Radicalization by Farhad Khosrokhavar

Author:Farhad Khosrokhavar
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972694
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE VICTIMIZED YOUNG

In Europe, particularly in France, the large presence of Muslims is linked to efforts to industrialize the Old Continent that began in the early 1960s. The need for unskilled labor to ensure the economic development of countries ravaged by two world wars propelled the authorities to encourage immigration. Naturally, to find the necessary labor force, the various European countries turned to their colonies or former colonies, to the countries nearest at hand, or to those with which they had cultural ties: North Africa for France, India and Pakistan for Great Britain, Turkey for Germany. As it happened, a large percentage of that labor force belonged to the Muslim religion. After three generations, a large portion of the children and grandchildren of these unskilled laborers, though they possess the nationality of their elders’ host country, live under conditions of great poverty and even social exclusion. Although some have managed to join the middle classes and become economically integrated, many remain poverty-stricken and their full citizenship is denied them, as suggested by the nicknames “Paki” in English and Arabe or the racial slur bougnoule in French. This denigration is by and large a male phenomenon; girls in France, provided they do not wear the hijab, are much more easily accepted than boys. Discrimination results in a much higher unemployment rate among these populations than within society at large and their concentration in neighborhoods with bad reputations, where social segregation is acute and the standard of living much lower than the national average, where criminality is more prevalent and the educational level lower.

The lives of these young people, who spend the greater part of their time loitering in front of their apartment buildings, were designated by a popular expression in the 1980s: la galère, “the gallery.” The young unemployed drift into criminality, in a state of mind considered characteristic of the end of industrial society and the collapse of social institutions (Dubet 2008 [1987]). In Great Britain, the expression “street life” seems to correspond to that reality: the young who adopt that lifestyle combine delinquency, a lack of social perspective, physical violence, and the conviction that the middle classes (whites, or, more precisely, the socially and economically integrated) enjoy a status inaccessible to them.

Some young people in these neighborhoods live as if they have no future, as if the hope of economic integration into the larger society is a delusion. That state of mind, which I will call victimhood, rests on a profoundly pessimistic view of social existence by the excluded strata, combined, in the case of young people from immigrant backgrounds, with a rejection of their “Arab” identity. Some of these young people who do not practice the religion nevertheless identify with it, in an attempt to overcome symbolically a double denial—of their Arabness and their Frenchness (or in Britain, their Pakistani identity and their Englishness). To do so they embrace a new identity that gives them a sacred legitimacy: Islam. To adopt “Muslim” as an identity means not having to be either French or Arab.

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