ‘separation of Church and State’, it is because the forces involved, those that have so often nearly broken up the State, cannot be mastered. In a sense, the 1905 law on secularism flows from a never-ending failure: the Republic cannot – will not – allow these forces to express themselves. They are no doubt too primitive, too archaic. The Republic cannot allow itself to let them blossom, to seize institutions and agencies. All it can do is forbid them from entering the spheres of power.

But these forces have a name. We have always known them: they are the gods – not religions, but gods! They are the true protagonists. And I mean all the gods, the pagan deities as much as the monotheistic gods, each with its specific requirements, from the Catholic God to the Protestant, Islamic, or Jewish ones. And we must agree that the 1905 law not only signed off on the failure of the Republic, but also the failure of religions. This law acknowledged the fact that there was no credibility in the promises that religions made about knowing their gods and keeping their moods in check and, in the process, protecting people from their violence and bloodthirstiness. All these religions had failed in their attempts to master their gods.

So, what has remained hidden behind the notion of secularity, ever since the first years of the twentieth century, is its negative, what it has built a bulwark against the uncontrollable violence of the gods. And it is these same gods that are reappearing today, and they have become even more cruel to the extent that they are in direct competition with one another because of globalisation and the accelerated movement of populations.

This war – that has been put on hold, that has taken place many times before and is just waiting to break out again – has to be given its proper name: the ‘war of the gods’. So, when the politicians announce that ‘we are at war’ without even having declared war on anyone; when we meet young people ready to pick a fight, mindlessly looking for some battle-ground, it is actually this unnamed war that is driving them.⁷

While they look like they are running away from secularity, my calculation is that these young radicalised people are reactivating to its opposite, its grimacing double. It is no good trying to reason with them by reminding them of the values of the Republic, as if they hadn’t understood them, or had forgotten them. To the contrary, they live them through and through, right down to discovering their foundations and reviving the conditions that created them. They want to be initiated into this hidden part of our world, this war of the gods from which our society has tried to protect itself, precisely through secularity, and which their engagement brings out in the open again.

Addressing the problem in terms of people and their individual motivations, difficulties they might have had in their childhood or adolescence, and ignoring the forces that are attached to them, and which according to their own testimony, possess them, is an intellectual error, a bad way of approaching the question. Worse, it is lazy.

When a young man of twenty-five confronts the combined forces of the police and the security forces, offering his breast to their bullets as he yells Allahou Akbar (‘Allah is the greatest’), he inscribes a surplus of divine existence into the world. Let’s call things by their names. The terror we feel is of a mythological order. In this sequence of events, the death of a man who in full awareness sacrifices himself, reinforces the existence of his god,⁸ according to a reverse accounting: on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Prologue
• 1 Secularity and the War of the Gods
• 2 The Veil as Membrane
• 3 Filiation and Affiliation
• 4 Conversion and Initiation
• 5 Apocalypse
• 6 Hashish and Assassins
• 7 Terror
• 8 Abandoned Children are Political Beings
• 9 The Foreignness of Migrant Children
• 10 Generations
• Epilogue
• End User License Agreement