Radicalized Islam, or Islamicized Radicalism?

Kenzo Tribouillard, AFP, Getty Images

Shortly after the November terrorist attacks in Paris, the government declared that France was at war. But who, exactly, was the enemy? The answer — “terrorism” — satisfied no one and sparked a different kind of war in France, this time fought among its intellectuals. Unlike other Left Bank slugfests, however, this melee has far-reaching implications, ones that may help us better understand what took place not just in Paris and Brussels, but also in Fort Hood and San Bernardino.

The leading antagonists in this battle are Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, renowned scholars of political Islam. Little more than a week after Islamic State jihadists massacred 130 people in Paris, Roy published an op-ed in the newspaper Le Monde. Titled “Jihadism Is a Generational and Nihilist Revolution,” the piece argued that the young French Muslims who committed these acts did so less because they were Muslim than because they were young. ISIS, he declared, recruited French youths who, already radicalized, “seek a cause, a label, a grand narrative on which to slap the blood-stained signature of their personal revolt.”

The threat facing France, Roy argued, was not the caliphate that ISIS seeks to resurrect. That nightmarish notion, he insisted, “will sooner or later evaporate like an old mirage.” The real threats to France and the rest of the West are the nihilistic and revolutionary reflexes of a certain cross-section of alienated youths. Were they, Roy wondered, “the avant-garde of a coming war or, instead, the detritus of history’s intestinal rumblings”?

Roy plumped for the latter explanation. Ultimately, the ISIS recruits who carried out the November attacks were rebels seeking a cause, any cause, with which to garb their murderous impulses. Think Marlon Brando wearing a beard, not a leather jacket, and riding a gun-mounted pickup, not a Triumph. In a well-chiseled phrase, Roy concluded that the challenge confronting France and the rest of the West was not “the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism.”

Roy’s bon mot caught the attention not just of the French media, but also of Gilles Kepel. Author of several works on Islam in France, especially on the grim suburbs that have become hothouses for Salafism, the ultra-conservative sect that rejects secularism and more-moderate interpretations of Islam, Kepel lambasted Roy. In a bravura piece published by the newspaper Libération, Kepel suggested that Roy should visit the suburbs that have hatched these terrorists rather than “rehashing Wikipedia entries and newspaper accounts.” Repeatedly punning on his antagonist’s name — his piece was titled “Le Roi Est Nu” (The King Is Naked) — Kepel blasted Roy for echoing the glib analysis first proposed by American specialists who, knowing neither Arabic nor Arabs, nevertheless declared that these acts of terrorism were the product of ruptures with their dominant societies.

Alberto Conti, Contrasto, Redux

According to Roy’s school of thought, the ISIS militants of today are no different from, say, the members of the Red Brigade in Italy or Red Army Faction in West Germany during the 1970s. Change the color from red to black and, voilà, you find the same rebellion, the same rupture, the same rapture with violence. For Kepel, this is utter nonsense. Deafened by the mantra of “radicalization” — which, for Kepel, signifies “the absence of analysis” — Roy did not hear the actual words pronounced by Salafist preachers in the suburbs, just as he had failed to read the tweets and tracts they were broadcasting.

Salafism, Kepel argued, must be taken seriously — even if this leads to accusations of “Islamophobia.” One of the seminal texts ignored by Roy and his followers, Kepel declared, is The Global Islamic Resistance Call. Written by Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian engineer turned jihadist, the text appeared online in late 2004 or early 2005 and, Kepel believes, frames the worldview of ISIS militants in France. In his most recent book, Terror in the Hexagon, he argues that al-Suri offers a kind of “third-generation jihadism.” From the 1970s to 1990s, the mujahedin in Afghanistan and Armed Islamic Group of Algeria formed the first generation of jihadists, who were then superseded by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda at the turn of the millennium. Turning the Al Qaeda model upside down, al-Suri dismissed centrally planned attacks against large and symbolic targets. Instead he urged a bottom-up strategy privileging the actions of independent and isolated groups already embedded in the West. The attacks in Paris and Brussels might well reflect al-Suri’s malign influence.

Predictably, the French media have been taken more by the sparks than by the substance of Roy and Kepel’s very public quarrel. But the substance is crucial because it forces us to reflect on the roots of jihadist terrorism. Does it find its sustenance in the soil of a politicized form of Islam, or instead in the secularized forms of society in the West? Is religion at the source of these awful events, or is it merely a justification — a convenient hostage, really — for acting on impulses that have little if anything to do with faith?

When I raised these questions with Kepel in a telephone interview, he renewed, in impeccable English, his emphasis on religion.

At times, Kepel, asking about the significance of certain dates, made me feel like a contestant on Jeopardy. “Why is the year 2005 important?” Was it the online appearance of al-Suri’s Global Islamic Resistance Call? The explosion of the suburban riots in France? Those answers were right, but not right enough. Kepel interrupted my stabs at an answer: “It was the year that YouTube was born.” That event, he declared, was as pivotal as al-Suri’s manifesto or the riots in France. With YouTube, not only did ISIS find an invaluable platform, but Salafism found an audience far greater than that of the largest mosque.

