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Jihadism in Europe
European Youth and the New Caliphate
Farhad Khosrokhavar
Jihadism in Europe
European Youth and the New Caliphate
FARHAD KHOSROKHAVAR
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Khosrokhavar, Farhad, author.
Title: Jihadism in Europe: European Youth and the New Caliphate / Farhad Khosrokhavar.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Series: Religion and global politics series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2021003262 (print) | LCCN 2021003263 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197564967 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197602522 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197564981 (epub) | ISBN 9780197564974 | ISBN 9780197564998
Subjects: LCSH: Jihad. | Muslims—Europe—Attitudes. | Islamic fundamentalism—Europe. | Muslims—Cultural assimilation—Europe. | IS (Organization) | Ethnic confict—Europe. Classifcation: LCC B P182 .K5228 2021 (print) | LCC B P182 (ebook) | DDC 305.6/97094—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003262
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003263
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197564967.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To my wife Noussy, and my parents
3-Women
Preface
Two types of works are used in this book. On one hand, academic research; on the other, journalistic reports, biographies, and essays, Journalists’ descriptions are not “thick”; they are usually created on an ad hoc basis, but they can provide precious, although not always reliable, information.
As for the statistics on the diferent European countries, they are not always homogeneous from one country to another, neither for the size of the samples nor for the dates. Tey can nevertheless be compared by taking the necessary precautions.
A major source for the analysis of jihadism in this book is my work on prisons and poor districts in France. I participated in two major projects on French prisons, in 2001–2003 and 2011–2013, respectively.
In the frst period, the major sites for my study of Islam and Islamic extremism were the prison Fresnes in Ile-de-France, close to Paris; FleuryMérogis, the largest European prison, also in Ile-de-France; and Loos, close to the city of Lilles. I conducted extensive interviews in those prisons that became the ingredients for three books.1
Te second project was on radicalization in prison between 2011 and 2013, and it was fnanced by the Ministry of Justice in France. I was able to interview prisoners, guards, prison authorities, and medical services personnel.
A major part of the interviews in this book was made in this period in four French prisons: Fresnes, Fleury-Mérogis, Lilles-Séquedin (in Lilles), and Saint-Maur high security prison, close to the town of Châteauroux in central France. I was not allowed to record the interviews. I took notes, sometimes alone and sometimes with my assistant Ouisa Kies, and I put them together in a book as well.2
I also took part in three specifc projects fnanced by the Social Housing Organizations in France between 2011 and 2018 on Cité des Indes in 2012 (in Sartrouville, within the Yvelines in the Ile-de-France department), Toulouse in Southern France in 2017 (two poor districts, La Reynerie and Bellefontaine in Le Mirail), and the third one, close to the town of Gien in the department of Le Loiret, the poor district Le quartier des Champs in 2018.
A project on youth in the poor districts of the town of Maubeuge was ongoing from January to August 2020 while I was putting the fnishing touches on this book.
In another project, fnanced by the Association Française des Victimes du Terrorisme (French Association of the Victims of Terrorism) in 2014 on French Muslim Middle classes, I supervised lengthy interviews with some sixty middle-class Frenchmen of North African and, occasionally, Turkish origin in Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis (a poor district close to Paris), and Bondy (in Ile-de-France).
Besides the cases already mentioned, in the research on this book I was able to choose 105 jihadis from the public data available to me (the media, academic publications, my own interviews with around twenty jihadis over a decade, and between 2000 and 2013 in French prisons).
Many of the people interviewed were not jihadi but were more or less sympathetic to them, and most jihadis came from their social milieu, largely among young people from the poor districts, of immigrant origin and multiple repeat ofenders (some were condemned for having taken part in terrorist activities). Teir interviews shed light on the mental universe of jihadis.
One should bear in mind that the dual source (biographies and interviews) has its pros and cons, and the link between them is not established automatically but depends on the researcher’s viewpoint. I believe that they shed light on jihadism, the back-and-forth between them enriching our anthropological knowledge of this complex phenomenon.
