NON-FICTION: THE EAGER FUNDAMENTALIST
In the past decade or so, a growing number of Western specialists — from long-standing academics to freshly ordained fearmongers — have sought to come to grips with the disturbing phenomenon of ‘home-grown jihadism.’ As a consequence, there has been plenty of useful scholarship — alongside much ersatz theorising and incendiary alarmism.
French academic Gilles Kepel falls into the first of these categories. An Arabist since the 1970s and a prolific contributor to the debate on religion in a series of books that date back to the 1980s, he knows whereof he speaks. His book, Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West, attempts, with some success, to put into context what he categorises the third wave of jihadism, that has involved a series of the most despicable atrocities in Paris and elsewhere in France, as well as in neighbouring Belgium.
His scholarship has been favourably cited by the new French president Emmanuel Macron as well as others whose embrace Kepel is more uncomfortable with. The latter include the arguably Islamophobic French writer Michel Houellebecq whose novel Soumission [Submission] was published on the same day in January 2015 as the appalling Charlie Hebdo massacre by the infamous Kouachi brothers, and the associated — mainly anti-Semitic — atrocities by Amedy Coulibaly.
As incidents of violence in the name of religion grow in the West, an examination of what could be the root cause of it all
Coulibaly, as Kepel records, was received by ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace nearly six years earlier, where he was honoured “as a model of successful rehabilitation.” Kepel adds: “This caustic wink at destiny … 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.”
That’s all very well, and feeds directly into Kepel’s thesis that neither 1983’s anti-racist Marche des beurs [march for equality and against racism] nor the 2005 revolt of the banlieues [suburbs] spurred the government into recognising, let alone tackling, the issues posed by Arab immigration. The 2005 revolt was brought about when the electrocution of a pair of young Muslims who were being chased by the police for a crime they had not committed — although Kepel insists the bigger provocation was the subsequent tear-gassing of worshippers at a mosque — sparked a violent uprising in strongly Muslim suburbs on the outskirts of the French capital.
This, of course, is by no means exclusively a French phenomenon, although France boasts Europe’s highest proportion of Muslim immigrants, mostly from the nation’s former North African colonies. In Britain, the comparative (albeit proportionately smaller) influx was from the subcontinent, whereas Turkish ‘guest workers’ dominated the Muslim population of Germany — at least until Chancellor Angela Merkel threw open her arms to refugees from the Syrian conflict and elsewhere.
The German chancellor has had cause to adjust her stance since 2015 because of electoral backlash and pushback from the far right, albeit without altogether resiling from her humanitarian policy. Recourse to violence by a handful of refugees has inevitably attracted attention, overshadowing the arguably far bigger story of the multitudes who clearly mean no harm to their hosts. Besides, barring a few exceptions, the perpetrators of purportedly Islamist violence in Britain, France and elsewhere in Europe are invariably young people who have grown up in these very countries.