Chapter 5 Ethnic Colonies

Europe’s historic understanding of Islam—Muslim populations, present and future—Rejuvenation of run-down neighborhoods—Architecture and segregation—Lawless zones—Segregation or self segregation?—Spaces of sharia—Violence, crime, and rioting—The banlieue riots and Islam—Tribalism, ideology, and escalation

Had Europeans realized, when immigration from Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, and elsewhere began in the 1950s and 1960s, that there would be thousands of mosques across Europe half a century later, they would never have permitted it. European tolerance of other cultures was sincere, particularly among elites, but not even they anticipated that such tolerance would mean the establishment, entrenchment, and steady spread of a foreign religion on European soil. In exchange for minor economic returns of extremely short duration, Europe replanted the seeds of a threat that had taken centuries of patience and violence to overcome—interreligious discord, both domestic and international.

Europe’s historic understanding of Islam

It can fairly be said that, until its steep military decline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Islam was the arch-enemy of European civilization. For virtually all of Europe’s history since the Dark Ages it had been a mortal threat. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, militarized Islam conquered half of the fragmented Roman Empire. “It very nearly destroyed us,” wrote Hilaire Belloc in 1938. At the time, Belloc thought it dangerous that Westerners

have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past…It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.

Belloc’s language was blunt even for the time. He referred to Western culture as “white civilization.” He was an especially ardent defender of the Crusades, which he called the “one supreme attempt to relieve that [Islamic] pressure upon the Christian West.” But his general thoughts on Islam were only those of most Europeans in most eras.

According to the French historian Henri Pirenne, the Islamic conquests created Europe—at least Europe as it has existed since the end of the Roman Empire. Unlike the invasions of Rome by Germanic barbarians in the first centuries after Christ, which were easily absorbed into existing institutions, the Islamic invasions changed everything. Islam’s advance broke the ancient world because it broke the unity of the Mediterranean. Cut off from the Christian capital (and the emperor’s fleet) at Constantinople, Europeans abandoned the Mediterranean to Muslim navies and Saracen pirates. “The West was bottled up and forced to live by its own means, in a vacuum,” Pirenne wrote. “For the first time ever, the center of life was pushed back from the Mediterranean, towards the north.” Europe’s heart moved away from its southern littoral to somewhere between the Seine and the Rhine. “Now on the coasts of Mare Nostrum” Pirenne wrote, “stretched two different and hostile civilizations.”

There have always been European exceptions to the prevailing distrust of Islam. Goethe and Carlyle, both admirers of Muslim civilization, were inclined to stress its achievements. This line of thinking, a minority one in past generations, is a majority one in our own, to the extent that one often encounters the suggestion that Europe ought to be grateful for Islam’s historic hostility. Bassam Tibi, Pirenne’s most tendentious reader in the present generation, writes: “Without the challenge of Islam, the Christian West of Charlemagne would never have existed. What Pirenne means is this: Both powers—Europe as the West and Islam as a civilization—arose together historically and constitute a challenge for one another.” This will not be the last time we see the word challenge used to mean problem, although the euphemisms vary. The Cambridge anthropologist Frank Goody, for instance, sees the centuries of hostility less as a series of battles than as a series of “encounters.” He is as interested in Muslim influence on European pharmacology and troubadour poetry, in the Muslim custodianship of many works of Greek philosophy through the Dark Ages, as he is in the conquest and bloodshed.

These Muslim achievements were real, and are increasingly well documented. But Europeans, up until the present generation, have not seen Islamic civilization as particularly impressive. Typical was the French polymath Ernest Renan, who wrote in 1883:

Those liberals who defend Islam do not know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind has ever borne. In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy, because it could not stop it. It could not stop it because it was as yet disorganized, and poorly armed for terror.…But as soon as Islam had a mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path. Religious terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong. Let us not give it credit for what it was merely unable to suppress.

Both Renan and Belloc complained of complacency among their contemporaries. That is nothing new. But neither of them lived at a time of mass Muslim immigration. It will surely puzzle future generations why Europeans did not worry more about the religion of those guest workers who began arriving from South Asia, North Africa, and Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s. Why, between World War II and September 11, 2001, did Europeans seem unanimously to embrace Tibi and Goody’s tolerant (or Panglossian) view of Islam rather than Belloc and Renan’s intolerant (or bigoted) one?

Part of the answer is that the European masses did come to accept the views of European opinion leaders. The wounds of racism and fascism were still open, and popular misgivings about Islam were easily quashed by official doctrine and intellectual fashion. For a few decades, Europeans felt they had more to fear from native, secular fanaticism than from foreign, religious fanaticism. And they mistook the Cold War, in which political conflicts tended to revolve around the economic and materialistic ideologies of the industrial age, for the permanent order of things.

This mistake should not surprise Americans. It certainly did not occur to anyone in the United States in the 1970s that importing migrant farm labor from Mexico might strengthen the hand of traditional Roman Catholicism (as well it might have, considering the political battles over feminism, liberalized abortion rights, and reform of other traditional folkways in the years of maximum immigration). Religion was simply not on anyone’s list of political fears at the time. It was scarcely on anyone’s list of identities. That America’s immigrants proved more compatible with the majority culture than Europe’s did is often taken by Americans as a proof of either a superior economy or a superior tolerance. Maybe, but it also reflects that America drew its manual workers from Latin American Catholicism, while Europe drew most of its bottom-rung labor from Mediterranean Islam. Europe’s failure and America’s success are in part an accident of geography.