I should also mention that many prison inmates and young Muslims in the poor neighborhoods unveiled their views to me in part because they knew I wasn’t all French: I have a dual identity, Iranian by birth and French by acquisition, sharing in part their duality as Arab (Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian) and French, and because I am a Muslim by birth. Still, they usually ignored that I was a Shiite, which in their eyes was an adulterated Islam. Tey did not hide from me their antagonistic feelings toward the “Whites” (nonMuslim Frenchmen of European background), in part because they believed I was not entirely “White,” which was true. Some of them characterized themselves as “Greys” (“Gris,” the disafected youth of North African origin), being neither White nor Black, but closer to the Blacks due to their stigmas. Te interviews produced in this book are not verbatim what the interviewees said; they are condensed to spare the space. I only took notes (recording was not authorized in prison, and elsewhere I preferred spontaneous talk without a recorder). During the interviews I summarized on
the spot what the interviewees said in order to keep up with their pace. Transcripts were synthesized later. Tat means that the defnitive transcripts bear in part the mark of my viewpoint (I had to choose quickly what was meaningful from what my interlocutors said during our verbal exchanges). But I never willfully changed their statements in my transcriptions.
I have chosen many examples of jihadis in the media. Te interpretations I ofer on this subject are, of course, mine. But they are inspired by the interviews I conducted with diferent types of more or less radicalized people in prisons and in poor, ethnic neighborhoods. Te cases that had been reported in the press and interpreted by me are, as I said, in dialogue with my interviews and my observations in the feldwork. Te relatively high number of jihadis that I analyze from the press and feld research is not simply an accumulation of cases. It is, each time, illustrative of their complex motivations from a phenomenological perspective—that is, by trying to understand their subjectivity and their intentions, in short, their way of capturing the world and the meaning they attached to it. Tis is why the high number of concrete cases is not without interest. Tey give me the opportunity to test the theories I put forward and make them more complex in order to explain diverse forms of radicalization among diferent people. I try to tie biographical data to a phenomenological analysis, back and forth, one informing the other. I shed light on what is stated descriptively in the available biographies of Jihadis from my interviews and feld experience and vice versa. Biographies are thus more than illustrative, they are part of the “proof,” their reading substantiating or, more rarely, contradicting my conclusions (I call them in that case “counter-intuitive,” or “exceptional”). To make it short, the biographies of known jihadis are complementary to the interviews I made with people who were mostly from the social backgrounds of the jihadis. Te interplay between the two is one of the specifc features of this book. Tat is why the examples provided in the sections entitled “Examples of . . .” are not only illustrative but also essential to our understanding of the “intentionality” of jihadis or wannabe jihadis. Tey also provide a kind of small encyclopedic dimension to this book. Of course, the reader in a hurry can skip them.
Tis book draws heavily on my feldwork in France over the last two decades (Khosrokhavar, 1997, 2004, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020), but it owes also a large debt to the work of many scholars quoted or listed in the bibliography.
Concepts Developed in Tis Book
A few concepts have been developed in this book in order to explain the social and anthropological dimensions of the new jihadi landscape in Europe.
Arab
In France, besides meaning the citizen of Arab countries, “Arab” means those people of North African origin, sons of migrants, who usually have acquired French citizenship but are still considered by many people as not being totally “French” in their mores, still preserving Arab features that disqualify them as genuinely French citizens. Its vernacular mutation is “Beur” or “Rebeux.”
White, White Man
In some European countries, the word “White” in the mouths of young people of migrant origin means those who belong to the mainstream society, are of European origin and, in general, are contemptuous or condescending toward the descendants of immigrants. Tey are ofen accused of racism or Islamophobia by “non-Whites.”
Jihadism
By “jihadism” I mean an interpretation of Islam that combines ideological extremism and direct use of violence in order to promote its radical version of Allah’s religion. Jihadism is marked by the violent rupture with nonMuslims and non-jihadi Muslims. It is based on an ideology that denounces dialogue as a perversion and tolerance as a heresy. Te legitimate way of solving problems related to Islam in a world dominated by the atheist West is violent jihad.
Jihadogenic Urban Structures
By “jihadogenic urban structure” I mean those urban settings that have been the places with higher numbers of jihadi agents than other districts.
In many European countries, stigmatized, disadvantaged districts with a high proportion of ethnic migrants from the Muslim world are hotbeds for radicalization. Economic problems (unemployment, stigmatization, imprisonment, radicalization) coupled with identity crisis are the hallmarks of this type of urban setting. Next to this kind of neighborhood, there are some districts in the middle-class areas that had a history of radicalization due to the arrival and stay of jihadis in the 1990s.
