Gulan: In recent few years the situation has shifted entirely in Europe with respect to a sudden and massive renewal of jihadiism and extreme salafism, a new generation of jihadists has emerged in this continent which holds distinct characteristics, unlike the previous generation they are highly inclined to preach and practice violent jihadism, so what are the drivers and trends that led to this situation?

Euben: Answering this question requires first clarifying the phenomenon we’re talking about, which also means being careful with terminology. Terms such as “extreme salafism” and “jihadism” can obscure more than clarify the subject they aim to describe. “Jihadism” reduces the Arabic jihad, which can denote all kinds of struggle and striving, to violence. Salafism refers to contemporary Muslims who generally reject the interpretive methods and norms of the medieval Islamic schools, and take as a guide for proper behavior only the word of God, the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and the example set by the pious forbears. It’s an important part of the genealogy of contemporary Islamism, but then again, it’s also an important part of the genealogy of Islamic modernism. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with violence.



I prefer the term “radical Islamism” for several reasons. “Radical” here designates those Islamist groups whose vision of the world is divided into unusually rigid categories of good and evil, and whose commitment to armed jihad is central; it distinguishes them from groups who, for example, may seek socio-moral transformation of society gradually, or primarily through da`wa (invitation or summoning to Islam), and/or whose views of the world are more flexible and less intransigent. At the same time, keeping the word “Islamist” recognizes some of the continuities among Islamist groups often divided into categories of “moderate” or “extreme.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that Islamism is the perfect term; there are drawbacks to it as well. I like to say that it’s the worst term except for all the others. All of this may seem like a semantic digression, yet words have the power not just to describe but shape the world, so I believe that it’s crucial to be as precise and explicit as possible about the words we use and why we use them. This is especially true when it comes to all things related to Islam and Islamism, as there’s a fair amount of misunderstanding swirling around both subjects.



The answer to the question depends partly upon which group of radical Islamists, in which European countries and which exact period of time one has in mind. Also the conditions conducive to the emergence of radical Islamist leaders/ideologues are often quite different than those of followers. But if we take a bird’s eye view and just look at the last 15 years, there are certain patterns and drivers that can be observed across several different Western European countries which contribute significantly to the appeal of Islamist ideas.



The current situation in France is a particularly instructive case, and not just because of the infamous killings at Charlie Hebdo, coordinated and carried out by three “homegrown terrorists,” i.e. French Muslims who came from Algerian and Malian families. It’s also instructive because the particular situation in France that contributes to the appeal of radical Islamist ideas among some young Muslims is reflective of broader patterns in Western Europe. To begin with, France is home to Europe’s largest population of Muslims, estimated at about 5-6 million, or about 10% of the country’s total population. This is, in part, a legacy of its colonial domination of much of North Africa and its brutal war in Algeria in particular. Then there’s the growing and voluble far right party, the National Front, long known for anti-immigrant, racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic invective. Moreover, many immigrants and children of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries live in suburbs called "sensitive urban zones,” a designation reflective of the fact that these areas are plagued by soaring unemployment and relatively high rates of poverty, among other things. And as in many American cities, there are often explosive racial tensions regarding how the police operate in these suburbs.



Last but most certainly not least, there’s the particular form of secularism the French state endorses and enforces, laïcité, which formally establishes state neutrality toward religion and keeps it from intruding on public spaces. But as recent scholarship on secularity has shown, secularism doesn’t reflect a natural division between public and private spheres, but is an expression of the modern state’s power to create that very division, then determine which aspects of social and political life belong where, and make it seem natural and inevitable to those born and raised in the culture of secularism. What’s particularly paradoxical is that, despite official claims of state neutrality, secularism is everywhere celebrated as a great achievement of “Judeo-Christian civilization.” Moreover, in the name of secularism, modern states engage in a great deal of regulation of religious life: majority and minority religious practices are differentiated, regulated and/or barred at different points in history for different political reasons. To see this point, just consider: despite the fact that France has a long history of publically displayed Catholic symbols, the French government felt the need to specifically target a Muslim religious practice in the 2011 law explicitly banning face veils from all public spaces.



My point here, of course, isn’t to criticize the principle of religious equality animating the idea of secularism, but rather to draw attention to how it’s experienced by many Muslims in France who already have a very acute sense that, even if they are French citizens and speak French, France has decided they somehow don’t belong. Responding to BBC reporter Shaista Aziz, one French Muslim woman echoed a sentiment I’ve heard expressed over and over by French Muslims in different ways. Describing what it’s like to be spurned by the country of her birth for being Muslim, she said, "It's like being rejected by your mother."



Now, there’s no simple causal line between any one of these conditions and, say, an Islamist martyrdom operation. In fact, studies have shown that it’s often the case that radical Islamists are middle class rather than impoverished, and that they’re often educated, disproportionately in the natural and applied sciences. Still, taken together, all of these conditions, factors and trends make it fairly easy to see why a set of ideas that pledges to restore the Islamic community to its position of primacy; that not only provides a compelling explanation for all Muslim suffering but details an antidote to it in multiple forms of jihad; and that holds out the promise of feeling at home and respected among others similarly committed to enacting the righteous bravery of the earliest generations of Muslims, might find fertile soil to grow.



