Faced with the hypothesis that there is a continuum between Moslem religious identity and the risk of radicalization, what do the French children of Moslem immigrants think? The working-class suburbs, the discontent in the public housing projects there and the effects of globalization are said to constitute a “hotbed” of potential radicals, who, with their protean and multifactorial psychic vulnerability, would see radicalization as a solution for internal problems (Guénoun, 2016). How does this look from the point of view of the clinician working with adolescents? How can this be read in a way that is at once psychoanalytical, anthropological and sociological?
The debate about the place that should be given to religious aspect of jihadism has been going on for a few years not only in the research world but also in the media. The paradigmatic hypotheses of G. Kepel and O. Roy are opposed, with the first emphasizing the “radicalization of Islam” and the second the “Islamicization of radicalness” (Kepel, 2015; Roy, Seniguer, 2015). According to Kepel, to understand jihadism, it is necessary to consider the religious ideology that guides “God’s madmen.” Roy, on the other hand, speaks of “nihilism” and considers terrorism to be a revolt, a misguided and dangerous one, but a revolt nevertheless. It is a revolt by the “damned of the Earth”, to borrow Fanon’s expression, crying out against their marginalization from French society. A central question in this ideological standoff is whether the religious is an inevitable part of the analysis of radical Islamism and jihadism, or just a false consciousness expressing a social and identity malaise that, at other times in history, could have been expressed through other protest ideologies…