They are also an accident of history. In the 1950s, Arab nationalism, of the sort practiced by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the Ba’athist leaders of Syria and Iraq, was the main political force coming out of the Muslim world. It was driven largely by people who wanted to break theology’s stranglehold on Muslim societies. Even if Arab nationalism was a threat, a young man ready to leave his nation to work in a mill in Belgium was unlikely to embody it. Europe’s Arab and other Muslim newcomers could be assumed to be the most secular and modern of their countrymen, with a vocation to act as Europeans. Indeed, photos of groups of Moroccans and Turks newly arrived on Rotterdam’s docks or in Rhineland train stations show clean-shaven men in conservative jackets and ties.

But right around the time immigrants began arriving in Europe en masse, a global resurgence of political Islam was beginning. It is now in full swing. Islam once again ranks high among the problems Europeans are most worried about. In 2004, France’s National Consulting Committee on Human Rights (CNCDH) asked people’s basic feelings about major religions. More than half of respondents (52 percent) had a “positive” view of Christianity, versus 13 percent who were “negative.” Europeans were 30 percent positive and 20 percent negative about Judaism. About Islam, they were 23 percent positive and 66 percent negative. In Germany, a 2007 poll asked, “When you hear the word ‘Islam,’ what do you think of?” Ninety-three percent said, “oppression of women,” 83 percent “terrorism,” and 82 percent “radicalism.” The first European generations in 1,300 years that did not see Islam as a threat turned out to be the last ones.

Muslim populations, present and future

While political Islam grew abroad, another problem was growing inside Europe itself. The new, mostly Muslim immigration was less manageable and less soluble than any that had come before it. This was partly a matter of size. The postwar waves of immigration were larger by orders of magnitude than the old ones. By the turn of the century, fully a sixth (16.9 percent) of French residents under eighteen had immigrant parents, and that was true of 40 percent of children in Paris. There were dozens of cities and towns where the majority of children had parents born abroad. But the immigrants were not only more numerous, they were also more foreign. France, for instance, had had enclaves of Italians, Spaniards, and Poles for much of the twentieth century, but there is a difference between immigrants who speak cognate languages and worship in local churches, and those starting from cultural scratch.

France’s most heavily immigrant places a generation ago were mining communes in the Moselle, heavily inhabited by Italians. In Behren-lès-Forbach in 1968, for instance, 72 percent of young people had immigrant parents; 43 percent were Italian. Behren-lès-Forbach remains heavily immigrant (although thirty-five communes have passed it in concentration), but today only 7 percent of the kids have Italian parents; 41 percent have North African ones. This process is going on all over the country. France’s population of sub-Saharan African immigrants rose by 45 percent between 1999 and 2004. In the department of Seine Saint-Denis, the heavily North and West African area where the riots of 2005 began, the number of children of French-born parents has fallen by 41 percent, while the number of children of immigrants increased two and a half times. Many parts of the country are marked by what the demographer Michelle Tribalat calls a “process of substitution.”

There are about 20 million Muslims on the continent, if you count the millions of native Muslims in the Balkans. As noted earlier, there are around 5 million Muslims in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain. Pakistanis and Bengalis predominate in England, Arabs in France, Belgium, and Spain, and Turks in Germany; but Islam in all Western European countries is to some extent a mix of people from all over the Islamic world. The heavy concentration of these populations has the potential to multiply their influence. A million Muslims now live in London, where they make up an eighth of the population. In Amsterdam, Muslims account for more than a third of religious believers, outnumbering Catholics, as well as all the Protestant orders combined.

Muslims now either dominate or vie for domination of certain important European cities. A partial list of them would include Amsterdam and Rotterdam in Holland; Strasbourg and Marseille (and many of the Paris suburbs) in France; Duisburg, Cologne, and the Berlin neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln in Germany; and Blackburn, Bradford, Dewsbury Leicester, East London, and the periphery of Manchester in England. Such places may, as immigration continues and the voting power and political savvy of the Muslims already there increases, take on an increasingly Muslim character.

Most of Europe’s leaders, in the first years of this century, embraced the view laid out (and disputed) in chapter 2 that Europe “needs” immigration for economic reasons. If this were true, then the demographic pressure of Islam on Europe is only in its very earliest stages—because the economically backward, overcrowded lands of Islam are Europe’s nearest neighbors across the Mediterranean. The U.S. National Intelligence Council expects the Muslim population of Europe to double, continent-wide, by 2025.

Immigration is not the only thing causing the weight of Islam in Europe to grow. The gap in fertility between immigrants and natives is at its widest for Muslim immigrants. Religion, or religiosity, is the strongest predictor of fertility. Looking at Britain, the sociologist Eric Kaufmann found that Caribbean and Eastern European immigrants rapidly picked up the ambient secularism (and low birthrates) of British society, but that there was virtually no change at all in the religiosity (and fecundity) of Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslims between the first and second generations. In Birmingham, Pakistanis made up 7.1 percent of the population in 1991, a figure that will nearly triple, to 21 percent, by 2026. Britain’s Barrow Cadbury Trust, which gathered the data, noted that “this increase is likely to be driven by existing demographics of Birmingham’s youthful Pakistani population, rather than migration.”