While some features of this story are unique to France, many of them aren’t: the waves of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment; the legacy of colonial involvement in Muslim-majority countries, the paradoxes of secular governance in modern Western European states, and the higher rates of unemployment that plague many immigrant communities can be found in many of the Western European countries that have had higher rates of Muslim youth traveling to Syria to fight for the Islamic State or citizens participating in radical Islamist cells. But importantly, this trend is neither massive nor sudden. The number of European Muslims involved here is minuscule compared to the total Muslim population in Europe. Moreover, these drivers and patterns have been years, decades and even centuries in the making.



Gulan: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the homegrown jihadiism characterized by quietness, this jihadiism manifests itself in small and isolated networks, but right now hundreds of jihadists from Europe have left to Syria, and there are several thousand sympathizers,. On one hand, this is a troubling and dangerous development, on the other hand understanding and addressing this new phenomenon poses great challenges, so what are those challenges and what should be done in this regard?



Euben: I’d like to break your question up into two parts. The first is about the challenges of understanding why there are hundreds of European Muslims traveling to Syria to join the Islamic state, and untold numbers of others who form the army of digital support for IS, but are unlikely to ever travel to join it–what are often referred to in the scholarly literature as “soft-sympathizers.” The second is the question: what’s to be done to stop it?



The challenges to understanding it are numerous. One obstacle that always gets in the way of careful study are those deeply-held convictions about Islam and Muslims in general that re-emerge whenever something having to do with radical Islamist violence hits the headlines. So, for example, in the United States, the ultraviolence of IS inaugurated yet another rehearsal of claims and counter-claims about whether and to what extent Islam is inherently violent, much as it did in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Yet to my knowledge, in the contemporary world violence committed by devout Christians has never inaugurated a debate about whether Christianity is inherently violent, even though there are passages in both the Old and New Testaments that can be used to justify it. Nor should it. The fact is that, just like the Bible, the Qur’an and hadith (reports of the practices and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) are complex and susceptible to many different, and at times contradictory, enactments, depending upon the questions and concerns that believers bring to it. This doesn’t mean that Islam is simply what any Muslim thinks it is. What it does mean is that Islam is less a fixed set of precepts that exist beyond power and history than a living tradition continually transformed and adapted in different contexts for plural purposes. This suggests that questions about what Islam really is or, for example, whether and to what extent IS and its violence can be considered authentically Islamic, are the wrong questions, and distract from the far more pressing need to understand why, in this time in history, this version of Islam has appeared and is appealing to these particular European Muslims who travel to join them.



But there’s an additional challenge to understanding IS, and that has to do with the sheer horror and brutality of what they are doing to other human beings. No doubt many of us had thought we had read, learned about and seen just about the worst that human beings could do to one another by the end of the 20th-century. Perhaps we even worried we’d become desensitized to human suffering. But then the reports and testimonials of the massacres, the torture, the beheadings, the systematic rapes of young girls, and it’s clear we haven’t seen it all, not yet. These reports make it unusually challenging to figure out why anyone in their right mind would actually make a decision to leave one’s home and family to join what most people regard as a well-organized group of sociopathic sadists suffering from delusions of grandeur. And so there’s been a tendency in the journalistic coverage and commentary to continually suggest that those who have made such a decision were already sociopathic criminals, or were somehow psychologically impaired by mental illness, trauma or brainwashing. This is far easier to believe than to confront the fact that many of the young European Muslims who are traveling to join IS don’t fit any of these categories and are, by most common criteria, quite ‘normal.’



Certainly many of the drivers and trends I’ve discussed that contribute to the appeal of radical Islamist ideas in general are crucial to understanding the lure of IS to some young European Muslims. But there are two additional features that distinguish IS from its primary antecedent and current radical Islamist competitor, al-Qaeda, and that need to be taken into account to try to understand its specific appeal. First, IS doesn’t see itself as fighting for an Islamic state as other radical Islamists do; it claims to already be one. In June 2014, IS declared itself a caliphate (the institution of legitimate Muslim political rule) governing a state located in northern Iraq and Syria, demanding that devout Muslims around the world swear an oath of allegiance to IS and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, its ruler. The second is that IS has devoted a substantial amount of human and financial resources to a propaganda and social media machine that far outstrips anything radical Islamists have done before in sophistication and innovation.



On the one hand, the fact that IS has declared itself a caliphate means that it’s operating out in the open and located in specific territory, rather than working underground and moving constantly. Militarily speaking, that makes it easier to target, although as we’re finding out, not necessarily easier to destroy, for a number of complicated reasons. On the other hand, its adept use of social media extends its reach and seems to make its pathways of recruitment and communication far harder to monitor and disrupt. This is particularly evident when it comes to IS’ soft sympathizers--or those I refer to as armchair Islamists–who are located all over the world, and who only need a smart phone or online access anywhere to do their work. This is the virtual army largely responsible for the mass dissemination of IS propaganda–by, for example, hijacking World Cup hashtags to retweet beheading videos–and they contribute significantly to the normalization of its content.



