4.1 Inverted Multiculturalism

Jihadism cannot be solely attributed to disaffected young people of immigrant origin, whether in France, England, Germany, or other Western countries; but young Muslims of immigrant origin, from the first to the third generation and living chiefly in ghettoized neighbourhoods, constitute the majority among European jihadists.

Let us analyse one specific case. In 2013, Karim, Adil and Rabi were the first to leave Lunel, a town with 27,000 inhabitants in southern France. Since then, more than twenty young people followed them to Syria. Seven are already dead, including Karim. Hamza lived close to the shop kept by Karim and his brother Saad in Lunel. The two friends spent long hours discussing the upheavals in the Middle East, the warning signs of the end of time in Islam, and the ills of French society. ‘I got a BTS [technician’s diploma] in accountancy, and the result was that all native French students found a job, and we, the only two Arabs [French citizens of North African origin] of the class, we did not find any. … In France, the choice is whether the employer likes the look of the customer or not. For the Arab, manual work is normal, not a higher job, even if he is qualified’, Hamza said to the researchers (see Kepel & Jardin, 2015).

To get Karim out of his predicament, Hamza activated the network of Johan Juncaj, an Albanian close to Mourad Farès, one of the main recruiters for the jihad in France. Before being formally identified by the intelligence services, Mourad Farès and Johan Juncaj created Facebook pages praising the holy war. For Karim, jihadism was a means to get revenge for the humiliation of having been mistreated by society; the humiliation of seeking and finding a job below his competence, which is shared by other young people with immigrant background in France (due to their North African origins) and England (due to their Bangladeshi or Pakistani origins) as well as elsewhere in Europe.

More generally, the feeling of being a second-class citizen, of being exposed to social prejudice and not having the same opportunities as other citizens, is widely shared by immigrants in Great Britain, Holland, Germany, Denmark, or Belgium, and empirical research by sociologists largely confirms it almost everywhere in Europe (Adida et al., 2013; Valfort, 2015; Dugan, 2014; Sedghi, 2014; Dobson, 2014).

Jihadism in this sense means reversing humiliation into a radical counter-humiliation which is inflicted on society as a whole as a retribution. Humiliating those who humiliated them is the dream entertained by many young migrants’ sons who consider their lives destroyed by the arrogance of a society that considers them as subhumans.

In Europe, the vast majority of young people who enlisted under the IS flag (referring to the Islamic State, also called Daesh, and, more rarely, networks like Jabhat al-Nusra, which represent al-Qaeda) belong to the group of disaffected young people (Castel, 2007). Their view of society is marked by ‘hatred’ related to their social and racial condition. They feel marginalized, excluded, rejected, mistreated, stigmatized as second-class citizens, and reduced to being infrahuman, to being ‘insects’, as a young man told me in prison during the empirical fieldwork funded by the French Ministry of Finance that I conducted between 2011 and 2013 in four major prisons in France (Fresnes; Fleury-Mérogis, in the suburbs of Paris; Lille-Séquedin, in the vicinity of the city of Lille; and Saint-Maur, a high-security prison in central France). For an exhaustive analysis of this research, see Khosrokhavar (2016a).

This negative self-image, which is shared by many young men (but not women) living in the poor suburbs in France or in ghettoized neighbourhoods throughout Europe, makes understanding others impossible. Stigmatization becomes second nature among these young people. At a certain point, not only do they not do anything to fight against this negative self-image in constructive terms, but they corroborate the social prejudices by behaving accordingly: they act aggressively and reject white people—i.e. those of non-migrant origin—thereby opposing the dominant society’s racism with a counter-racism of their own.

The overwhelming majority of these young people do not take part in elections because, in their view, no noticeable change in their circumstances will occur regardless of the outcome of the vote. The only viable solution is to cheat the system and to get involved in the underground economy (traffic, drugs, theft, robbery). Violence also plays a role in bypassing the long road to economic integration: they refuse to start with underpaid menial jobs and to finish like their parents with an insignificant retirement pension, which is synonymous with indignity in their eyes. They want immediate access to middle-class status. They are in a situation of ‘neither/nor’ that generates rancour and a feeling of ‘double un-belonging’: they are neither Arab nor French; in the country of their parents, they are called ‘dirty Frenchmen’, but in France, they are ‘dirty Arabs’. The same holds true for the young people of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin in Britain: they are ‘Pakis’ in the eyes of British citizens and ‘nasty Englishmen’ in Pakistan. Delinquency gives them an opportunity to obtain middle-class status symbols, thereby giving them a sense of joining the middle classes to which their parents were denied access.

It is also an act of provocation towards a society that treats them as less than nothing (moins que rien), as one of them told me in prison. The intense feeling of internalized indignity and the yearning to live in a provocative manner make them seek illegitimate recognition rather than legitimate recognition which, in their eyes, is inaccessible (see Honneth, 1995, for a discourse on the importance of recognition in modern life). They therefore long to become, not ‘positive heroes’ who are admired by others, but ‘negative heroes’ who are hated by society and yet glorified all the same by the media which assure the negative heroes notoriety based on their monstrosity and their superlative violence through jihadism and other avenues.

They hate society: hatred (la haine) is an anthropological category used by the very same young people to characterize their attitude towards society. Therefore, they literally accept (and some of them enjoy as a form of revenge) being hated by society in a reciprocal relationship, this time successful in their eyes, due to the ‘fame’ achieved through terrorist acts that push them to the forefront of the media. The recognition they seek is an inverted one: since they cannot be recognized for good, they must be acknowledged as evil in the eyes of others, inspiring fear instead of admiration, marking through deadly deeds the break with the dominant norm of non-violence.

