Terreur dans l'Hexagone: Genèse du djihad français

by Gilles Kepel

Pendant les dix ans qui séparent les émeutes de l’automne 2005 des attentats de 2015 contre Charlie Hebdo puis le Bataclan, la France voit se creuser de nouvelles lignes de faille. La jeunesse issue de l’immigration postcoloniale en constitue le principal enjeu symbolique. Celle-ci contribue à la victoire de François Hollande aux élections de 2012. Mais la marginalisation économique, sociale et politique, entre autres facteurs, pousse certains à rechercher un modèle d’"islam intégral" inspiré du salafisme et à se projeter dans une "djihadosphère" qui veut détruire l’Occident "mécréant".

Le changement de génération de l’islam de France et les transformations de l’idéologie du djihadisme sous l’influence des réseaux sociaux produisent le creuset d’où sortiront les Français exaltés par le champ de bataille syro-irakien. Fin 2015, près de mille d’entre eux l’ont rejoint et cent cinquante y ont trouvé la mort, sans compter ceux qui perpètrent leurs attentats en France.

Dans le même temps, la montée en puissance de l’extrême droite et les succès électoraux du Front national renforcent la polarisation de la société, dont les fondements sont aujourd'hui menacés de manière inédite par ceux qui veulent déclencher, dans la terreur et la désolation, la guerre civile.<

C’est à dénouer les fils de ce drame qu’est consacré ce livre.

Spécialiste de l’islam et du monde arabe contemporain, Gilles Kepel anime le séminaire "Violence et dogme" à l’École normale supérieure et enseigne à l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris. Il a récemment publié aux Éditions Gallimard Passion arabe (2013) et Passion française (2014).

Antoine Jardin, ingénieur de recherches au CNRS, est spécialiste de la sociologie politique des quartiers populaires.

Genres: Islam, Politics, Nonfiction, France, Political Science, Terrorism, Middle East

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

A French scholar and analyst of the Islamic and the Arab world. He has written works on Radical Islam including Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. He was the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs for 2009-10 at LSE IDEAS (Centre for Diplomacy & Strategy, at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Professor Kepel has previously been a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York. He speaks Arabic, French, English and Italian.

Kepel's work has stirred intense debates in the French academia. His analyses of political Islam have notably been criticized by Olivier Roy, François Burgat and Alain Roussillon. These 3 authors however are also quite controversial, with secularists like Caroline Fourest or Mohamed Sifaoui being particularly critical of Roy and Burgat's sympathy towards islamists.

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the two authors hate each other and claim to be in total opposition, this book could easily be sold as a companion to "Jihad and Death" by Olivier Roy. Whereas Roy focuses more on the psychological underpinnings of radical jihadism, Kepel's analysis focuses more on the social and political context in which Salafi-Jihadism arose in modern France. But although the subheading promises a look at "The Rise of Jihad in the West," this is very much a book specifically about life and politics in France, which renders its value to studying jihadism as a universal phenomenon, or even a Western one, less useful.

Having said that, I really appreciated Kepel's analysis and really did not find it discordant with Roy's. He provides an anatomy of Muslim politics in France since the end of the colonization of Algeria and argues that the 2005 riots, though they had nothing to do with Islamism, were a turning point in the politicization of the banlieue. Muslims began to vote in great numbers after this episode (apparently up until even the late-90s it was legally difficult for them to do so), while the right-wing Sarkozy government began to rile up the politics of French ethnic identity as a means to create a support base. Some of the ideological trends born out of the riots have ended up bolstering the Front Nationale camp, as well as the camp of people that Kepel describes as advocates of "total Islam". I don't know enough about this history to evaluate it properly, but this is one place that Roy disagrees with Kepel strongly, arguing that his analysis of the riots represents an opportunistic reordering of events and that jihadism is more of a doomsday cult than a product of failed integration.

In one of the most fascinating parts of the book, Kepel cites the importance of conspiracy videos shared by the far-left, far-right and Islamist groups, including very popular YouTube series that have circulated in these milieus in recent years. I think that the impact of these videos is important and understated. While they have at best a tangential relation to radicalism, or political action of any sort, they have definitely created powerful alternate realities for millions of people. The "Arrivals" videos popular with many English-speaking Muslims and non-Muslims a decade ago are an example of this. According to Kepel, in France a set of narrative videos claiming to explain world events made by "super jihadist" Omar Omsen likely helped recruit huge numbers of people to join the fight in Syria. Omsen's conspiracy videos were also shared by many other "antisystematic" factions in society, including the right and left. Kepel's descriptions reminded me a bit of "Zeitgeist" and other popular videos that I and others had watched growing up. Most of us outgrew these provocative but shallow narratives, but for others they helped inculcate a lasting political paranoia and mistrust of institutions, which was usually followed by apathy rather than activism. Although these videos are an important and underanalyzed area of study, I suspect that they are viewed as being beneath the consideration of most intellectuals. For that reason I appreciate Kepel's analysis of them, which to me evinces a good practical immersion in the nuances of his subject.