Mainstream Society
Mainstream society, from the viewpoint of European Muslims, stigmatizes them. Middle-class Muslims sufer from it but also cope with it in a manner that is distinct from the disafected Muslim youth, who are also economically excluded. Tey fnd its values opposed to theirs, their relationship being antagonistic, and judicial institutions and police being regarded by them as repressive. Tey don’t call the police by that name, they refer to law enforcement personnel as “they” in an anonymous manner, or “Whites.” Tis view is in part grounded in the imagination of young Muslims, whose feelings of stigmas are also partly real.
Islamistan
In many European countries, a new type of urban structure has emerged that I call “Islamistan.” It is a district that has become “almost exclusively Islamic” in a rigid, fundamentalist way (e.g., Salafsm, Deobandi Islam among the Pakistanis). Islamistan can be of two types. Te frst is marked by the combination of poverty, ghettoization, cultural withdrawal, de-schooling of children, unemployment, delinquency, rejection of mainstream society (mainly through “hatred”) and lack of self-respect (deep feelings of indignity) as well as lack of hope (“no future”). Social exclusion and the adoption of a religiosity more and more infexible (for instance, the expansion of the “total veil” among other signs of introversion) engender incommunicability between
the district and the mainstream society. A defcient multicultural identity, marked by the absence of a shared culture with the mainstream society, sets in motion.
Te second type of Islamistan is a mostly middle-class urban quarter that combines introverted, fundamentalist Islamic culture to the exclusion of the secular or non-Islamic ways of life. It is a means of preserving the mores of the Muslim community, over and above their ethnicity (the diferent Muslim countries from which they come). Middle-class or lower-middleclass Muslims build up this type of district in which Muslims live together, non-Muslims leaving gradually, non-Islamic businesses disappearing, exclusive halal food replacing a more diversifed ofering, and women without veils almost vanishing from the public space. Tis type of urban structure gives birth to a fundamentalist “enclaved identity” that evolves, in minority cases, into jihadism, in reaction to which extreme-right movements set in.
Salafsm as a Counter-Secular Religiosity
European societies are distinguished by a dominant trend toward secularization. Secularism as a “civil religion” has had its heyday in France (la laïcité), Denmark, and some other European countries (Spain before the Franco regime). Te simultaneous weakening of religion and secular utopias (socialism, communism, fascism, republicanism in France) has ushered in a type of religious sentiment marked by an anti-secular tendency in order to assert a new identity, mostly among those who are at the bottom of the social ladder or feel hopeless about the future (the “no future” generation in the lower-middle classes). In Europe, Islamic religiosity among the migrants’ sons is particularly close to this counter-secular attitude, in part because of stigmas. Te anti-secular stance is a sign of a provocative identity: the more they are culturally stigmatized, the more they become counter-secular by assuming a “negative” identity. Salafsm, Tabligh, and jihadism wield a countersecular dimension in distinct ways.
Headless Patriarchal Family, Neo-Traditional Family
Some migrant families in Western Europe develop a feature due to their anthropological crisis: the father who assumed the role of a norm-setter has
either gone away (due to divorce or to a return to his country afer retirement) or has almost abdicated his authority because of his subaltern position in society and in the family (he does not understand the twists and turns of modern European society, his language is defcient, etc.). Tis type of migrant family has not undergone the evolution of its European counterparts that have become more egalitarian, the role of women being revalued and the father becoming less central, not only in fact but also in symbolic terms, the mother sharing authority with him in a conficted manner. In the families of migrant origin, even though the role of the father has been weakened by the involvement of the mother, the patriarchal mindset hovers over the family, even though the father is absent or marginalized. Tis situation pushes older brothers to vie for the paternal role. Since they do not have his moral authority, they usually resort to violence. Te crisis of authority exacerbates relations among the family members, real and symbolic violence becoming prominent in the management of family relationships. Tis type of family is found most prevalently in societies where secularism is enshrined in the political culture of the mainstream society, such as France, marked by “laïcité.” Other types of migrant families express the crisis otherwise, in particular in what I call the “neo-traditional family.” What characterizes this type of family is the fxed role of the father. Unlike the family in the country of origin (Pakistan, Algeria, Turkey) which is evolving, this type of family casts the father beyond time, giving him an intangible, hyper-patriarchal status, to protect him from the onslaught of a European society marked by the questioning of patriarchy. It has an antisecular dimension as well, the father becoming a sacred pole against the desecration that is taking place in society.