In France, poor suburbs (les banlieues) are the venue of illegality for these young boys, who learn from a young age to share values of ostentatious consumerism through deviance. As young boys, they idolize the local caïds (chiefs) who ‘succeed’ by showing off their cars, fashion sunglasses, and branded shoes.

Deviance and dropping out of school are part of the culture of these poor districts for young boys because the normal way, the route through schooling and studies, leads them nowhere given their social and cultural handicaps. Their parents are unable to help them because of their lack of fluency in French or English or German, and, sometimes, their illiteracy. School fails them; the school environment in these poor districts is not conducive to ‘healthy competition’ in learning, and the fact that a high concentration of pupils come from anywhere in the world but the host country itself makes their acculturation to the host country’s national norms difficult or almost impossible. In these districts reigns an inverted multiculturalism; to wit, a variety of cultures with the exception of the most important one, namely the host country’s culture.

This type of multiculturalism creates individuals who lack an understanding of the body language and the daily habits of the larger society in which they live, and who have not learned through contact with other French, German or English individuals the basics of national behaviour, in particular as regards polite manners or fluency in the normal daily language. These individuals usually create a subculture of their own, using a mixed language where inverted words (verlan)—some Arabic, English, and slang—give birth to a vernacular that is almost incomprehensible to the outsider. Black African, North African, Asian, even Chinese cultures are muddled up, with some dominant features of the North African culture in France, Bangladeshi or Pakistani in Great Britain, Moroccan in Belgium.

Espousing a subculture from which the mainstream national culture is all too often absent creates a generation that has major obstacles to overcome in order to become part of the larger society in terms of its cultural understanding of others. This subculture and the sentiment of being excluded generate a body language and verbal expressions that express this explicit fact of separation. Since the chasm between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is regarded as unbridgeable, the young people’s attitude becomes provocative, even aggressive, and they accentuate it to express their rancour. Words made up of expressions that are unintelligible to outsiders and gestures often considered as threatening and even offensive by the dominant culture put other citizens ill at ease in front of these young men. While this aggressiveness is real, it is partly exaggerated by attributing an aggressive nature to these young men who, for their part, also live in the apprehension of the others, namely the ‘Frenchmen’ (the ‘Englishmen’, the ‘Germans’) who do not recognize them as citizens. When they leave their poor districts, these young men usually move in groups, thereby in turn increasing the level of apprehension experienced by the other citizens, who face a horde rather than individuals.

Between these young men and the other citizens stands a wall of misunderstanding, both sides rejecting each other and both characterizing the other in derogatory terms: the non-immigrant Frenchman calls them ‘Arabs’, ‘Beurs’, ‘Bougnoules’; while they call the non-immigrant Frenchman ‘Garoui’ or ‘Blanc’ (White). This divide of mutually derogatory language exists all over Europe.

Transferring this identity from delinquency to jihadism requires some mutations, but it also preserves constant features like the revenge-seeking character of the individual: as a deviant youth, he ‘shines’ by squandering money and roaring his car, often stolen, which is then set on fire to make disappear the traces of the theft but also to underline the pleasure derived from destruction in a kind of modern potlatch (see Mauss, 1904–1905). By becoming jihadist, these deviant young people literally stage their own narcissistic tendency to magnify themselves at the expense of the disbelievers; they put their pictures on the internet in order to assert their glory and their superiority towards a society that has denied them a fair lot. Larossi Abballa, the killer of a French policeman and his companion in Magnanville on 13 June 2016, filmed himself, streaming the video live to Facebook; in March 2012, Mohamed Merah filmed himself murdering the Muslim soldiers and the Jewish father and his children in Toulouse and Montauban, sending the footage to the channel Aljazeera.

For many stigmatized young people, death is a means for having their superiority recognized by society (whereas in real life they suffer from inferiority); their exposure to deadly dangers flatters their wounded egos as they consider as inferior normal citizens who are afraid of death and avoid exposure to it. In Fresnes in 2013, in a large nineteenth-century prison close to Paris, a 25-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent, jailed for having been involved in drug trafficking and deeply marked by the stigmas of his origins, did not attribute his ideas to himself (for fear that I might denounce him to the prison authorities), but credited his friend for those opinions:

Mohammad: My buddy told me, they mistreat us, they put us in a hole in these poor suburbs, separated from the rest of the population, they put us in jail, they look down on us, they think we have no pride, we are like apes. But Islam gives us pride. That frightens them. They are afraid of death—we are not. When we lean on Islam, they are afraid of us; they don’t despise us anymore, they believe we are reckless and violent. We know what we want, and after death we will go directly to paradise while they will go to hell!

(Khosrokhavar, 2016a, p. 54)

Islamization in this context results in recovering the lost pride, becoming somebody that cannot be treated as inferior, pushing towards the holy war in order to overcome the humiliation of being an outsider, of being a Frenchman ‘only on paper’, a non-genuine French citizen. Radical Islam rejects citizenship and instead promotes violence in order to establish a new order in which those who were superior become inferior, and Muslims will gain the upper hand through the holy war.

