Fabien Truong approaches religious commitments by focusing on “Islam from below” and the tinkering that characterizes it in the shadow (and at a distance) from radicalization trajectories. In this way, he makes a bet to illuminate the extraordinary through the ordinary.
Fabien Truong’s book deals with the involvement of “bad boys” in the Muslim religion (p. 24). This proposal is situated at the confluence between an ethnography of the worlds of the suburbs, and a pressing and contradictory social and political demand for intelligibility of the terrorist phenomenon in France. It aims to account for the social thickness of a recurring moral panic: the combination of the future of “youth in the cities” with the “Muslim problem”.
Fabien Truong mobilizes a rich and heterogeneous material (interviews, discussions, observations) collected according to various methods: relationships forged while he was teaching at the high school in Seine-Saint-Denis between 2005 and 201 (Tarik, Radouane) and since 2015, during regular stays in Grigny (Adama, Hassan, Marley). The sample (six individuals belonging to distinct generational groups, between 25 and 40 years old) favors the longitudinal ethnographic exploration of biographical trajectories to the detriment of exhaustiveness. In his analysis, the author relies on the observation of homologies between the profiles of individuals engaged in delinquent activities and those of “homegrown terrorists”: from immigrant families of Muslim culture, residence in relegated neighborhoods, delinquent careers (petty and medium delinquency), late investment in religion (p. 19). Fabien Truong unfolds his investigation along two analytical threads: the religious investments of the “bad boys”, on the one hand; and an attempt to reconstruct the biographical trajectory of Amédy Coulibaly, author of the murder of a municipal policewoman in Montrouge and the attack on the Hyper Casher, on January 8 and 9, 2015, on the other. This mise en abyme aims to “(..) connect the news item to the social fact, the minority fact to the majority fact, the ordinary trajectories and the extraordinary trajectories” (p. 18).
Fabien Truong invites us to consider the social constraints that weigh, to varying degrees, on biographical trajectories. He emphasizes the institutions, relationships and injunctions that condition daily life, the relationship to the world and the political socialization of “bad boys” (p. 55). The author focuses on the description of moral economies based, among other things, on loyalty, which here involves “(…) fidelity to one’s first commitments and (a) respect for the rules of honorability and probity” (p. 42). Fabien Truong addresses a specific space, “the second zone”, at the confluence of delinquency and terrorism, which designates a space of representations, relationships and acculturation to illegality. Its members feel a strong sense of injustice, maintain a specific relationship to prison, which has become routine, and to death, which has become commonplace.
A sociology of Islam “from below”
The author understands Islam as an “ordinary social fact”. From this perspective, the Muslim religion constitutes a plastic and heterogeneous resource whose appropriations (about-face, spectacle of rupture, conversion, reconversion) are indexed on social relations and subject to the effects of time. In this regard, Fabien Truong’s analysis confirms the work on the social construction of an “Islam from below” where “religious bricolages” are deployed, made of deviations and contradictions with the norm. Religion, understood according to modalities acquired in other universes (school), takes the form that the actors give it. It accompanies and gives meaning to biographical bifurcations: the boys associate leaving business with “entering religion”. It is not, either, a total social fact. On the contrary, the Muslim religion here merges with a set of limited practices and an ethic that does not contradict a morality and loyalties to which they continue to subscribe. The author seizes on the “banality of the social” that emanates from ordinary trajectories to approach the journey of Amédy Coulibaly. To this end, he reconsiders the commitment to extremist violence through the prism of social interactions forged between school, the neighborhood, the “second zone” and prison. Amédy, whom he names thus on purpose, is not an asocial being. He inserts himself into an interlacing of social relations where, while condemning his actions, those who have known him recognize qualities that make sense in local sociability.
Questions of radicalization
Fabien Truong invests the dispute over the notion of radicalization. Radicalization designates “the progressive and evolving adoption of a rigid thought, absolute and non-negotiable truth, whose logic structures the vision of the world of the actors, who use to make it heard a repertoire of violent action, most often within clandestine, formalized or virtual structures, which isolate them from ordinary social referents and send them back a grandiose projection of themselves”. This notion relates to that of homegrown terroristsborn or raised in Western countries. The notion of radicalization has become, in political and media discourse, the social reason for the deviances attributed to the practice of Islam. Fabien Truong displays his skepticism with regard to the routine uses of the notion. He denounces the confusion between practices, such as departures for Syria, which he compares to running away, on the one hand, and “home-grown terrorists” on the other; objects (Salafism, jihadism) and processes. The author then rejects the implicitness of the “individual drift described in stories of the gradual shift of fragile individuals.” Fabien Truong finally tackles the debates that agitate the “neo-Islamologists”: he judges the explanation by ideology proposed by Gilles Kepel to be tautological and discusses Olivier Roy’s explanation by nihilism, because it relegates the convictions and aspirations of the actors to the background.
The challenges of access to the land
Fabien Truong’s approach draws its interest from the use of the ethnographic method to approach the banality of the appropriations of the Muslim religion. Contrary to analyses that consider radicalization processes through the prism of the shift, the author insists on the ordinariness of limited and provisional moral economies. However, the analytical project that consists of articulating ordinary and extraordinary trajectories does not fully achieve its goal: the two analytical threads remain distinct and distant for reasons related to the nature of the object and the difficulties of accessing the material. While the ethnographic ambition bears fruit in the stories of Radouane and Tarik, whom the author has known for a long time, it proves, in comparison, less fruitful in the approach of the actors more recently encountered in Grigny and the reconstruction of Amédy Coulibaly’s trajectory. The examination of the radicalization processes (departures to Syria and “home-grown terrorists”), based mainly on secondary sources, seems to stumble on the incomplete nature of the material, linked to the difficulty of accessing the actors.
Following on from this observation, we would like to question the notion of “bad boys”, which is not always clear whether it deals with engagement in delinquent activities or whether it takes up a label that encompasses “youth from the estates”: how can we consider within the same continuum the positions of Hassan, Radouane, whose delinquent career is limited and entirely focused on satisfying superfluous needs, and that of Marley, who has been to prison? In short, the reasons that govern the development of the sample deserve to be further explained in the same way as the modalities of religious socialization. Apart from the passages on the exchanges of the Koran, the author only allusively addresses the institutions and figures that structure the offer of a return to religion. However, religious investments cannot elude this central dimension of “tinkering” that delimits the available stories.