Dr. Farhad Khosrokhavar

First of all I would like to thank the organizers of the conference, St. Antony's College, which I've happened to know since a long time ago, and Princeton University. I'm not going to talk about the networks as such. There are very good books on that topic and I think it is somewhat repetitious to focus on the networks as such. What I'm interested in is, let's say, the sociological factors within each European society that contribute to radicalisation of part of their citizens. I'm interested in the subjectivity of the people who get involved in those radical terrorist activities. As a matter of fact, this communication is the result of an empirical research done in France on Muslims in prison. It has been performed with the help of the British. We are two groups, one in France, another one in England, Warwick University, James Beckford and Daniele Joly who are in the centre of Ethnic Relations at the University of Warwick. We have done this research, each of us in three prisons, three in France and three in England. And I interviewed around 160 people, out of whom 15 were there because they were charged with terrorist acts. My paper is based on these interviews. They lasted between one hour and two. Of course, I didn't have the right to record the interview, because of the prison rules, not because the prisoners were opposed to it. And I could not ask them about the networks, because then I would have been identified as a police officer or, as what they call, sold out to the French, American or even Israeli spying systems. Even without asking them about that topic, I was identified as partially being a spy. But that's another matter. So what I try to understand is their subjectivity, their social origin, their motivation, within the framework of a sociological and anthropological work. In that respect, I should say it is somehow connected to the topic of today not only because it's a terrorist network within Europe, but also because there is a question of human agency, of social actors which is involved. During these two days we have had wonderful people talking about Islamophobia and so on and I fully agree with that, but I think by focusing almost exclusively on that topic we might forget that in England, in France and in other parts of Europe although there are many Muslims who feel victimized, or partially victimized, but at the same time many of them don't feel totally victimized. There is a room for social action in European countries and Muslims are not passive people, passively submitted to Islamophobia. Even in the United States, Muslims, with whom I talked after the September the 11th and who are not passively exposed to Islamophobia. So Islamophobia, discussion about all those things are necessary, but I think we should have a kind of positive picture of Muslims and since I have been working on Muslims in Europe and particularly in France since the last ten years, I can tell you that even at the lowest level, those people, poor Muslims, poor, as they called in France, Jeune de Banlieue, those people who belong to the poor outskirts of the cities and so on, are not mere victims. Even they have, at least most of them, projects for their lives, they are future orientated and it's not true that they are totally victimized. So denouncing Islamophobia is something I subscribe to, but I think, almost everyone here would agree with the fact that there is positive room for action and Muslims in Europe are human agents, are social actors. And out of the interviews with those 15 people in French prisons who were radical Muslims, and some of them actually were and they said it, the problem is that they didn't identify themselves as victims. So my thesis, of course, which I won't be able to develop in 20 minutes, is that radicalism, at least, for some actors within those radical networks is tied to the feeling of victimization and humiliation, but it is not only that: they overcome it in order to become actors, to act. The logic of action in that respect can be manifold. One might be positive morally speaking: many Muslims in Europe become actors of their lives, of their situation, of the situation of other Muslims through associations, through enterprises, through many other legal activities, and some others go toward radicalism. And my empirical work contradicts the idea of these people as being schizophrenic, paranoid, and so on. The discussions I had with them, lasting between one or two hours as I said before was a kind of rational discussion. Of course I didn’t' agree, at least with their logic of action, but we should not view them as mentally ill or having deep psychic problems. Another important point is that in these radical networks so far as empirical datas allow me to talk about them, two types of action are related to the social classes: one is the by the "excluded" people; this is a classical case: those who are excluded, rejected and so on might get radicalized and act against the society. There is stigmatization and then counter-stigmatization, so this is something which is understandable, at least partially understandable, but of course not legitimate. Most of those people to whom I talked were not from excluded stratas, they were middle class or lower middle class people and culturally speaking, many of them were multicultural. They spoke between three and six languages. The least was three, French. English and Arabic. Perhaps those 15 people to whom I talked did not represent the entire spectrum of radical actors within these networks, but still, they were not monocultural. And some of them knew many other languages. So the picture of an excluded person who feels rejected and who is, let's say, not modern enough to live in western societies doesn't hold. On the other hand their mental construction, their social construction of reality, is related to experiences which have in many cases their roots in family life, some of them, in international relations, some others, in French society. So I should argue, there are different factors that might induce radical action, which might be inserted into terrorist networks. One is the existence of a community. Some people feel, mostly in France but not exclusively there, that communities are a danger to democracy. Having a community might mean you are interposing between society and the free individual, a kind of mediation which puts into question the citizenship as a political phenomenon. I know that this point of view is not shared by many of the European countries, but there is a kind of suspicion in some of them, mainly in France, that being a member of a community might have negative consequences, or at least push some toward