Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in France by Gilles Kepel (review)

One of the most admirable aspects of this book is that Gilles Kepel is not afraid to tackle the difficult subject of the recent wave of terrorist attacks in France with all the complexity it deserves. Kepel has no method as such—he makes no claim to be a political scientist or social scientist. He therefore has no theoretical or philosophical axes to grind. Rather he assembles his material like a detective and presents his case with the subtle but remorseless logic of a lawyer. His arguments are not only all the more convincing for this but also match exactly the twists and turns in French political life that have been the direct result of terrorism. Most significantly, Kepel does not present us with any ‘reading’ of recent events in France, but argues with forensic precision that Islamist violence in the country is endlessly mutating, and, even if no one can know quite where it is going, it is possible to put together a coherent version of events that tells us what Islamist strategy is, and where the fault-lines in French society lie. He begins in 2005 with the waves of riots in the banlieues—the so-called ‘French Intifada’—which stunned the French authorities, and then the rest of the world. Kepel is sceptical about the official judgement by the French police, which concluded that the riots had little or nothing to do with Islamism. Most impressively, he links evolving Islamist strategy, particularly in Algeria and Tunisia, and now Syria, with increasingly hard-line radicalization in the banlieues. These phenomena cannot be separated, he argues, even if the French and intelligence authorities were all too often blind to them. Since 2005, he argues, the divisions in French society have hardened, partly as a result of this blindness of successive French governments to what was happening in plain sight, and because of a significant shift in the Muslim community, particularly among the young, from a tolerant, plural form of Islam, as practised in North Africa, towards a ‘total Islam’, an import from the Gulf into North Africa, but which has had a devastating impact on the present generation of North Africans on both sides of the Mediterranean. Kepel takes us through the terrible catalogue of now familiar atrocities —Merah, the Bataclan, Nice, and so on—but at no point does he propose any easy solutions to the present impasse. He dismisses critics such as Emmanuel Todd, whose emphasis is on attacking French society rather than Islam, as not much more than a narcissist. This book is, in contrast, a grown-up version of events, which sees great dangers in the present and the future. Kepel does not give us a happy ending; most importantly, he also stresses that this appalling story is not yet over.