Jihadists of the poor districts of Europe make up a tiny minority among European Muslims. Usually, male members opt for deviance if they do not succeed in getting integrated into the normal economy; however, if they succeed, they usually leave the poor districts to live in middle-class neighbourhoods instead. Once they choose Islam as a receptacle for their identity, they might become pietistic non-violent Salafists or jihadists. As jihadists, they transpose their aspirations onto a religious plane which restores to them their lost dignity—they become the knights of the faith—and which satisfies their need for forced recognition by the others; because the others refused to acknowledge their dignity and mistreated them as second-class citizens, young jihadists assert themselves in a lofty manner through sacred violence. In their eyes, they do not seek violence for selfish and deviant motives as might have been the case in the past, but they seek violence to dispense a religious sentence to miscreants. Jihadism instils pride in the disaffected young people who think that they can only regain their dignity by transgressing the existing norms and by espousing a counterculture of sacred violence that doubly denies legitimacy to society: through religion (whereas in a democratic society the law, not religion, should be paramount), and through violence (whereas legitimate violence should be exerted not by the individual, but by the legal system).

By espousing radical Islam, these young people adopt a provocative attitude vis-à-vis the secularized societies that host them, and of which they are often citizens (although some are residents rather than citizens). As already mentioned, jihadist Islam plays a fundamental role in turning inferiority into superiority: they were insignificant, but now they are the self-proclaimed elites of a conquering faith; they were condemned for offenses or crimes; but now they condemn the society that judged them; they were unemployed subcitizens without public recognition, but they have become superbelievers who seek to coerce humanity into an intolerant version of Islam; they were anonymous, but they have become the stars of the internet and the world media.

The results of psychiatric analyses of a dozen jihadists reveal the following insights: most had not finished school; none of them had a professional career; their financial situation was precarious; they felt as if attacked by the void; they left for Syria to break free from an unattractive daily life (Bazex & Mensat, 2016). These traits united the excluded young people with no economic and social prospects, destined for a life with no future.

Among the marginalized young people in the poor districts of Europe where the families of immigrant origin are the majority, a tiny minority joined Daesh, but a significant proportion identified with non-violent Salafism, called pietistic or scientific Salafism. The latter has become a new type of socialization. It fosters a sense of community that is not set against the others but in stark distinction to them. Many pietistic Salafists attempt to separate themselves and their children from the wider society by avoiding a state school education (at the secular École publique) for their children. One pietistic Salafist based in La Reynerie, a poor migrant district of Toulouse, told me in August 2017:

Karim: My dream is to migrate to a Muslim country with my wife and child so that I can be in a Muslim surrounding where I can perform my daily prayers, avoid women who are without veil and sometimes half-naked, and where I am able to raise my children far from the eyes of the kuffar (disbelievers). Here in France, state schools spread kufr (disbelief). Boys and girls are mixed in a sinful way; they look at each other in an illicit way; they learn that God should not interfere with human politics, that men and women are equal, that polygamy is forbidden—although men have mistresses and women have lovers, even married ones; that daily prayer is not tolerated in public. My wish is to go to a Muslim country where these haram (illicit) acts are forbidden in order to make my hegira (migration in conformity with the ideal of the Prophet of Islam who went from Mecca to Medina). This society perverts my daughter, who is mixed with male children and does not learn what is halal (licit) and what is haram; my wife has to protect herself against sin every minute when she is out in the street; she wears the total veil that is forbidden by French and Belgian law. Their TV, their radio, their media—they all spread sin.

(Khosrokhavar, 2016a, p. 122)

As a rule, pietistic Salafists are not jihadist, and they often reject physical violence, preferring to build up sectarian types of closed communities.

Radical Islam as well as pietistic Salafism both provide a bond built against society, the former through violence, the latter through creating a closed group fostering a countercultural subculture that constructs a world of its own and raises a wall between the in-group and the others.

Radical Islam imposes a coercive sense of belonging through sacred duties, and it rejects freedom: ‘good repression’ is far superior to ‘bad freedom’, whereby bad freedom encompasses all kinds of modern freedoms, from the sexual to the secular (for example, sexual freedom, homosexuality, gender equality). Individual freedom has become trivial and sometimes devoid of meaning; many young jihadists prefer repressive norms that give sense to their lives to a set of freedoms that robs them of sacred norms. The major problem that distinguishes the new generation from that of 1960s is that it suffers from the lack of norms, and the unlimited freedoms to which its members are exposed make them unhappy. They do not know where to set limits: patriarchal family is dead, nothing seems sacred; the need for limits and transcendent principles gets the upper hand over the transgression of norms that characterized the generation of the 1960s and that created the ‘revolution’ of 1968 in France as well as social protests in the United States against the Vietnam War.

In many cases, freedom has become synonymous with loneliness and a lack of a sense of solidarity, in particular among those people who are exposed to the new rules of flexibility in labour relations, among those who find the freedom to remain jobless indefinitely meaningless, and among those who suffer from being left without protection against the blind forces of the market in the name of freedom.

Family fragility and women’s liberation have contributed to the loss of the sense of identity; there is no longer a bond to provide resistance to the internalized sense of loss among those who suffer from economic fragility as well as anthropological instability within the family. In this social context, freedom is more a negative than a positive; it overburdens the individual with the risks of life without providing societal assistance and solidarity. Jihadism substitutes this cold society with a ‘warm’ (even ‘hot’) imaginary neo-umma to be built by the new heroic agents who put their lives at stake in order to construct the city of God in this world pending the advent of the end of time.