radicalization. My data shows that it's not true. Belonging to a community might entail some kind of peculiarities, specificities, "particularism", lukewarm natinalism and so on, but on the whole it prevents from radicalization and those people who are involved in these acts and, of course, those with whom I had these interviews in prison, belong either to north African countries or to Lebanon, some of them being from other countries, but the majority, more than 10 belonging to North Africa. And these people did not belong to any kind of concrete community. The second point is that it's very important whether or not people who are becoming members of these radical networks are from former colonies or not. I mean in France and especially in England, of course, most of the Muslims come from the former colonies. There is a kind of collective memory related to colonisation decolonisation which operates effectively. This has positive and negative aspects. For instance, in Germany where the Turks are not from a former German colony, their relationship, at least, toward radicalization, are different and since they belong to communities, this prevents them as well from radicalization. Some of them get radicalized toward Turkey. But those people, for instance, who were in Hamburg, who got involved in September the 11th terrorist acts, who were having lectures, courses, training to become pilots did not have close connections with German Muslims. Whereas this type does not hold true for the French and for those in England that we know of. Another point is the nature of the judicial system. Of course, France, Germany, England and other countries in Western Europe are all democratic countries, but the French judicial system is different from the English one or from the German one. The French one is influenced by the Roman legal system and by the French Revolution and the English one is totally different, influenced by the common law. Sometimes acts that might induce imprisonment in France do not have the same consequence in England and vice versa. The nature of the juridical system is important in identifying who might be a terrorist, or who might be somehow or other, related to terrorist networks and that's why there's a kind of parlour mix between England and France almost everyday. After September 11 much less, because in England people have become concerned and this type of Islamophobia which has been developing here has contributed to suspicion towards some Muslims. But on the whole, the French complain that the English let those terrorist networks act freely, whereas the English think that the French juridical system does not give all the liberties to the citizen in order to put into question the indictment ob being a terrorist. I think the nature of the juridical system within each European country is as much important as the radical activities within networks. That which can be identified in one country as being a terrorist activity in another one might be identified as a kind of illegitimate, or somehow illegal activity, without being a terrorist one. There is another factor, which might be called the 'traumatic event'. In the United States, of course, September the 11th has been one with incalculable consequences. In the French case the terrorist acts of 1995 in Paris, in Parisian underground, where 12 or 13, innocent people died had a huge echo within the French media and public opinion. The repression of the activities identified as a terrorist one began in France in 1993, 1994, much earlier than in the United States or even in England, due to the Algerian background of these networks. I come now to the fact that these categories of actors are, of course, related to the economic stratification, but not only that and we have many people with middle class background and from lower classes. There are other categories, the converts. Some are tempted to become radical Muslims. And in prison I had many who were influenced by the radicalized ones. One case was interesting, that of a protestant pastor who became a Muslim in prison: he had raped a child or something like that, and he underwent a crisis. There is a tendency of non-Muslims in many European countries to become Muslims and paradoxically, for instance in the United States, after the September the 11th, Islam has been diabolized, and as a result, some people are much more attracted towards Islam because of this rejection by the majority. And the fact that Islam in many European countries, in poor suburbs, becomes the religion of the "dominated" shows that in a way Islam is being identified by some people as being the religion of those under repression, under duress, under domination. It doesn't mean that other Muslims do not exist. There are important numbers of middle class Muslim people in Europe. And, as I said, there is positive room for action for Muslims in many European countries, but the other side of the coin should be described. Another characteristic feature of these radical people is that there is almost no woman in them. There were some Palestinian women in the Palestinian territories, but this is another problem, it's not terrorism in the same sense as al-Qaeda, it is a kind of national movement within which there are radical styles of action. We have to distinguish between this kind of radicalism and transnational terrorism as such.

All these interviews show that one major component of the radical subjectivity was the feeling of humiliation. From our perspective humiliation can be twofold. Humiliation can be bodily humiliation, for instance. What the Palestinians undergo in Gaza strip, in the Palestinian territories, when they pass through check points and so on is of this kind. There is another kind of humiliation, which is not a bodily one. This is a constructed phenomenon related to the modern culture. In the prison almost all those 160 people I talked to, besides perhaps four or five, were humiliated because of the TV pictures on the Israeli-Palestinian issue as shown on the TV screen. This is a construction of humiliation which is closely tied  to an anthropology of modernity. I'm not going to describe all those phenomena because of lack of time. So far as the problem of radical action is concerned, radicalization occurs when the feeling of victimization is overcome by a logic of self-affirmation, self-assertion and in the interviews it was obvious. And as I said before, I totally reject the notion of mental illness or paranoia or schizophrenia or a kind of disjoined self. In a way, they unify their Self.

All these aspects have been largely developed in my latest book, "Les nouveaux martyrs d Allah" (the new martyrs of Allah).

Thank you for your patience.