Austria is a good country in which to study the variance in population growth between natives and newcomers. Its immigration has been heavily non-European and it is one of the few countries that includes religion in its census. There, the total fertility rate of Catholics is 1.32 children per woman. It is 1.21 for Protestants and 0.86 for the nonreligious. The total fertility rate for Muslims is 2.34. This divergence may sound unspectacular—after all, American women had higher total fertility rates than that as recently as the baby boom—but the effects of such a divergence increase rapidly. According to four demographers from the Vienna Institute of Demography, Islam could be the majority religion among Austrians under fifteen by midcentury; it is probable that Austria as a whole, which was 90 percent Catholic in the twentieth century, will be under 50 percent Catholic by the middle of the twenty-first.

In Belgium, the relatively well-established Moroccan-Belgian community has a birthrate two and a half times higher than the native Belgian one. In Brussels, where a quarter of the residents are foreign citizens and more than half the children (57 percent) born in 2006 were born to Muslims, the seven most common given boys’ names were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine, and Hamza.

Rejuvenation of run-down neighborhoods

One of the things that immigrants are supposed to do, in the popular mythology of immigration, is to “regenerate” or “bring new life to” areas that have lost their magic for natives. That is exactly what has happened in many cases across Europe, even if natives have sometimes been slow to admit it. The Turks who came in droves to the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg were often accused of turning it into a ghetto, but it would be more accurate to say that they rescued it from being one. The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 had transformed Kreuzberg into an urban cloaca in the shadow of East German sharpshooters. The working class moved out. A grotesque tower block full of welfare flats went up in 1974. “Commuters came no more,” as a display in the Kreuzberg Museum bluntly puts it. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hippies and Turks moved into this neighborhood’s rotting flats for the same reason: cheap rent. The hippies brought rock music, panhandling, skid-row alcoholism, prostitution, drugs, and city-sponsored coin-operated hypodermic-needle-dispensing machines. The Turks brought (along with their warehouse mosques) families, sewing circles, sweet shops, sports clubs, and streets that, while decidedly rough, grew safer by the year. The parents among them even organized groups to collect discarded drug paraphernalia from the streets.

In Turin, the literary scholar and novelist Younis Tawfik turned a crummy bathhouse, built in 1958 for migrants from the Italian south and abandoned for more than a decade, into the beautiful Centro culturale Italo-arabo, with a hammam (or Turkish bath), a restaurant, and an interfaith library. In the Rhineland port of Duisburg, after industrial jobs disappeared and the central city atrophied, immigrants preserved the life of working-class neighborhoods such as Marxloh and Wanheimerort. When they gathered the funding to build the largest mosque in Germany, which opened at the end of 2008, they devoted a substantial part of it to a community center open to all faiths. In London, the inviting, restaurant-filled neighborhoods around White-chapel and Bethnal Green (dominated by Bengalis) were in places so tightly entangled with the neighborhoods around Liverpool Street (dominated by headquarters of high finance) that it was hard to tell where one left off and the other picked up.

This was the picture of immigration that European elites, who increasingly inhabited their countries as international tourists à l’intérieur, saw most often. It was misleading. Most Muslims lived apart, in places that were terra incognita to the vast majority of Europeans. In conditions of isolation, many Muslim neighborhoods turned into ghettoes, with customs, rules, and institutions of their own. It was not always easy to tell whether it was the natives who desired this or the immigrants themselves. But the sense that the Muslim part of Europe’s immigrant population was shearing off and forming a parallel society has been at the heart of European worries about Islam since well before September 11, 2001. To understand European unease about these parallel societies, it is necessary to make a detour into urban planning and segregation.

Architecture and segregation

In the 1950s and 1960s, vast housing projects were built for low-income earners in most European countries, just as they were in the United States, and with the same goal: to remove the poor from the filth and stale air of the slums. There was a price for this “progress,” and it was too high. The new grands ensembles, as they were called in France, were without variety. They were often isolated from job markets. And while organic neighborhoods can be woven into rich communities, vast, soulless landscapes of residence pods usually cannot be. Such housing projects were a European idea. It was the Swiss planner Le Corbusier who inspired the tracts of HLMs (habitations à loyer modéré) that ring Paris and other European cities. His theory was that human beings are pretty much like plants—aside from nourishment, what they mostly need is sunlight and air. In the United States, it is now acknowledged that high-rise housing projects built according to the Corbusier philosophy—the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, to name two of the most notorious—were traps of violence and poverty for the mostly black people who got stuck there. As long as Europe had a large industrial proletariat—regulated by inherited political habits and disciplined by employment—the consequences of such architecture were not as catastrophic there as they were in the United States. But people hated these places, and as the European economy boomed in the postwar years, they made this hatred plain by moving out. At that point, architecture began to interact with migration in unforeseen ways.

The most dramatic transformations came in Sweden, possibly because it was there that the subsidized housing stock increased most dramatically. Facing a shortage of housing units in the early 1960s, the government undertook an ambitious plan to build a million of them—this in a country of only 7 million people. It came to be known as the Million Program. The apartments that resulted compare well with other European subsidized housing, but Swedish culture is not built around apartments, and native Swedes were unwilling to stay in them once they could afford their own houses. Over the decades, the perfectly serviceable apartments of the Million Program emptied out. When immigrants began arriving en masse—and particularly when Kurds, Bosnians, and Somalis fleeing simultaneous wars in the early 1990s overwhelmed the country’s refugee system—there was an obvious place to stick them.