Te Negative Hero
Many male European Muslims who went to Syria (the so-called Foreign Fighters) or staged attacks in Europe (homegrown jihadis) aspired to a kind of heroism at odds with the dominant values of European societies. Tey intended to achieve an exceptional status and attain worldwide stardom, not for having achieved good deeds but for perpetrating “bad” ones according to the mainstream Western culture. For them, the yardstick for goodness was the opposite of those of the “Infdel” societies in which they lived. Tis “negative heroism” enhanced them in their self-esteem in proportion to
their dismissal by their own society. Before they joined jihadism, they had feelings of self-depreciation, stemming from their stigmas. Te new selfesteem, based on the turndown by others, pushed them toward violence in reaction to their having been humiliated. Negative heroes inverted the vector of humiliation: they felt demeaned by others and treated as inferior. In return, they debased their society to which they no longer wished to belong, the new caliphate giving them the golden opportunity as a pole of reference (without it, their task would have been harder, their numbers having been marginal before and afer the Islamic State, or Daesh). Negative heroes made “conspicuous violence” in the name of religion one of the major ingredients of their identity: they used social media, Western TV, and interviews with journalists to exhibit in an ostentatious manner their violence against the values of mainstream European culture, among them tolerance and non-violence.
Neo-Ummah
“Neo-Ummah” is an imaginary construction of an organic, efervescent community in vivid contrast to the “cold” and “soulless” societies in which young Europeans live, where freedom is ofen synonymous with loneliness and confusion, and ties between the citizens is loosened to a large extent, creating the need for “close-knit” groups and “sects.” Neo-Ummah was the image of the Muslims living in Syria, provided by the Islamic State to the young Europeans, through its propaganda machine (mainly through the internet), in quest of meaningful communities in which they would not feel alone. It was an imagined community where a patriarchal family would be solid (in contrast to its fragility in the secular European world) and women would become mothers rather than competitors to men. Neo-Ummah satisfes the need for certainty, the attachment to a model of family and community in which sacred values become paramount: the more repressive they are, the more reassuring they become.
Slum Culture
Te slum culture in Europe is mainly that which grows in neighborhoods with succeeding generations of poor Muslim immigrants. Tese neighborhoods
are marked by new forms of ethnicity: the derogatory expressions “Arabs,” “Bougnoules,” or “Picots” in France, which refers to those who have Algerian, Moroccan, or Tunisian parents; and “Pakis,” which includes young people of Pakistani origin and, by extension, those of South Asian origin; as well as racism against British African-Caribbean people that includes Blacks from diferent African countries, called “Perker” in Denmark to characterize Muslim migrants’ sons.
Te major hallmark of slum culture is an identity that protests mostly in a self-destructive manner against social domination and the biased attitude of the mainstream society toward the sons of migrants, but also submits to it in more or less hidden forms. Tis culture is marked by its defciency (people belonging to it do not master the cultural codes of the mainstream society) and by the anger and outrage against this predicament (aggressiveness, a specifc language, a body language diferent from that of the global society). It is usually embedded in a parallel economy in which small groups fnd ways of overcoming poverty through illegal means, but others are condemned to it because of the bad reputation that deviance causes for the neighborhood. To be from these poor ethnic districts results in being rejected by employers for whom these young people bear the mark of the slum culture and are deemed unft for serious work. In general, the overall image of the districts where slum culture prevails is degraded through the media, but also in these neighborhoods by those who live there and feel deeply stigmatized.
Jihadi Fratriarchy
By “fratriarchy” I mean primarily the brothers, but also the cousins or the young members of a family, and ofen an elderly brother as a substitute for the authority of the father who has been dethroned by the undermining infuence of the Western societies afer immigration to Europe, primordially within headless patriarchal families. Since the father has abdicated, usually the older brother (sometimes, another brother) assumes his role and pushes toward violent action, being devoid of his moral authority. Jihad becomes the cement among the young family members. (I chose “fratriarchy” instead of “fraternity” or “brotherhood” because of their extensive meaning in common usage.)