Regarding Kepel's analysis of jihadist texts I was less convinced by the central role accorded to Abu Musab al-Suri in the book. al-Suri was the author of "The Global Islamic Resistance Call" and Kepel attributes the current wave of individualized jihad very directly to his theories and writings. Although many of the lone terrorist actors we encounter today do seem to echo Suri's advice in some ways, if he has personally been such a great influence it seems strange that Suri is never actually mentioned in ISIS materials, despite their love of voluminously quoting their favorite radical scholars. I am not aware of any ISIS jihadists mentioning him at all. Having read Brynjar Lia's analysis of Suri's work and translations of some of the Resistance Call, I am skeptical whether the unhinged nihilism of most ISIS attacks really fits into this model. Suri sought to trigger polarization and civil war in Western countries through terrorism, but its not entirely clear that most identified ISIS members (in the United States, I have read most of the affidavits against them) are consciously trying to do any such thing. Suri was a radical, but his was not a radicalism divorced from politics, as much of ISIS activity seems to be. He himself posited his beliefs in the league of the IRA and PKK, rather than the new generation of terrorism we are experiencing. This is not so say that Suri has had no influence on anyone in the Islamic State milieu, but if he and his work are as vitally important as Kepel repeatedly suggests here, the notable silence about him is a bit strange.

Interestingly, while Kepel has little time for the complaint of Islamophobia, he is still not an "Islamophobe" and makes a powerful case that French Muslims are an integral part of the national fabric, including even those "misguided children" who have ended up as jihadists. Kepel analogizes the charge of Islamophobia made by Islamic activist groups in France with the allegation of anti-Semitism used by Zionists to stifle any criticism of the government of Israel. I think he paints with too broad of a brush - discrimination against Muslims in France and elsewhere undoubtedly is real and existing - but in some cases the comparison is something to think about.

I read this deliberately alongside Roy's book to compare and contrast their respective analyses. They have a famous rivalry, but it seems to me that this must be more personal rather than substantive. Their writings are complementary and not in essential conflict. Kepel desribes the material basis of jihadism and Roy describes its psychology. Both have echoes of each others work within them. Looked at as a universal phenomenon however, outside of strictly France, I found Roy's book to be more useful in understanding the attraction of jihadism.

[Mal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Personnellement, j’ai vraiment du mal à comprendre les commentaires positifs concernant cet ouvrage - quand je vois “incontournable“, “perspicace“ et d’autres commentaires du même genre, je me demande mais quels sont ces critères qu’appliquent les gens pour arriver à ce genre de conclusion? Kepel, comme est trop souvent le cas dans le milieu intellectuel français, est très apte à employer un vocabulaire riche et louablement expressif pour finalement ne rien dire ni de profond ni de pénétrant.

Je pense que la plupart des gens sont suffisamment lucides pour comprendre que le phénomène du djihad en France - et en Europe occidentale de manière plus générale - est lié principalement à trois facteurs; i) le sentiment d’isolement économique et social qu’éprouve un certain profil issu de l’immigration maghrébine, ii) la politique étrangère des pays occidentaux en moyen orient, et iii) le caractère particulier de l’islam radical. Le deuxième élément est largement absent dans ce livre, ce qui trahit clairement les inclinaisons conservatrices de l’auteur. Quant au premier et au troisième, Kepel apporte le même regard que tant d’autres spécialistes dans ce domaine dont les connaissances approfondies du monde arabe ne se traduisent finalement qu’en une lecture distante et intellectualisante.

[Alain Acevedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seguramente el mejor libro sobre yihadismo que he leído. Una joya.