On the other hand, individuation reaches its upper limits insofar as the globalized individual has to assume many areas of his social, emotional, economic and cultural life that literally crush him under their weight. The negative dimensions of freedom push him to despair and depression whereas the positive dimensions (to choose one’s work, to live in economic stability, to take advantage of one’s rights within the welfare state in order to achieve a sense of freedom in culture and leisure) are becoming scarce. Self-depreciation, a feeling of deep mental instability, and a sense of being inferior (lack of intelligence causing one’s failures in life) are common. Involvement in jihadism contributes to building a renewed self-esteem and overcoming the sense of instability by leaning on God, and by embedding oneself in a new community, namely the Islamic neo-ummah reshaped by the Caliphate, the IS. Exposure to the test of sacred death in the exaltation of staging the jihad creates a new situation that overcomes the lack of self-esteem and allows access to a positive acceptance of oneself in the heroic fight against the infidels.

4.2 Humiliation in School

Humiliation begins at a young age at school for the sons and grandsons of migrants. I concentrate on the French case but mutatis mutandis my observations can be extended to many of the sons and grandsons of migrants living in the segregated poor districts of Europe, where they feel inferior to the middle-class lads who choose the main (academic) track, whereas they themselves are confined to vocational options. The school system also humiliates young migrants in another manner: migrant children from a wide variety of different cultures and backgrounds are put together without French pupils (or with only very few) who would introduce them to the mainstream French culture so that they could imitate it. What I call inverted multiculturalism begins at school, and it makes it impossible to become a ‘normal’ French person by learning how to behave according to the unwritten patterns in day-to-day contacts with other French people. In the poor ethnic neighbourhoods, young children live in a cultural mix that has no Ariadne thread to let them come out of the ghetto by showing them how to conduct themselves in ways that might be considered as normal in the mainstream culture. The specific body language developed by these young people begins at school, and it is a reaction to the lack of knowledge of the middle-class pattern as much as a transgression in order to denounce this lack of access to the codes of the mainstream culture.

Young boys develop an anti-school subculture, as Lacey (1970) and Willis (1977) observed a few decades ago. The main difference is that the young working-class boys of the 1970s acted in an aggressive manner against the rules of their schools because they knew that they had no chance to accede the noble sections of society and that once out of school, they had nothing but manual jobs waiting for them. Nowadays, it is not so much the prospect of unskilled jobs (there being largely no need for them in the highly automated industrial economy) but the desire to avoid visible exposure to unemployment by joining deviant groups that motivates migrant young men. The school curriculum does not allow them to embrace a middle-class career; it simply lets them choose pathways for ending up with lower-paid jobs under the supervision of ‘native’ French persons. They hate it because it reminds them of colonial times, and the type of discipline these jobs require (keeping precise officer hours, or social attitudes that are alien to their own world) exhausts them. They reject this kind of work and instead aspire to jobs in which they are the boss; for instance, working as a taxi driver for Uber offers them hierarchical autonomy. Likewise, being self-employed avoids suffering the postcolonial superiority of the ‘white’ boss or the disciplined attitudes that they find so humiliating. School is where many young people in the poor districts develop an unruly attitude as troublemakers: not believing in its ideals, having little respect for the teachers who are there for lack of another alternative (after the perfunctory period forced on them at the beginning of their careers, many teachers will leave these districts gladly). Young boys are well aware of the dead-end jobs for which they are destined even if they do succeed at school. Some of them enter university (Truong, 2015), obtaining the required diplomas for middle-class jobs, but in many cases this does not open up opportunities for better jobs because of their origins, their names, their accents, sometimes their lack of discipline, and their body language: with the same qualification, Mohamed, a migrant’s son, has between a third and a fifth of the chance of French-born Robert to accede the same job (Dobson, 2014; Dugan, 2014). Education may open up some doors, but social stereotypes and stigmatization close many of them. Humiliation becomes a major problem at different levels for these young men, and one of the solutions (for the minority of cases by far) is jihadism.

4.3 Stages of Radicalization among Disaffected Young People

Jihadism among the disaffected young people of migrant origin follows a series of stages that is different from those of the middle classes.

First, a sense of exclusion promotes social deviance. Life in the ghettoized neighbourhoods that I call jihadogenous districts causes the feeling of being banned from society. Ghettoization creates a desire to be recognized as someone in a subculture of deviance where honour is paramount and its defence is part of the domination strategy. Among jihadists, the rupture is deepened by the total rejection of ‘the other’ as ‘miscreant’. Deviance frequently results in prison terms and recidivism.

Second, the erosion of traditional family structures promotes violence in the home and fosters early social deviance. Deviant socialization begins early. It is encouraged by the resignation of the father, the supreme authority in the patriarchal family, which has become, after less than half a century, not a ‘blended’ or an egalitarian family in the traditional style of the European middle class, but rather a ‘beheaded patriarchal family’ in which the figurehead of the father is simultaneously de jure paramount and de facto absent (either the father has gone back to his country, or there has been a divorce, or he is simply ‘dethroned’ by his sons) and in which children are raised by the overworked and overburdened mother. Despite the central role of the mother, the symbolic patriarchal figure of the father remains essential and, in the absence of the father, the big brother often tries to usurp his role by exerting violence against his brothers, sisters, and sometimes the mother. This beheaded patriarchal family is the privileged venue for the crisis of authority. Many suburban jihadists have suffered from this deeply deficient family structure in which the father figure is simultaneously paramount and absent. Many of these young jihadists were either placed in a children’s home, or they lived in a single-parent family with much higher levels of violence than found in middle class neighbourhoods. To give just one example, Mohamed Merah suffered through this type of fatherless family, his older brother claiming to be the highest authority, the latter’s attitude often leading to physical violence against him. Mohamed developed a hyper-aggressive character in the public institution where he was placed by the authorities, combining delinquency and violence. Similarly, Mehdi Nemouche spent time in a children’s home and with foster families before being raised by his grandmother. The Kouachi brothers were orphaned very young, the mother prostituting herself occasionally to provide for the family before committing suicide, after which they were raised in a children’s home. Amedy Coulibaly seems to be an exception, but many other cases highlight this crisis in the family.

