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.
Table of Contents:
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
About the Author :
Fabien Truong is lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Paris-8.
Review :
"Truong vividly describes the lives of young men from immigrant backgrounds in the Paris banlieue, charting their trajectories from dropping out of school towards crime and then prison. This is an extremely valuable book, rich in ethnographic detail and very well written: I was irresistibly drawn in to this world of kickbacks, payoffs and unsettlingly deep resentment against the whole of French society."
—David Lehmann, University of Cambridge, UK
"Truong take us deep inside the personal world of six immigrant young men from France's disreputable urban periphery. He shows how they navigate the promises and demands of the school, the street economy, the prison and the police, and why they are attracted (or not) by Islam as a 'floating political imaginary.' An insightful and urgent contribution to the analysis of the social fabrication of terrorists that punctures the sonorous but empty notion of 'radicalization.'"
—Loïc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley
"It is not a clash of civilizations that Fabien Truong vividly describes but a collapse of communities, as young men in transitional stages of their life search for significance in the West's Muslim diaspora. If you want to understand how most overcome feelings of rootlessness and despair and how a few become jihadis, read this book."
—Scott Atran, CNRS, Paris, and University of Oxford
"... an excellent ethnography of Muslim masculinity."
—Times Higher Education
"... a thoughtful, well-crafted ethnography that humanizes the faceless, amorphous 'Muslim youth' of the French banlieues."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Radicalized Loyalties is an outstanding study of the social worlds of immigrant young men living in the urban periphery of Paris.... The book will be of great interest to scholars within the cross-disciplinary field of (counter)terrorism studies as well as to social scientists and anthropologists interested in state-margin relationships, Islam, the secular state, and the administration of the urban periphery in the West."
Ethnos