The growing presence of Salafism in certain urban enclaves also preoccupies Kepel. In his books, he traces the “halalization” of these neighborhoods. Increasingly, everyday life in places like Saint Denis, in Paris’s northern suburbs, is governed by what is halal (permitted) and haram (forbidden). These categories extend well beyond food, encompassing sartorial, sexual, and social mores.

RGA, REA, Redux

Kepel worries that this trend is not limited to the borders of these suburbs. “Have you heard,” he asked, “about Hijab Day at Sciences Po?” In fact, I had read that morning an account of it in Le Monde. Sponsored by a few Muslim students at the university — one of France’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning — they encouraged fellow students to don a headscarf for a day in order to give them an idea of daily life for some Muslims in Paris. While a few students accepted the invitation, many others demurred.

Teaching at a public university where I regularly encounter students passing out material about Hinduism and Sufism, Pentecostalism and Buddhism, and where on occasion a young man, waving a Bible outside our library, tells me I am damned, I found Hijab Day both unexceptional and well-intentioned. But here, too, I was wrong. For Kepel, it instead carried the whiff of proselytization and made yet another dent in the rusting carapace of laïcité, France’s robust separation of church and state.

But it is less the hijab that threatens higher education in France than the country’s successive governments. Excoriating the deep cuts made in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, Kepel reminded me of a fundamental difference between French and American universities. Unlike our country, in France there is little public pressure and few interest groups to finance these fields. He suggested that the Israel-Palestine conflict has largely driven the founding of chairs and departments in the United States devoted to the Middle East.

I asked Kepel what advice he would give France’s leaders if he had their ear. “I have their ears,” he replied. The problem was that the ears were hard of hearing.

As it turned out, here was an issue where he and Roy agreed. In a long email exchange, Roy told me he also had spoken into powerful ears, including the French president’s. In particular, he had warned François Hollande against his efforts to “expel religion from the public sphere,” as with Hollande’s backing of headscarf bans, but to little avail. “There is a political logic,” he wrote, “that has little to do with good politics and good logic.”

The greatest danger to laïcité, for Roy, is its fiercest defenders. When I asked him about the role the schools and universities have played — or failed to play — in the rise of Islamist fundamentalism, Roy cited the recent metamorphosis of laïcité. Once it was a term defining the legal separation of church and state, but now there is “a growing trend to turn laïcité from the neutrality of the State into an ideological system of its own.” This mirrors distrust concerning laïcité among the youths living in the devastated suburbs. “These so-called valeurs laïques,” secular values of the republic that reflect its revolutionary origins, he wrote me, “are met with suspicion by young schoolchildren who feel ‘cheated’ by the system and do not find ‘égalité, liberté, fraternité’ in their relationship with the police, the labor market, and the school system.”

This explains, for Roy, why Salafism is the consequence, not the cause, of youthful radicalization. Insisting that we cannot make sense of the suicide bombers according to “any kind of traditional, religious, and fundamentalist approach,” he instead points to the attraction that violence holds for this particular demographic. “ISIS fishes in an existing pond,” he insisted, “and it is useless to understand radicalization as part either of a religious trajectory or of great global strategy.”

Radicalism versus Islamism: Is the choice truly so stark? Or, instead, has this debate’s sound and fury obscured the shared traits of equally compelling analyses? Might we not instead compare Roy and Kepel’s approaches to a theoretical double helix? Doesn’t each of these thinkers offer a discrete strand of interpretation, which in turn coils around a shared axis?

Marc Hecker shares this impression. A respected, widely published terrorism specialist at the French Institute of International Relations who also teaches at Sciences Po, Hecker observed that the spat between Kepel and Roy in part reflects the confrontational nature of French academe, based on “chapels,” or schools of thought, fueled by personal or institutional animosity.

Roy’s and Kepel’s approaches are in fact complementary, Hecker wrote. In his own research on the motivations of jihadist terrorists, Hecker has been impressed by their great diversity. “Some of these profiles correspond to Kepel’s analytical framework, while others correspond to Roy’s,” he says. “At times the two frameworks simply overlap.”

Since the 2015 attacks, Hecker has also had the ear of government officials. While he has emphasized the reinforcement of France’s system of human intelligence, Hecker allows that much more must be done at a national level. Like Roy and Kepel, he worries about France’s fraying social fabric and the growing divide between well-to-do urban centers and impoverished peripheries. As one potential way to ameliorate the situation, Kepel cited the current debate in France concerning the re-establishment of compulsory military service, and pointed out that it would allow the young from different social milieus to mingle and mature together.

One of France’s greatest political observers, the late Raymond Aron, wrote several decades ago that those who “believe that people will follow their interests instead of their passions have understood nothing of the 20th century.” Both Kepel and Roy can shed light on the jihadist particulars of that insight. They’d do well to listen patiently to each other, and we’d do well to listen to both of them.

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of world cultures and literatures in the department of modern and classical languages and the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author, most recently, of Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2015).