Third, the deviant trajectory results in crimes that lead to imprisonment. From January 2012 to July 2015, 80% of those who committed terrorist acts had a criminal past, and 60% had spent time in prison (Basra et al., 2016). Prison then serves as a place of socialization for these young people, who include it in their life project as a ‘rational risk’ in their deviant attitude (Khosrokhavar, 2016a). Sometimes in prison, at other times outside, young people have a ‘revelation’ that leads them to radical Islam.

Fourth, a deepening of radical faith ensues whilst young migrants spend time in prison. Armed with their militant faith, these young people often deepen their religion whilst they are in prison by adopting a pre-oriented inclination towards jihadism: they read the radical Surahs of the Koran, which preach an uncompromising attitude towards the unbelievers or the other faiths, like Tawbah (repentance) or al-Anfāl (treasures of war), rather than those who preach tolerance (such as the Surah Kuffar). The deepening of their faith in prison (or sometimes outside) consists in overcoming their religious ignorance through their reading inspired by the radical version of Islam.

The fifth and final stage involves the journey of initiation that these disaffected young people make to the lands where jihad is raging. The Kouachi brothers made a trip to Yemen (one of them was invited and financed by Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-Yemeni jihadist killed by United States drones in 2011); Mehdi Nemouche went to Syria; Mohamed Merah made a trip to Pakistan and Turkey (and probably from there to Syria); Abdelhamid Abaoud, a major figure of the attacks of 13 November 2015, stayed in Syria in the service of the IS, as did Brahim Abdeslam, another member of the group. In addition, these people can be indoctrinated by charismatic figures at home, as was the case with Amedy Coulibaly, who did not go to a holy war country but was indoctrinated by Djamel Beghal, a major French/North African jihadist figure. The journey of initiation involves military training and encompasses the manufacture and handling of explosives. It generates a denationalization with regard to the society of origin, now considered foreign. Jihadist socialization outside the country of origin creates a new identity which is detached from citizenship and polarized by religious militancy. After their stay in the Islamic country in the service of the jihadist order, the adept becomes insensitive to extreme forms of cruelty, accepting beheadings of disbelievers or heretics (e.g. Shiites). War in the service of Daesh (or other jihadist organizations, like Jabhat al-Nusra) puts an end to empathy for the victims. In his utter insensitivity towards the victims, the mujahid (the combatant of the holy war, the jihad) performs the role of the executioner as much as that of the warrior.

While not necessarily all of the above five characteristics are present among the disaffected young people of migrant origin, at least three or four of them are present when they embrace jihadism.

6.1 Convergence and Divergence with Men: Feminism and Its Avatars

The causes that attracted girls and women to Syria from 2013 to 2016 bore similarities to those that drew men there.

First, women constituted a significant proportion of workers and employees in Europe for at least two generations due to the benefits of feminism, the shaking up of the patriarchal family, and the advantages arising from the legal equality between men and women. As a result, they feel the same job insecurity and fear of the future as men—if not more, due to their disadvantaged position in the job market. In a society deprived of utopia where the sense of belonging has been weakened in many ways (the fragile family structure, the weakening of the nation state, the loss of job security due to globalization, and the new ‘flexibility’ in recruitment policies), women lean towards the utopia of radical Islam, attracted by its promise of an effervescent community and a restored family structure (a reassuring neo-patriarchal family rather than the destabilizing modern family).

Another common point is the monotony of everyday life and the boredom experienced in the peaceful European societies since the end of the Second World War. The instability and fragility of the family, even if it is experienced differently by men and women, have the same roots: the family is no longer perceived as solid in the face of the uncertainties of life and the multiplication of family models (man and woman, woman and woman, man and man, informal partnership, the ‘blended’ family). The ‘à la carte family’ puts the burden on the couple, who must negotiate their coexistence with each other, who must negotiate with the stepfamily which is diluting their authority, who must assimilate children bequeathed by stepfathers or stepmothers. The shared authority between the biological father and the new husband of the biological mother, or the mother and the new wife of the father, contributes to this growing sense of fragility of authority, which is now subject to endless negotiations between husband and wife or the two members of the couple. The dream of marriage to a knight in shining armour who might die after a few months was easily internalized by many of these young women who ventured into Syria because in their minds, marriage had already been affected in its immutability within their own family and put to the test of a destabilizing modernity.

The pride of being part of the new effervescent Muslim community, even though this proved to be an illusion upon arrival in Syria, was a strong motivation for young women to depart for Syria. The knight of faith was a role model opposing the de-idealized man to whose trivialization have contributed both feminism and the loss of his role as the exclusive financial provider for the family. A large proportion of these young women were drawn to Syria by the romanticism of love, which re-idealized men, rather than by adherence to the political ideal of a jihadist Islam or the desire to protect Muslims against secularization, both of which prevailed in the motivation of young men to travel to Syria.