Jihadophile Family
Tis type of family is characterized by the fact that a large part of the household has accepted (or even encouraged the others) to join IS or other jihadi organizations. Te family, in particular the father and the mother (sometimes the uncles and aunts), have aligned themselves with their son (or sons) who usually took the initiative of moving to the holy land of jihad, or the family has put their resources at the disposal of their male ofspring in order to provide the sons with the means to achieve their ends. Te diference with jihadi fratriarchy lies in the fact that in “jihadophile families,” the generation of parents adheres to the vision of the sons, which is not the case in jihadi fratriarchies.
I Te European Societies and Jihadism
Societies do not usually realize the extent of the alienation experienced among particular segments of their population. Tis is particularly the case for young Muslims of immigrant origin, whose deep frustration and humiliation are not understood by much of Europe. Tis book attempts to penetrate the subjectivity of this youth to reveal the depth of their distress. Desperate before the creation of the new caliphate, they found hope through it. Te new state, called the Islamic State, gave them the illusion of a new world where they would fnally fnd the legitimate place they had been denied in Europe, mainly through violence. But it is not only this population that has been spellbound by the new caliphate. A section of European middle-class youth, marked by a loss of meaning in life and a lack of hope in the future, also joined the new caliphate, mainly as converts. Tis work attempts to understand what motivated them and how they accepted to play a repressive role in killing and maiming thousands of people, and dying themselves at the service of an apocalyptic theocracy.
Te revival of European jihadism in the years 2013–2016 had a major external cause: the creation of the so-called Islamic State, which provided a utopia and a territorial base that enabled young Europeans to identify with it, to seek to join it, and to put themselves at its service. But alongside this external cause there were internal causes—namely, young people’s aspiration to a utopia, their frustration with everyday life in Europe, and urban and family problems—which played a fundamental role in their commitment to the new state. Tis book attempts to describe these two dimensions, which are intertwined, form a whole, and give sense to European jihadism. Following this line, one can describe the aims of this work.
Te frst is to portray European jihadism mainly in a particular period marked by the emergence and decline of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), renamed in June 2014 the Islamic State (IS), or Daesh (its Arab acronym), mainly by its Arab opponents. Te new state introduced a profound break in the history of transnational jihadism, until then dominated by networks, especially al-Qaeda. Te founding of this territorial state gave
a boost to jihadism and heightened the aspiration among young Europeans whose number rose to around 6,000 so-called Foreign Fighters (those people who went to Syria to join jihadi organizations) between 2013 and 2017.
Te second aim of this book is to describe in depth the subjectivity of young people who radicalized, but also their repertoire. Terrorism in the name of Islam, which we call jihadism, or any other extremism can only be fought efectively by understanding what is going on in the minds of its followers. But understanding is not justifying. It is, however, necessary to grasp the intricacies of jihadi subjectivity, which is multiple by defnition, and which enlightens us both on the extremist logic of its agents as well as the shortcomings of European societies.
Tis book focuses also on the sociological and anthropological aspects of jihadism in order to grasp the motivation of its main actors in a phenomenological perspective. More broadly, it aims to show the complexity of jihadism, and the need to understand radical Islamism as a “total social fact” that encompasses anthropological, sociological, and political but also psychological dimensions. Jihadism cannot be understood independently of the mental and anthropological contents of its agents’ subjectivity and their relationships with the global society. A comprehensive vision of the jihadi actors’ behaviors in relation to their socio-economic condition and family relations is therefore necessary to elucidate this phenomenon, which an abstract view in terms of variables and parameters with no reference to their subjectivities is incapable of clarifying, although statistics and the correlation between diferent objective factors greatly help us to build up a conceptual framework.
Tis book aims at explaining jihadism by contextualizing the urban, parental, social, economic, and psychological aspects of their subjective, imaginary dimension. Imagination, becoming almost boundless through the web, migration, and globalization, had a major impact on the minds of these people. In this global perspective, the anthropology of the family is at the heart of jihadism: many young jihadis belonged either to broken families or to those in which authority was diluted or shattered, and violence was largely present—that is to say, families in crisis, marked by a shaky authority.
Tis book also focuses on each specifc European country. To take an example, Italy did not sufer any major successful jihadi attack in the years 2013–2017, whereas France sufered a lot, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Spain being in between.