Consider Bergsjön, a planned community outside of Gothenburg, which, with its Volvo plant and some of the world’s biggest shipyards, used to be an industrial powerhouse. Bergsjön was built between 1967 and 1972 to reward the city’s workers. Only a tram ride away from Gothenburg’s factories, it resembles the places Swedes of all classes retreat to in midsummer—quiet, pristine, speckled with lakes, and smelling of evergreen trees. The central “campus” of the housing project has no cars. Its 14,500 people live in apartments set on grassy hills within a lasso-shaped ring road.

But in the 1980s and the 1990s, Sweden’s shipyards collapsed. The Swedish industrial workers Bergsjön was planned for no longer live there. By 2006 it was inhabited by immigrants of a hundred nationalities, many of them refugees. Seventy percent of the residents were either born abroad or had parents who were. The same goes for 93 percent of the schoolchildren. You can see Somali women walking the paths in hijabs and long wraps, and graffiti reading “Bosna i Hercegovina 4-Ever.”

Lacking much indoor space and places where lots of noise can be made, and hard to keep under surveillance by responsible adults, housing projects have always been bad environments for raising children. Awkward even for the working-class people for whom they were designed, they are even less well suited to immigrants, with their vast families and their astronomical unemployment rates. Neighborhoods built to keep Swedish families of the 1960s close to nature served four decades later to keep the foreign-born unemployed far from the job market. Assar Lindbeck, the dean of Sweden’s welfare-state economists, pointed out that to send newcomers to areas where there were empty apartments meant sending them to places that were “by definition in an area of high unemployment.”

As of 2006, 40 percent of the families in Bergsjön were on welfare outright, and many of the rest collect various equivalents of welfare that differ only in name. Far below half the population is employed. The mayor of Gothenburg declared earlier this decade, “The prospects of turning Bergsjön into a normal Swedish neighborhood are almost nil.” And there are neighborhoods like it all over Sweden—the Stockholm suburbs of Rinkeby and Tensta, hundreds of miles to the northeast, are little different. Immigrants and their children make up 85 percent of residents in both places, with dependence at levels comparable to those in Bergsjön. In Tensta, for instance, a fifth of the women in their late forties collect disability benefits. So fully have immigrants become associated with the Million Program that the Gringo, the Stockholm immigrant newspaper mentioned in the last chapter, coined the term miljonsvenskar, or “Million Swedes,” to describe them.

This substitution of immigrant populations for working-class ones was replicated in almost every European country. One could say of public housing and immigrants what the American movie Field of Dreams said of ballparks and ballplayers: “Build it and they will come.” France, too, began to warehouse immigrants in the places against which its own citizens had voted with their feet. More than half of the country’s North Africans live in HLMs today, versus only a sixth (17.6 percent) of French natives. The movement of old residents away from HLMs has accelerated over the years. The whites who could not afford to leave have been the mainstay of right-wing parties, including Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. In industrial Turin, too, state-financed apartments built in the 1960s to accommodate short-term factory immigrants from Sicily were by the turn of the century heavily North African. The notorious high-rises of De Bijlmer in southeastern Amsterdam were completed only in 1975, but were soon heavily immigrant. Large parts of the Bijlmer projects have already been demolished and much of the rest is under reconstruction.

Lawless zones

On top of that, Europe’s housing projects, like those in the United States, were perfectly fitted to the needs of criminals and hoodlums. Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold a dozen families (or several dozen, if the building were high enough) for ransom. Anyone who could control the long access roads could block traffic in and out of the projects and harass (and even repel) the police. On several occasions in the summer of 2004, transit authorities stopped bus traffic to Tensta because of attacks on passengers. Firemen and emergency medical technicians were attacked in the suburbs of Malmö. In France, areas where the police would not go—more from reluctance to provoke unrest than from fear or indifference—were plentiful at the turn of the century. They came to be known as zones de non-droit, or “lawless zones.” Local youths set up informal neighborhood-watch-groups-in-reverse, not to warn police of active criminals but to warn criminals of approaching police.

Pierre Cardo, the popular longtime mayor of Chanteloup-les-Vignes, twenty miles west of Paris, referred to much of the infrastructure of his city as architecture criminogène, or crime-generating architecture. Chanteloup was one of the most spectacular failures in the history of French state planning. Since it sits in the middle of rich gypsum deposits and was near several automobile plants, plans were drawn up in 1966 to expand a pretty rural village of 2,000 into a bedroom community of 20,000 overnight. When it was half built, the investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné revealed that Chanteloup’s expansion rested on one of the largest kickback schemes (it came to be known as the Aranda affair) in French postwar history. Construction was halted by court order. The developers, annoyed, covered up the utility and water grids that were already built and destroyed the records of where they could be found. In the early 1970s, president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing opened the unwanted apartments to immigrants. The three-, four-, and five-story HLMs that made up two-thirds of the housing in Chanteloup were named after poets and educators, but everyone knew them by more gladiatorial sobriquets the local kids had given them, like “the Bestiary” and “the Hippodrome.”

By 1995, two-thirds of Chanteloup’s residents were of foreign origin. That year, director Matthieu Kassovitz released La Haine (“Hatred”), a drama of suburban violence and police brutality filmed in Chanteloup. It was considered such a grittily realistic exposé of the lives of trapped French teenagers that then prime minister Alain Juppé ordered his entire cabinet to see it. Today, certain of its details appear quaint to the point of sentimentality. Its depiction of a Jewish and a North African teenager chumming it up together as members of the same street gang is particularly implausible in today’s suburban France. In the days before La Haine, youths would wade across the locks that separate Chanteloup from the nearby town of Andrésy to attack rival gangs with iron bars and baseball bats. (A bemusing aspect of rough neighborhoods in Europe is the prevalence of baseball bats in countries where baseball is not played.)