[David Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

After being very impressed by David Pinault's The Crucifix on Mecca's Front Porch, I found his assessment of Gilles Kepel as a scholar weighty: "I will read anything by Kepel I can get my hands on; he is by far Europe's greatest Orientalist." (Pinault remarks that "Orientalist" is not the pejorative that Edward Said tries to make it but simply means a scholar of Islam who happens to be non-Muslim - a member of a centuries old discipline that combines language study and textual exegesis and on-the-ground observation of cultures from northwest Africa to Southeast Asia.) Being desirous to work steadily at overcoming my backward ignorance on these subjects, I selected Terror in France as my first book by Kepel's and my trust in Pinault's testimony was not misplaced! Incidentally, in addressing the failings in Immanuel Todd's analysis, Kepel himself seems to provide a similar outline to Pinault's of the work of an Orientalist when he writes that Todd failed to perform his function, and extrapolates, "Obviously, the analysis of jihadist and Islamist phenomena is complex; it requires knowledge and competencies that include learning Arabic and studying Muslim cultures, as well as fieldwork in the impoverished banlieues (where the marks of Islamization now stand out amid social decay) and patiently listening to and interpreting what their residents say. This footwork from the Middle East and North Africa to the neighborhoods of our housing projects is harder than the sociohistorical acrobatics carried out between maps of France allegedly localizing the 'zombie Catholics' who reject Islam …by correlating them with priests who voted against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790..etc." (pg. 183). Kepel's book clearly shows the fruit of this approach by both its detail which is capable of focus to granular depth as well as depth of analysis which brings out of the details many important insights. I won't try to enumerate them all here, and doubtless for different readers different aspects will stand out. I will just mention a few things I learned or appreciated in the book.
Kepel fleshed out for me to a greater depth the differences between the three waves of modern jihad. He explodes the "lone wolf" thesis. He familiarized me with a lot of terminology and their meanings such as "Total Islam", or Islam integral. He helped me to understand the importance of the sacred geography in Islamic tradition and greatly helped by contextualizing the jihadists in France within French politics in the last forty years or so. He drove home the importance of Abu-Musab al-Suri and his Global Islamic Resistance Call as paradigm setting for third generation jihad.
I could list more but I won't. One of the rewards of reading the book is encountering his anecdotal observations and comments. An example that comes to mind:
"By another irony of history, in July 2009, the same month when he was married in a halal ceremony, on July 15, the day after the celebration of Bastille day, Coulibaly was received by President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace, where he was honored as a model of successful rehabilitation. This caustic wink from destiny, involving the consecration of the would-be mastermind of France's 9/11 in the very heart of the Republican pomp, tells us all we need to know about the inanity of the French ruling class and the French government's ignorance of and consequent lack of preparation for the challenges of the third-wave of jihadism." (pg. 160)
I enjoyed his engagement with French philosopher Pierre Manent's Situation de la France whose English translation under the title of Beyond Radical Secularism I happen to have read. He is on the whole more impressed and respectful of Manent's analysis than that of Immanuel Todd's in Qui est Charlie?, though he differs with him in eschewing a priori essentialization of Islam as a social group, partially for methodical reasons. Manent argued that France is weak as a nation "by its dilution in an evanescent European Union and by the substitution of the secular ideology of human rights for the social bond that was founded on the Christian religion." Manent prescribed giving Islam a legitimate place in the Republic as a community of its own, so that Muslims, without having to betray their attachment to their dogma, might become full-fledged members of the French nation. Kepel writes, "And yet the fact of this growing Islamization does not sum up the diversity of French population groups of Muslim culture or descent. Islamization is taking place in the context of a battle for hegemony over these groups being waged by movements and sects ranging from the Muslim Brothers to the jihadists by way of the Tabligh and the Salafists. The rise of these movements is undeniable. However, to concede victory to these zealots and to entrust their claim to represent the Muslim citizens or inhabitants of France as they have imagined it would be to underestimate the diversity of French people of Muslim provenance…Although the killers of 2015 have not yet won the battle, we have to admit with Pierre Manent that the incantation of the secular principles of the Republic by politicians who lack both inspiration and vision is far from being able to meet the challenge posed by a French jihad whose rise we have traced over the past decade and beyond. We can agree with Manent that beyond the monstrosity of the crimes committed against France by some of those who, in spite of themselves, are among its children, even if they have gone astray, terrorism in France is also a malaise of our civilization." (pg. 198). In contrast to Manent he argues against making the church, mosque, synagogue and temple "the primordial relays of state intervention" as all through the book he has argued that many actors who claim to follow "total" Islam "are resorting to religion to transform their social fury into a political strategy. He argues that what really needs to be built up instead is public education and notes the closest thing to the "friendship" where all the city's components live together is the lycee or French high school. Kepel certainly does embody a high level of education and models how it can be a boon to society.
I hope to further digest and commit to memory some of the key contents in this book as to not do so when I desire to increase my knowledge of the subject matter would be true sloth. The lazy man is too lazy to bring the spoon from his bowl to his mouth. Letting a single reading, with its awareness slip into oblivion would be rather a novice mistake. I hope too to supplement the reading of this book by many more by Kepel.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat odd book that would have been better if the publishers had waited a year or two. It was published in 2017, but it doesn't really include the major attacks in Paris and Nice in 2015 and 2016. I also may have found this book a little off-putting because of different styles of argumentation in French academia. Still, I can't quite figure out what the argument of this book is; the intro and conclusion are impressionistic and disorganized, and Kepel doesn't write clear chapter intros or conclusions that tell you the argument of a given chapter. Moreover, a lot of the book feels like in depth semiotic analysis of Islamist propaganda, often to the tedious point of explaining the significance of phrases like "Je Suis Charlie," which is a pretty self-explanatory marker. I think this book needed more editing (especially of the highly academic prose), a little more time, and

