The New Crusades by Khaled A. Beydoun

Author:Khaled A. Beydoun
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520356306
Publisher: University of California Press

THE BANLIEUE AND THE BEAST

A burning room is a dying era

When the Elysée-Montmartre went on fire

I think I lived my World Trade Center

MÉDINE, “Bataclan”

You haven’t really seen Paris, and all of its lights, until you’ve seen them from Saint-Denis. The banlieue directly north from the center of the City of Light offers a view from the other side of Paris. The side, six miles from the heart of the city, where the gleam of the Eiffel Tower lights up the same sky but stands atop a radically different neighborhood.

“This is the real Paris,” Malik says of his banlieue. “The one they don’t want you to see.”29

I had visited Malik’s Paris before. I was welcomed by the North African faces of young men that resembled my own, and the familiar portraits of Muslim elders sitting around café tables, smoking hookahs while debating the same handful of political issues for the thousandth time.

Algerian flags and headscarves provided a distinctly Islamic tapestry to the banlieue, while the thud of drums in the background and the lyrics of Médine blasting from my friend’s radio filled the air. This was the real Paris, or at least, the one where I felt at home.

This Parisian sound is what scholar Hisham Aidi dubbed “rebel music,” the soundtrack of resistance rising from those vibrating speakers and vibrant streets, adorned by visuals of a Paris tourists would not dare step foot in.30

In France, “Muslim cool” takes on different colors and contours than in the United States. It attracts youth from all races and religions, even white kids, who come from the suburbs and try to be down, and get down, with the beat of the banlieue. The children of Parisian gentry on the other side of the city who, because of its perceived menace and rebelliousness, mix “asalamu alaikum” and other Islamic colloquialisms into their speech to fit into a part of Paris their parents seldom cross into, and fear.31 That fear is shared by French politicians and scholars, who see a robust and omnipresent Islam in those French banlieues that could overtake the entire republic.32

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