Finally, there was a quest for norms and even discipline among women and men, a need for guidance that would give meaning and direction to their lives. For men, this was particularly the case among those who sought to join the police or the army and who, as unsuccessful candidates, turned to jihadism; this was the case for Mohamed Merah, who tried to join the Légion étrangère in France in 2010 before committing the deadly attacks against Muslim military men and Jews in 2012. There were many male examples, but there were also proven instances of similar female examples, like Hasna Aït Boulahcen, who dreamed of joining the French army (Rey-Lefebvre et al., 2015).

However, while women and men shared some aspirations for their relationship with the new Islamic State, other characteristics separated their motivations. To begin with, their relationship with death was different in the overwhelming majority of the cases, even though some jihadist women aspired to die as martyrs in the same way as men. While many girls died in bombings in Syria, the female death rate was much lower overall than that of men. They were not affected in the same way, and what often awaited women was the death of a husband, a period of mourning (lasting around four months), and then a possible marriage with a second husband.

6.2 The Need for Norms and a Strong and Inclusive Community

Jihadist women, like their male counterparts, strongly aspired to belong to a community that would give meaning to their lives. The dystopia of Daesh, repressive and regressive but promising strong integration into a close-knit Islamic community (the neo-ummah), was highly attractive to young men and women living in European societies, where togetherness had become almost meaningless due to the lack of a shared utopia (up to the 1980s, utopias of socialism, communism, and republicanism (in France) had provided the promise of a better future and the cement of social togetherness in the present). The more restrictive the norms, the more reassuring they became, at least before jihadist women experienced real life under the aegis of Daesh in Syria. Rigid norms played a reassuring role for the anomic individuals in search of belonging to a hot community, as compared to the cold societies they lived in.

This is particularly the case for Saïda, born in the early 1980s in a non-practicing North African family to a French mother of Algerian origin and an Algerian father who had seven children (de Féo, 2019). Saïda’s parents divorced when she was thirteen years old. She blamed her father for not raising her as well as he had raised her brothers and sisters, loving her less than the other siblings. She was more tender towards her mother, and she worried about her because she did not perform the daily prayers and therefore risked hell in Saïda’s eyes. In secondary school, Saïda had problems attending classes and turned to Islam, influenced by her friends. She tried to pass the police officer examination in order to fight against paedophiles, drug dealers, and other law breakers. Despite receiving good grades, she did not succeed because she did not provide a medical certificate of good health. She attributed the fact that she did not succeed in the examination to Allah. Afterwards, she also noted that working in a male environment such as the police would have been illicit (haram) from an Islamic viewpoint. She married a Tunisian Salafist in spite of the opposition from her parents, learning about Salafism (the Salafiyya) on the internet. She found answers to her questions on Islamic forums. She had fits of depression that she attributed to the sins she had committed prior to joining the Salafist faith. Not only did she yearn for rigid norms, but she also felt guilty for not having applied them previously. This type of aspiration is as prevalent among the peaceful Salafists (the so-called pietists who aspire to hegira, leaving Europe for a Muslim country rather than engaging in jihad) as it is among a significant proportion of Salafist jihadists (who consider violent jihad the only way to assure their redemption). Both are in search of restrictive norms, absolute certainties, a faith that will frame and give meaning to their existence. Wearing the full veil, Saïda was stopped by the police and, after an altercation, spent a night in prison. For her, the will to build another life with a set of self-imposed restrictive norms was a paramount existential question. The Salafist neo-ummah filled this void but stripped her of much of her free will.

6.3 Women Facing Violence: Total Muslims versus Negative Heroines

For a new generation in the West, women’s relationship with violence has been progressively evolving at an anthropological level. Violence still remains largely the preserve of men: the female prison population is 3.3% in France (République Française, Ministère de la Justice, 2020) and 5% in Great Britain (Silvestri, 2013). However, women’s imagination, especially of very young women, regarding violence, has been evolving. As already mentioned, 17% of jihadists today are women. If we compare this figure with most extremist movements, this proportion is one of the highest, except in far-left movements like the Baader-Meinhoff gang (the proportion of women in this group exceeded 50% and at times reached 60%; see Neuman, 2016) or the Red Brigades in Italy. In the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, 5% of members were women (Gill et al., 2014); 6.4% of the members of the Basques organization ETA were women (Reinares, 2004). The number of Western women who went to Syria between 2013 and the first half of 2015 is as follows: 70 German (including 9 minors); 63 to 70 French; 60 English (20 minors); 30 Dutch; 14 Australian (Bakker & de Leede, 2015). Given how women are treated by Daesh, this proportion reflects their fascination with jihadism as well as that of adolescent girls and post-adolescents.

To begin with, violence is no longer being perceived as the exclusive preserve of men. It must be emphasized that this was already the case in the past, specifically in the second half of the twentieth century; examples include the Algerian women who played a major role in the Algerian war of independence in the early 1960s, the Chechen Black Widows up to the present time, but also the socialist and communist leftist women in Lebanon who took part in the movement against Israeli occupation through kamikaze attacks in the 1980s.