A decade later, the violence of Chanteloup had become more ambitious and audacious still, and had broken out of the confines of the housing development. Marauding gangs from Chanteloup often wreaked havoc at La Défense, on the edge of Paris, and Cergy Pontoise, several train stops away. In 2006, when a twenty-four-year-old from the town was shot dead after taking a hostage during the armed robbery of a Paris outlet of the Gap, sixty hooded and armed youths launched a coordinated assault on Chanteloup’s police station. Next to that, La Haine looked naive. It bore the same relationship to the violence of twenty-first-century France that West Side Story had to American riots in the late 1960s.

Segregation or self-segregation?

In 2005, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, warned that Britain was “sleepwalking its way toward segregation.” Isolation was particularly severe among ethnic Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Phillips noted that the number of Britons of Pakistani descent living in outright “ghettos”—places where at least two-thirds of the residents belonged to a specific ethnic group—had tripled in the course of the 1990s. In certain British cities, such as Bradford and Leicester, almost 15 percent of those surveyed were in ghettos, a figure roughly comparable to that of blacks in Miami and Chicago, neither of which is considered a model city for race relations.

“Some minorities are moving into middle-class, less ethnically concentrated areas,” Phillips said, “but what is left behind is hardening in its separateness.” Some scoffed at Phillips’s pessimism. London mayor Ken Livingstone claimed that British society was becoming less segregated, since the number of “mixed neighbourhoods” had risen from 864 to 1,070 in the course of the 1990s. He also claimed that “inter-ethnic couples and children of mixed ethnic parentage have risen 20 percent in 10 years.” But the research Livingstone cited, sponsored by a multiculturalist lobby, did not so much disprove segregation as define it away. Its argument was that, since “thousands of areas that are 95% White are not called segregated,” calling a neighborhood segregated just because very few whites lived there was a “colour-laden value on which many other discriminatory claims are made.” This is wrong. A neighborhood with no native English people can be diverse, but it cannot be integrated—assuming that it is, in fact, England into which the study’s authors wish the immigrants to integrate.

Nothing did more to radicalize native opinion about immigration than this manner of addressing it—using statistics generated more by ideology than by social science to bully people into disbelieving what they were seeing with their own eyes. If you define your terms so that any neighborhood with a large number of minorities in it can be called “mixed,” then any increase in minority population (or immigration) will result in an increase in mixed neighborhoods, which can be presented as a boon for social harmony, no matter whether the newcomers integrate or not. So it was in Britain. Those vaunted mixed marriages were mostly among immigrants, not between young people descended from immigrants and young people descended from natives, the study’s authors acknowledged. “White Christians,” as English people of English descent were described, tended not to intermarry.

British immigrants often complained that they never met native Europeans. A British government report, issued after days of violent clashes between whites and Asians in several northern cities in 2001, quoted one Briton of Pakistani descent as saying, “When I leave this meeting with you I will go home and not see another white face until I come back here next week.” But the increasingly voluble complaints of many immigrants that they were being systematically excluded from European life were not always heard, and were even dismissed as unreasonable. Europeans tended to meet immigrants as retail or restaurant or other service employees—all jobs in which complaisance can be purchased even where it is not sincerely felt. How can you say you’re excluded, Europeans wondered, when I’m always saying how delicious your baklava is?

The Europeans most alarmed at the isolation of immigrants were those who, like Phillips, had worked hardest for racial harmony. Whose fault was this isolation? Was it imposed or chosen? Was it segregation or self-segregation? Were the natives racist and cold? Or were the newcomers idle and violent?

There was certainly measurable discrimination in the European job and housing markets, although it was mild alongside what one might have found in the United States four decades ago. Studies in Sweden found that Swedish-raised children adopted from other lands, who often look different, did worse when looking for jobs than similarly situated ethnic Swedes, and that apartments “open” for a Swede were somehow “taken” when non-Europeans showed up. Laws mandating that the résumés of job candidates be made color-blind were proposed in several European countries, including in France in the weeks after Nicolas Sarkozy’s election in 2007. Studies similar to the Swedish ones had been carried out in France—this time involving résumés with Muslim-sounding surnames—and they seemed to show a particular reluctance to hire, or rent to, Muslims. And while immigrants’ poor career prospects might be evidence of prejudice, success need not be evidence of its absence. The children of Muslim immigrants often repeat the experience of Jewish Americans in the industrial age, who made an end run around prejudice by focusing on professional credentialing. From Arab cab drivers and Kurdish kebab vendors, one hears a lot of My son the doctor and My daughter the attorney. Arabs are now heavily represented in French medical and law schools, and some of the most prominent doctors in the country are children of immigrants.

