Radicalized Loyalties

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.

Auteur
Fabien Truong is lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Paris-8.

Résumé
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.

Contenu

• Note to the Reader
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The call of the ground
• Friday the 13th
• Behind absurdity, the social world
• The magic of radicalization
• A bad religion for bad seeds?
• Finding Allah at street-level
• Chapter 1: Common histories
• Making a home in public housing: a French history
• Boys will be boys
• Conflicting loyalties, recognition of debts
• A white fence-post in a dark forest
• Rebels without a cause, or a cause without rebels?
• Chapter 2: On the margins of the city
• Imprints of school
• The incompleteness of le business
• Common criminals
• Masculine machines
• Police, death, and hatred: a political trinity
• Chapter 3: Reconversions
• Being or becoming Muslim? The community illusion
• The Koran: reading and sharing
• In the here and now: getting better
• Beyond the here and now: being the best
• The value of reconversion and the reconversion of values
• Chapter 4: War and Peace
• Turning thirty: the verdict
• Toward a sociology of inner peace
• Kif-kif
• Desires for Syria: going off to war, over there
• I am Amédy: at war, over here
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index