Some of the women who joined Daesh presented particular traits, especially their quest for ‘de-Westernization’ in order to embrace Islam more thoroughly and to become new women. These young women felt that ‘Occidentality’ (Westernness) had stuck to their skin like a straitjacket, preventing them from identifying fully, absolutely, totally with the neo-ummah which, in their eyes, embodied happiness in this world and bliss in the afterlife. For them, the West was first and foremost a reign of total secularization, the profanation of the sacred in the name of the supremacy of the secular, the annexation of the public sphere being by a non-religious (or anti-religious, in the jihadists’ view) system of reference. Becoming a real Muslim was impossible in this situation. Leaving Europe was also finding a way to escape the all-secular public sphere where ‘naked bodies’ (women without veil, sometimes exposing their legs and/or their forearms) were permitted. Shedding all occidental traits and habits became a prerequisite for recovering a full Muslim identity.

A 23-year-old woman from a secular middle-class background in France who converted to Islam became radicalized under the influence of a local preacher, according to her brother. She sought to become a total Muslim and left France for Syria in 2015. Her 28-year-old brother described her mindset in these terms:

She felt that the entire society was corrupt and perverse […]: ‘I feel ashamed to be a French woman. Not only am I not free to be a proud Muslim, but other people dress and behave in such a way that I am ill at ease all the time. My dream is to migrate to a Muslim country, forget about France […], and embrace my Muslim identity […]’.

(Khosrokhavar, 2021, p. 301)

I qualify Women and men of this category as ‘total Muslims’. Benslama, in French, speaks of the surmusulman (the super-Muslim) to characterize those Muslims who look for more and more restrictions in the name of religion in order to prove to themselves worthy of their genuine Islamic identity. Super-Muslims are different in the sense that it is their quest for de-Westernization that characterizes them (see Benslama, 2016; Benslama & Khosrokhavar, 2017).

These total Muslim women want a world in the image of the uniqueness of Allah that would result in the unification of all spheres of existence under the protective wing of God. The secular world seems monstrous to them because it has broken off its ties with God, and is bound only by the soft consensus of the citizens who have banished God from their existence and have taken his place. The loss of the old utopias and the lack of meaning resulting from the absence of a cement for living together creates a climate of anxiety for some, who feel a strong need for an encompassing principle in the sense of Karl Jaspers (das Umgreifende, the encompassing, which gives sense to the existence and ties the community together, see Jaspers, 1948); or who long for mystery in the sense of Gabriel Marcel, who opposed the mystery of the sacred to the problem, understandable and susceptible of finding a solution in the secular world; (see Marcel, 1951). For a few years, Daesh brought this kind of meaning to the young men and women who entered the fold of Islam and broke with the West, the world of domination, desecration, and opposition to Islam and all that is sacred and transcendent. The Islamic State excommunicated a desacralizing and profane Western world by opposing it with an agonistic version of Islam that violently reintroduced the sacred into daily life and restored in a coercive manner a unified meaning to the world by guaranteeing individuals a blessed life after death if they fought the forces of evil incarnated by the agents of secularization in a diabolic West.

The West, the venue of feminism that managed to desecrate the patriarchal family, to bring the social roles of man and woman dangerously close to each other, and to make inaudible the desire to be a woman and to feel the body during precious childbirth for these young women, was experienced as alienating, making impossible the self-assertion as a genuine mother-woman. Admittedly, the desire for early motherhood among young women or adolescent girls could not reproduce the model of the past, that being the product of the imagination of young post-feminist girls and women. It was the reaction to many generations of feminists and the yearning for recovering a sense of womanhood rather than the desire to become a woman in the traditional sense. This romanticized worldview was totally destroyed for the majority of these young women after few months in Syria, when the patriarchal system and the subordinate status of women under the Islamic State became unbearable to many of them. But in Europe, prior to their journeys to Syria, many of these young women yearned for an exotic life, romanticized and estranged from their uninspiring daily life in the West.

Another step was taken in jihadism with the figurehead of the negative heroine who went beyond the total Muslim woman in terms of her radicalization. She was the feminine counterpart of the male negative hero. Her mindset was an explosive mix of feminism, anti-feminism, and post-feminism; her will to act hid her tormented character. The jihadist heroine sought to embody the countervalues of society, beginning with violence, acting for ISIS, mostly in the West. The more violent she became, the more she legitimized herself in her own eyes, inversely proportional to her de-legitimization in Western societies. She sought to punish the West through violent action. She also intended to attract new female adepts to strengthen IS. The number of these negative heroines was rather marginal. In contrast to the majority of the young women who intended to marry a knight of faith, they aspired to take up arms and to fight against the miscreants (the entire West) in order to defend radical Islam.

In Syria, except in rare exceptional cases, the mujahidat (female mujahids) could not intervene in the battlefield during the reign of the IS. In Europe, some of the women who were prevented from going to Syria turned their anger against their host society and became negative heroines. This was the case for the young women who tried to blow up a car in the tourist district of Notre-Dame de Paris in September 2016. One of them, Ines Madani, attacked a police officer with a knife and wounded him. She planned to play the role of a jihadist combatant sensu stricto. She had pledged allegiance to IS on the internet.

Women thus oscillated between the dream of love, the desire to break with a morose daily life, the yearning for building up a family beyond the fragility of the modern one, and the aspiration to recover their female identity by reinforcing its difference with men. A tiny minority intended to act as combatants in the battlefield or to attack their own country through terrorist action.

6.4 Women Converts and the Mythical Restoration of a Lost Unity

Among the women who went to Syria (jihadist brides), a significant minority was made up of converts. For example, in January 2016, roughly a third of French women present in Syria within Daesh were converts (Guéguen, 2016). European female converts have a number of characteristics that distinguish them from the Muslim women or girls who left or were about to leave for Syria.