Which side was held to blame for segregation may have mattered morally, but it did not matter that much practically. A vicious circle was at work. Noting the way third-generation minorities in Germany were retreating into their own “parallel worlds,” the journalist Giovanni di Lorenzo wrote: “A lack of job qualifications is readily excused by alleged discrimination on the part of Germans—and the result is a growing aggressiveness from, say, young Turks, which then leads to rejection in fact.” Once minority communities harden into ethnic islands, the process is hard to reverse, even if the majority population has the will and the money to do so (which it seldom does). There is an excellent distinction made in French public policy discussions between mixité (people of different hues and religions living alongside each other) and genuine sociabilité (deeper contacts, even intimacy, between people of different cultures). The former is easy enough to produce, but how to get the latter is a mystery. When a neighborhood in eastern Helsinki, one of the European capitals least touched by immigration, filled up with so many Somalis that it got the nickname “Mogadishu Avenue,” city government proposed high-income housing for the area. But even the presence of rich people did little to break the isolation and unemployment of the Somalis. It replaced segregation between neighborhoods with segregation within neighborhoods. Americans learned the idleness of this exercise in the later stages of desegregation—the stage marked by such fruitlessly divisive programs as forced busing of high-school students.

Americans seeking to understand the impasse in Europe’s integration of its ethnic minorities, particularly its Muslim ones, should look at their own history of race relations as well as their own history of immigration. American immigration has involved—and still does—a fairly predictable process of economic advancement and social assimilation, in which old-country customs gradually disappear. Differences between natives and the children of immigrants are often superficial and situational, even when they appear to be profound and cultural. There is occasional friction because there is much contact. The American race problem, on the other hand, grew out of lack of contact between blacks and whites. The position of Latino immigrants in the United States has nothing in common with it. The position of Muslims in Europe has more in common with the American race problem, as we will discuss later.

The segregation of Europe’s neighborhoods is not merely a consequence of migration patterns, of poverty meeting plenty, of the Third World meeting the First. The difficulties presented to Europe by its first generation of mass migrants were actually negligible compared to those presented to the United States by the violent and crime-prone Irish who arrived in the nineteenth century. The difficulties presented by Europe to its migrants, in the form of prejudice, were also small, relative to those the nineteenth-century newcomers to America faced. Europe’s problems came later. The European-born children of the guest workers and refugees wound up viewed with considerably more suspicion than their parents, who had arrived as illiterate villagers from eastern Anatolia, say, or the Atlas Mountains. Why was this so?

In the summer of 2006, just months after the nationwide riots in France, a European minister gave a despairing off-the-record diagnosis to a congress of migration experts meeting in Italy. He had spoken of the prospects for integration with one of his counterparts from a country with a somewhat longer history of mass immigration. “He was very pessimistic,” the minister said of his colleague. “His experience with difficult neighborhoods is that the second generation is worse than the first generation and the third is worse than the second.” If Italy did not yet face these second-generation problems, the minister worried, it was because its second generation was as yet only in grade school. If Italy was like other European countries, it would evolve in the opposite direction from the American model. As the generations passed, the children of immigrants would found more, not fewer, foreign establishments; develop more, not fewer, separatist sentiments; and demand more, not fewer, concessions from the country at large. That is where Islam came in.

Spaces of sharia

The problem of parallel societies was more deep-seated in Muslim than in other communities that arose from immigration. In 2004, France’s Renseignements Généraux, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, surveyed several hundred neighborhoods with large Muslim populations and found half of them ghettoized on religious lines. Whether Islam was the cause of this separation or just an extremely serious complicating factor, Europeans—including the Muslims among them—had begun to think of Islam as the religion of the continent’s ghettos.

Even before September 11, 2001, Islam’s pretensions to global domination made European television news on many nights. So many European natives looked at segregation not as a fate endured by immigrants but as a project hatched by them. As soon as it became obvious that certain immigrants proposed to establish foreign cultures on European lands, immigration—and Muslim immigration a fortiori—appeared in a different light. It appeared in the light of a project to claim territory. The establishment of Muslim institutions was worrisome, no matter how innocent their ends or how peaceful their ethos. In 2005, the English journalist Rod Liddle saw the first outlines of a Muslim state in Europe. He wrote that there was already “a string of towns and cities, from Rennes in the south, through Lille, Brussels, Antwerp, Zeebrugge, Rotterdam, Bremen to Aarhus in Denmark in the far north, where the Muslim population approaches or exceeds 20 per cent (and in some cases constitutes a majority).”

It was not just that young Muslims were assimilating too slowly into European culture as the generations passed. It was that they were dis-assimilating. In 2002, an imam in Roubaix, France, refused to meet Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille and the former minister of labor, in his neighborhood, saying that it was Muslim territory and that it would be haram (unclean) to welcome her there. In Aubervilliers, a suburb just north of the Paris périphérique that has become so heavily North African and so devoutly Muslim that many children take Fridays off from school to prepare for prayers, the city council voted to offer swimming hours at public pools segregated by sex, for fear of offending Muslim women’s modesty. In the Norman city of Dreux, and also in Denmark, there were protests over the serving of non-halal meat in school cafeterias. It was alarming how quickly the culture of a place such as Rosengård, a Swedish housing estate just outside of Malmö, could diverge from that of the mainstream. Ninety percent of the women went veiled (including many who had not worn the veil before arriving in the country), as did their Swedish-born daughters. Rosengård was not dangerous criminally, in the sense of high drug and crime rates—at least not at first. But immigration there has always been unsettling politically, in the sense that it has turned Rosengård into a wholly un-Swedish place. Clashes with authorities eventually arose. In December 2008, there were several nights of serious anti-police riots, with Molotov cocktails and homemade bombs.