Te ofcial proclamation of IS on June 29, 2014, swelled the number of vocations. Tis research intends to show the importance of that event by
raising the question of this new state and its role in promoting a territorially based “Islamic dreamland” (we call it the neo-Ummah). Te decline of IS and, fnally, its disappearance as a state in October 2017 put an end to the wide-scale appeal of jihadism for European youth, but not to jihadism itself. Te caliphate was at the heart of a utopia that attracted young Europeans in search of meaning and an ideal, ready to cross swords with their elders in order to promote the new order, totalitarian but endowed with enthusiasm and a new sense of belonging, in much the same way as did Nazism, fascism, or communism, which promised a new life to those who were ready to join their ranks. It was a mass phenomenon: at least 5,904 Europeans went to Syria and Iraq during those few years (Cook and Vale, 2018),1 and many more would have lef Europe for Syria if the means had not been set up in Europe and Turkey to prevent their departure since the end of 2014. Most of those who made the journey to Syria intended to join IS. Tey had social class problems (most of them were from lower-class Muslim families in Europe, a minority of them from the middle classes, mostly among converts), and identity problems (many were of Moroccan, Algerian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and other descent, and they did not feel they were accepted as full citizens by the European societies).
I focus particularly on six aspects of radical Islam in Europe.
Te frst is the jihadi agents and their subjectivities, according to social class, gender, generation, psychology (normal versus depressed, psychotic, and so forth), and religion (convert, born-again, etc.).
Te second raises the crisis of the family as one of the explaining factors of Jihadism, diferently shaped within the middle classes and the lower-class youth of migrant origin, their ethnic background being signifcant (youth of Moroccan, Pakistani, Turkish origin behaved in specifc ways toward jihadism).
Te third relates to national diferences and political cultures in some major European societies (French laïcité as a political culture distinguishes France from other European countries, English multiculturalism having its peculiar features, etc.).
Te fourth explores the urban structure and what I call the “jihadogenic urban structure,” which is at the heart of radical Islam in Europe, including poor districts and middle-class urban settings, for diferent reasons.
Te ffh dimension is the age group (adolescents versus adults), their respective motivations, and the infuence of preachers on them and their religiosity. Teenagers were massively lured to Daesh. Teir view was infuenced by
the production of IS on the internet and by local recruiters, but also by their own imaginary worldview and their desires, mostly ignored by adults.
Te sixth dimension is gender. Women became signifcant agents of jihadism during this period (around 17 percent of those who went to Syria), mostly as “jihadi brides” but also as violent jihadis among a minority of them. In their desire to join IS, their subjective grasp of feminism, parenthood, and family played a key role.
Of course, in dealing with jihadism the vocabulary is not innocent. While there is a consensus on the terrorist nature of jihadism, terrorism itself is a matter of dispute and more than 260 defnitions of it have been put forward so far (Easson and Schmid 2011). On the other hand, the word jihadism is not universally accepted since the notion of “jihad” is regarded positively by Muslims, even though the neologism “jihadism” (jihadiyah) is pejorative both in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. Muslim theologians sometimes use the term Kharijite (Khavarij in Arabic) to characterize jihadis. A few decades afer the death of the Prophet, the Kharijite opted for violence against the fourth “well-guided” Caliph Ali and killed him in 661. Tey used violence against those they considered fake Muslims, and whom they subjected to excommunication (takfr) and death. Nowadays, Muslim extremists use the same word to reject in their turn those who oppose them in the name of Allah’s religion. For lack of a better word, and to avoid cumbersome circumlocutions, I use jihadism, while being aware of its disputed semantics. I mean by it a politico-religious phenomenon by which agents combine a radical version of Islam focused on jihad, in conjunction with violent action. Te overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world reject the jihadi view of Allah’s religion.
Te notion of “radicalization” also poses serious problems in social sciences: some reject it outright because of its polysemy, its emphasis on a linear vision, underscoring the social and political context, and overemphasizing psychological problems. Some even think that the notion is not only useless but even harmful because of its false transparency and its exclusive stress on few aspects (Coolsaet, 2016; Sedgwick, 2010). But the expression has gained currency in social sciences, particularly because of the huge investment made by governments and research institutions in this feld and under this labeling. On the other hand, social scientists have endeavored to subsume it under a social-anthropological construct, overstepping its original psychological and security-related meaning (Khosrokhavar, 2014; McDonald, 2018).