As already mentioned, a principle of active individuation underpinned their motivations: they felt called to an individual duty (fard al-ayn) that encompassed men and women (Hoyle et al., 2015, pp. 10–14). The distress of Muslim societies morally compelled some women to go to Syria to defend the dignity and the territory of Islam. Some English women took the initiative to go to Syria. To the overwhelming majority of them, being a woman no longer meant escaping this obligation which, in the past, applied only to men, if not de jure, then de facto. During the period from 2013 to 2017, when IS claimed the status of the Caliphate, individual awareness created a sense of obligation and responsibility towards the Muslim community that pushed individuals towards action. Sitting by idly promoted feelings of guilt for men and women alike. Engaging on the side of Daesh meant fulfilling their religious duty as Muslims.

The notions of the afterlife, divine justice, the last judgement, hell and its pangs, and paradise and its delights, preoccupied women as much as men. Secularization had apparently rendered obsolete those religious notions, which were thought to be strictly reserved for the private life of the citizens.

The behaviour of these young people fascinated by Daesh called into question the separation between the public and the private life: they questioned the relegation of religion to the private sphere; moreover, they wanted to annex the public life and put an end to the separation of politics and religion. In the perspective of these young people, the belief in the hereafter was rooted in an eternal reality that extended to the entirety of the individual’s life (and in particular his or her life in the public sphere). This belief brought with it an ethical-religious sense that encompassed both the private and the public spheres while, in European societies, it belonged solely to the private sphere. This demand for religion by converted women and girls who questioned the dichotomy of private versus public spheres could be explained by the exhaustion of secular utopias throughout Europe and the emergence of new dystopias that attempted to coalesce the fragmented lives of individuals by insisting on the totality of their existence, private and public spheres at the same time.

Late modernity diversifies the sectors of life and tends to compartmentalize social relations without a link between them. The new regressive utopias, such as jihadism, attempted to unify all spheres of existence by denying the principle of differentiation and diversification in the name of a transparency based on the mythical unity of Islam. Daesh opposed an opaque and fragmented complexity devoid of unity with a transparent simplicity in which violence against the disbelievers gave a monolithic unity to the life of the believer. Women were particularly exposed to its seductive powers because the boundary between womanhood and manhood has become fuzzy, feminism having transformed women into quasi-men, the dialectic of gender equality having created an anguishing indistinctness with regard to their femininity. Radical Islamism reassured these women by re-inscribing the difference of the sexes into a sacred register where to be a man or to be a woman had an absolute meaning, reintroducing a mythical transparency which appeased the modern anguish of gender indistinctiveness. One can mention an afterlife in paradise that would soothe the anguish caused by the uncertainties of the present time through the assurance of eternal bliss.

Before their departure to Syria, the fascination among young European teenage girls with the Daesh-type family was rooted in the quest for a countermodel to the stepfamily (blended family) in which they lived, which was often marked by instability, a lack of unified authority, the disappearance of patriarchy without a new substitutive frame of reference, and the agonizing dilution of the distinction between men and women. The converted girls wanted to find a spouse who was the antithesis of the clichés of men in their daily lives, clichés marked by the loss of the former’s superiority (the Islamic hero would re-idealize the man’s role), the equalization that de-idealized men, and an egalitarian culture that rendered men effeminate or robbed them of their manhood (the Islamic warrior would restore the man’s virility). What they were looking for was an exceptional man who could be trusted—someone who accepted the possibility of dying for his ideals would be trustworthy—and who also would back them in the vicissitudes of married life, who would not be intimidated by danger, and who would kill or get killed without flinching. His heroic nature would reassure young women anxious to idealize their future husbands.

Identifying herself with an effervescent neo-ummah in which she would assume the eminent role of the mother (ummah and umm (mother) stem from the same linguistic root in Arabic), she would no longer feel insecure. The extraordinary man would guarantee the couple an intensified marital life which would also be protected from the monotony and boredom which assail many modern couples after the first few months of marriage. Of course, the couple could be shaken by the death of the husband as a martyr, but boredom would not besiege them.

In Europe, girls spent hours on the internet looking for a suitable young man who would become their husband, while men used social networks to go in search of women once they had arrived in Syria and subsequently tried to seduce them by courting them according to Islamic norms. Women journalists contacted young European jihadists in Syria, pretending to be a young woman ready to migrate, in order to see how young jihadists tried to seduce young girls (see Erelle, 2015).

In addition, young women also wanted to become celebrities to raise themselves above their insignificance and give meaning to their lives: they built a new ego by making a new skin. The jihadist star system needed feminine figures who stood out for the quality of their propaganda on the internet and for their striking, even cruel, character. This was the case for Samantha Louise Lewthwaite, Maria Giula Sergio, and Emilie König, who all made a name for themselves in the global jihadist network and attracted young girls in whose eyes they were envied stars.

Finally, the spectacle of a Syrian society plagued by death and destruction has induced an attitude of compassion that can create a humanitarian goal of a new kind: to help the Muslims of Syria against the heretical regime of Assad, legitimizing the use of violence which is perceived as legitimate, and bypassing non-violent options in the name of the higher values of Islam. This argument was confirmed by the stories of a dozen American women, who might easily have been Europeans, arrested before they left for Syria, exemplified by Shannon Conley, a 19-year-old woman from Colorado who was sentenced to four years in prison for trying to help Daesh (Hughes, 2015).