Across Europe, people saw the growth not just of parallel societies but of “ethnic colonies,” in the words of the Turkish-German ethnographer Rauf Ceylan. The children of immigrants did not always find European culture—with its atomization, its consumerism, its sexual wantonness—self-evidently superior to their parents’ cultures. And thanks to television and airplanes, ancestral cultures are now, for the first time in the history of transcontinental migration, generally available for all immigrants and their descendants to fall back on. Half a century into the Turkish immigration to Germany, Ceylan found, Turkish was still the language of the cafés, mosques, and hairdressers of Neufeld, near Duisburg—even for German-born young people. The men’s establishments were sharply divided by political leanings—and the politics that divided them was the politics of Turkey, not Germany.

That is why native Europeans began to get upset over developments that would seem in an American context—and used to seem in a European context—like normal immigrant behavior. A Pakistani teahouse in an area that is hostile to outsiders (say, a segregated street in Oldham) has a different cultural meaning than a Pakistani teahouse in a multicultural setting (say, Liverpool Street Station). Once a community is closed off to outsiders, only the residents of that community “get” something out of it. Their neighborhood now looks like a seizure of territory rather than a multicultural enrichment. And if the community is increasingly religious (as most immigrant communities are), then it looks like a space not just of separatism but of sharia, a subject we shall take up in chapter 8. When a halal Franprix that sold no alcohol opened in the relatively well-off banlieue of Évry south of Paris, it was forced to close due to public pressure.

Mosque building was particularly alarming to Europeans. There was not much ambiguity about what that meant over the long term. This was not a provisional foothold for the next generation, which would inevitably be Europeanized. No, it was a declaration that people intended—at least in one realm of life, and perhaps the most important —to live henceforth as they had in the old country from time immemorial.

The establishment of religious institutions is a familiar and predictable stage of immigrant life, but the native residents of west Amsterdam, Munich, and Cologne—all of which saw pitched battles over mosque construction—did not see things that way. The mosque complex in Duisburg/Marxloh, the largest in Germany, met resistance, too, even though it was the very model of a modern religious establishment, with its upper-middle-class membership and its millions of euros in funding from the European Union and local government. The mosque’s request for a thirty-four-meter-high minaret was approved, but a muezzin (or call to prayer) once a week was rejected out of hand. The ZDF television network aired sensational claims that Germans now had to speak Turkish to go about their daily business in Marxloh. The big, modern mosque, meant to move Duisburg’s Turkish Muslim community into the modern age, provoked more public alarm than any of Duisburg’s forty-four other mosques ever had, even though those had been located in garages and basements and back alleys, and some of them had been run by Muslim hard-liners. And the reason was obvious: The great mosque meant that Islam had arrived in Germany to stay.

Violence, crime, and rioting

The relative violence of Muslim neighborhoods is a main obstacle to social mixing and integration. Immigrants and their children commit much of the crime in all European countries, and most of the crime in some of them. Citizens of other countries make up 26 percent of Swedish prison inmates. Among those serving sentences longer than five years—which in Sweden are given out for only serious crimes like major drug dealing, murder, and rape—about half are foreign citizens, and these figures exclude the foreign born who have become Swedes. Among immigrants, Muslims are especially prone to get in trouble. According to the sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar, Islam is now “probably the first prison religion of France.” Although precise numbers are hard to come by, Muslims make up 50 percent of the population in many French jails, and up to 80 percent in certain prisons near the banlieues. A prison official estimates that 45 percent of inmates in the jails in Turin are foreigners (Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, and Albanians occupy the top four slots) and that rate of foreign inmates is below Italy’s national rate (47 percent). A huge influx of Romanians over the past decade has been the focus of political controversy, but in private conversation North Africans are more often singled out. When a crime is committed in Italy, a journalist said in 2006, “you often hear ‘Sarà stato un marocchino’” (“It was probably a Moroccan”).

Violence has kept native Europeans out of certain immigrant neighborhoods as effectively as an electric fence. Such places are ethnic colonies in a more literal sense of Ceylan’s term. While still European territory de jure, they are places where Europeans sense they have lost their right of way. “Silently, squeamishly, the natives are disengaging,” wrote the former Tory minister George Walden in 2006, “and the lines of ethnic mini-states are forming around us.”

The riots that began in the banlieues of Paris in October 2005 were the worst and most widespread civilian violence Western Europe had seen in decades. On October 27, two teenage boys in Clichy-sous-Bois, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, believing (erroneously) that they were being pursued by the police, broke into a fenced-off area that held a power transformer and were electrocuted. Dozens of cars were burned in protest that night. In the days that followed, sympathy protests broke out in immigrant and ethnic neighborhoods all over the country, and even in other European countries. It was a two-week rampage of burned cars, smashed buildings, and (for benefit of the television cameras) menacing gestures copied off of hip-hop videos. It touched every major and medium-sized city in France. Eight thousand cars were burned and 2,900 people arrested. It was an explosion that many—in fact, most—observers of the banlieues had predicted.

Historically, France had been less touched by race rioting than, say, Britain, where there was a decades-long history of ethnically based mob violence, starting with white attacks on West Indian settlers in Notting Hill in the late 1960s. Since then, Britain had seen at least a dozen race riots launched by ethnic minorities. In the 1980s, there were serious episodes of unrest in Bradford, Bristol, Brixton, and Broadwater Farm.

Although France had had fewer explosions, its banlieues had always been cauldrons of discontent, too. There had been riots unleashed by beurs, as young French Arabs were called, in the suburbs of Lyon in 1981 and 1990. In Strasbourg, rampaging vandals burned dozens of cars every New Year’s Eve, in what had become a tradition of sorts. By coincidence, the day before the deaths of Benna and Traoré that unleashed the riots, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced that nine thousand police cars—an average of twenty to thirty per day—had been burned or otherwise destroyed already that year. There were riots of a more isolated kind somewhere in France on two hundred different nights in 2005.