But these two distinguishing features of IS–sophisticated use of social media and the establishment of a caliphate--also work together, and in powerful ways. Social media has played an enormous role in recruitment, not only of male fighters, but also of women, where Islamist women–or those posing as women online–reach out in potential friendship to offer young Muslim women far away advice and support, and depict life under IS as an Islamic utopia where their full potential as both virtuous Muslim women/wives/mothers and competent professionals will be nurtured and honored. In fact, studies of several of these young women’s testimonials online suggest that they join the jihad in Syria because, in part, they have come to feel like pariahs in the country of their birth and so seek a place where they can feel at home and complete as a Muslim. Such testimonials also suggest that they see themselves as becoming part of a remarkable enterprise: building the only just Islamic state on earth, and re-establishing a caliphate that hasn’t been in existence for nearly 100 years. The alienation, angst and idealism at work here are not all that unusual, and the teenagers who harbor them are far from pathological, as the background of the three “Bethnal Green girls” (a reference to the Bethnal Green Academy all three attended) from East London attest. These girls, who secretly ran away from their families to join IS earlier this year, have been described as smart, successful and popular. If the hard truth is that many of these young European Muslims traveling to join IS are pretty much like other teenagers in their problems, frustrations, idealism and blindnesses, how is it possible to identify and stop them in advance?



Gulan: This sudden rise of jihadism occurred quietly, the jihadist movement worked skillfully and did not repeat their previous mistakes, and they become more professional and specialized, and escaped any undesirable attention. For example, they are not telling the truth to the security services when they are travelling, they pretend that they're going to a wedding, or to see their relatives, and the government does not have the legal instruments to stop them. So how the government would be able to address this threat without curtailing, or restricting the individual rights and freedoms?



Euben: It’s a bad bargain to incrementally curtail our precious civil liberties further and further in the interests of trying to identify and stop these young European Muslims from traveling to Syria. There are two reasons for this. The first is pragmatic. By the time a young person has gotten to the point that they are so desirous of leaving their home country, willing to part with everything they know and presumably, many people they love, perhaps for all time, it’s probably too late. They will find a way to leave, and there will be sympathizers to help them. The fact that many of these young European Muslims are, by many criteria, typical teenagers or youth further suggests that there may be no obvious red flags or markers to help identify them in advance. But even if it was possible to identify them before they left, what can a government do to permanently stop them other than throwing them in jail indefinitely and find ways to ‘force’ them to think differently? And jail, of course, is counterproductive, because it’s a major site and cause of Islamist radicalization. The second is a lesson from history we should have learned by now: when the state expands the reach of its power under the guise of national security, it rarely gives it back.



It’s important to take a step back when trying to answer the question-what is to be done? Because there are prior questions about who can address the problem and when, which is quite different from the question of responsibility, that is, who should address the problem they had a hand in creating. And there are different problems here. First, there’s the problem of the Islamic State itself, whose very emergence may be traced to several responsible parties–the United States and its coalition partners, Saudi Arabia, Iran, successive Iraqi governments, the Asad regime, among others--but who either have no idea how to destroy the monstrosity that’s emerged, or a vested interest in letting the carnage continue. Second, there’s the problem of the hundreds of Muslims traveling to join IS from Belgium, the UK, France, Russia and elsewhere. Here’s where there’s work that can be done, and where Western European countries can do it, not at the level of individuals but in terms of counteracting those conditions within Europe that provide such fertile soil for radical Islamism. As for the untold numbers of sympathizers: there’s not much any government can do about that short of confiscating every iPhone in existence.



Gulan: An extension to the previous question to what extent hiding the truth by those jihadists will lead to the erosion of trust between the citizens and state institutions, especially police, judicial and security services institutions? Do you believe it will endanger the social peace and will have more destructive or at least disruptive consequences on social harmony?



Euben: This is a perfect example of why I say it’s such a bad bargain to further erode the privacy of all citizens in search of a few dozen or even a few hundred alienated youth who will find a way to travel to Syria anyway. It’s important to remember that these are enormously powerful nation-states with vast resources and forces at their disposal–states responsible not only for national security but also for the protection of the freedoms and rights of its citizens. I tend to worry less about the damage that a few hundred youths lying about where they’re traveling does, and more about how warrantless searches, secret wiretaps, arrests without charges, indefinite imprisonment, racial profiling, and granting police and security services greater latitude to rough up ordinary people erodes citizens’ trust in the state institutions charged with protecting them. As we’ve seen from the way prisoners have been terribly mistreated in U.S. prisons in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and Abu Ghraib, Iraq, there’s also an incalculable damage done to the credibility of liberal democratic states–not to mention to the reputation of democracy they claim to embody--when they violate their own laws and principles in pursuit of Muslim enemies. That only plays into the hands of groups like al-Qaeda and IS, who are busily selling to potential recruits a narrative of Western democracies as hypocritical and Islam-hating.



When and if these particular youth want to return to their home countries after serving or fighting for IS–now, that’s a different matter, and a complicated one, because it very much depends on why they’re returning. Are they returning because they’re escaping, disillusioned with the horrors of IS that they’ve witnessed first-hand, or are they coming home to do more of its brutal work?