Still, this book may be worthwhile for students of terrorism and modern French politics and ideas. Kepel charts the course of French political Islam from the 80s to the outburst of terrorism in the 2010s. He treats the 2005 riots as a key rupture point that led to more self-conscious Islamist political organizing/identification as well as greater French concern with Islam and assimilation. French Muslims historically voted for the socialist parties mainly out of a sense that the Right was hostile to them. However, cultural issues like gay marriage and HOllande's fairly interventionist policies against terrorist groups in Mali and Syria broke this alliance, leading to some strange connections between the French right and traditionalist Muslims. Kepel also narrates the formation of radical cells, although he frustratingly doesn't even bother to narrate the terrorist attacks themselves nor give clear, engaging biographies of the radicalized. This weakness severely limits the potential impact of the book, as you have to already know about these attacks in order to follow his analysis. Still, it was interesting to see how this wave of French terrorists has tried to carry out Abu Musab al-Suri's jihadist vision of breaking France up into ethnic/political enclaves that war with each other to the extent that they tear the country apart. This is a very different jihadist strategy than the vanguard approach of AQ, and the book is solid on how jihadism in Europe has transformed.

Unfortunately, this book can't hold a candle to the clear, organized, and thorough research of someone like David Kilcullen or the outstanding journalistic narratives of Lawrence Wright. More dense academic books like Hoffman and Sageman are also more valuable, although not necessarily to the lay reader. Something was maybe lost in translation, and this isn't a bad book; I'd call it more of a missed opportunity, in large part because it offends my preference for highly deliberate argumentation and simple, straightforward writing.

[Cait · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly thought-provoking read on two subjects I ashamedly admit to knowing very little about. I think my lack of substantial knowledge about the rise of religious extremism and French society actually played a part in why this book felt so refreshing to me. Gilles Kepel makes what is obviously a very complex topic completely digestible for someone such as myself. His writing is perfect for an academic text: not self-indulgent or pretentious, but clear and relevant.
An absolute gem of a book.

[Brett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought Kepel introduced too many actors to clearly keep track of, and sometimes I lost the theme for all of the stories of alienation and indoctrination. More intriguing for me was to read about the French political aspect. In 2012, at the same time thousands of French Muslims were taking part in democracy (largely voting for Hollande), the Merah terror attack in Toulouse marked a renewal of terror on French soil (and this by a French native whose terrorist inclinations were nurtured in France). The author also points out the element of animosity about French colonialization in Algeria that spurred some, like Merah (who had Algerian heritage) to lash out. Also covered was the 2010 law, getting a lot of attention in the U.S., that banned the niqab (not covering eyes) and burqa (covering all but a small slot for the eyes) in public spaces.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very sharp and thorough analysis of recent terrorism in France. Kepel doesn't succumb to over generalizations, but brings a thoughtful perspective on the influences, opportunities, and life paths of France's recent terrorists. Furthermore, his analysis of the Arabic and French language used in this context is extremely valuable.

[Cecile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un livre excellent qui décrit et analyse les fondements et les événements relatifs au jihadisme et terrorisme en France. Les solutions potentielles ne sont pas décrites en détail mais c'est un exposé clair et objectif de la situation française. Vraiment très intéressant et un préalable à une réflexion sur les solutions potentielles à ce problème.

[Andy Detaille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incontournable