Who were these rioters? Were they admirers of France’s majority culture, frustrated at not being able to join it on equal terms? Or did they simply aspire to burn to the ground a society they despised, whether for its exclusivity, its hypocrisy, or its weakness? Unlike the American race riots of the 1960s, and unlike France’s student riots of 1968, for that matter, this steady but occasionally surging violence produced no leaders, no social movement, no body of thinking that outside observers could either accept or deplore, and no demands that could be productively answered. Years after the events, there was still no consensus in French public opinion over what the riots were even “about.”

At the level of political and media discussion, people seized on the first explanation at hand: official racism, or some form of exclusion, to which the uprisings in poor neighborhoods were merely a response. But how this putative racism worked was not obvious. There were two basic explanations. The first was that French authorities were neglecting the banlieues—an improbable accusation for a country that was plowing an extraordinary 1.9 percent of its GNP into low-income housing. The second explanation was police brutality. That was even less likely. Hundreds of video cameras were present in the banlieues throughout the 2005 riots, and revealed very few instances of excessive zeal, let alone brutality. Not a single rioter was killed during tens of thousands of man-hours policing widespread violence and destruction.

There was something formulaic about the accusation of police brutality. The liberal magistrate Jean de Maillard warned, after another round of rioting in December 2007, that certain banlieues had become zones de non-droit not because the police were outgunned, but because the residents would resist any policing, no matter how mild. Those who held out hope that softer policing might help calm the ghettos were deluding themselves, de Maillard wrote.

You can’t graft local police on to a society that is so sick and broken, and whose members are in open rebellion against society. The police are a means, not an end.…Police are no longer considered legitimate in these banlieues…and can no longer exercise the slightest control without provoking a mini-riot and, obviously, getting called racists.

While it was improbable that France’s policing had become tougher, it was unquestionable that the country’s streets had become meaner. By 2002, European Union statistics showed that France had 4,244 crimes per 100,000 residents annually, making it a higher-crime society than even the long-belittled United States. Again, much, if not most, of that crime was committed by immigrant minorities and their children. It was probably not a coincidence that 2002 was also the year that the fascistic National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen succeeded in reaching the final round of the presidential elections, ousting the Socialists as France’s second party at the ballot box.

That triumph of fearmongering reactionaries was attributed less often to crime than to l’insécurité, a new official euphemism. In France and elsewhere, politicians spoke of “insecurity” more than they did of crime. “Insecurity” meant the perception of crime. The implication was that people perceived more crime than there actually was. The crime to which statistics attested loud and clear was held to be a figment of the pampered upper-middle-class imagination. If “insecurity,” not crime, was the problem, the blame for it lay not with the people committing it but the people reporting it—the general public. In the years before and after the riots, French bookshops were full of titles that brought up worries about crime only to pooh-pooh them, such as Violence and Insecurity: Fantasy and Reality in the French Debate or Punishing the Poor: Governing by Social Insecurity.

There was a desire, verging on desperation, to explain the riots as being due to some misconduct of the majority society. Because if the riots could not be explained by the misconduct of the majority society, then they could be explained only as part of the agenda of the rioters. And to raise the agenda of the rioters was to raise, once again, the subject of Islam.

The banlieue riots and Islam

Given the North African origin of much of France’s immigrant population, the West’s military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and worries over jihadist terrorism in all Western countries, it was natural to ask whether the rioters were radicalizing along Islamic lines. In 1995, France had suffered a banlieue-based wave of Islamist killings: Khaled Kelkal, a young sympathizer of Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group from the Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin, had bombed a train in Paris and a Jewish school in Lyon. At the time of the 2005 riots, other Lyonnais were detained under suspicion of al-Qaeda-linked terrorism in Guantánamo. Islam seemed important to the rioters. On October 31, just as the violence seemed to be dying down, it was given a second wind by the firing of a teargas grenade near a mosque in Clichy, which was decried as a desecration. Police deferred to Muslim leaders to help keep order, even withdrawing from neighborhoods at the request of local imams. In Clichy there were shouts of “Allah akbar!”

Most observers sought an explanation for the riots that did not involve Islam: That the riots were committed by Muslims, they argued, did not make them Muslim riots. Maybe the rioters were not angry Muslims but angry poor people who happened to be Muslim. The International Crisis Group (ICG), while admitting that the riots had a strong Islamic element, nonetheless claimed that the more Islamic the riots looked, the less Islamic they actually were. “Paradoxically,” the ICG opined, “it is the exhaustion of political Islam more than its radicalization that explains this predominantly Muslim violence, and it is the depoliticization of young Muslims much more than their alleged re-organization along radical lines, that ought to make us uneasy.”

This was unconvincing. The ICG conclusions rested on biased definitions. What the ICG meant by “political Islam” was official political Islam, as defined by bureaucrats in France: old-line local imams of long standing, the Muslim Brotherhood–linked Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), government-sponsored anti-racist groups, and various organizations that had participated in the French Council on the Muslim Faith (CFCM) started by Nicolas Sarkozy in his early years as interior minister. These, it is true, managed neither to win the allegiance of ghetto youths nor to control them in the course of the riots, because the youths had drifted toward other identities.

But the identities to which the ghetto youths had drifted—anomic, modern, individualistic identities that they had learned on TV—were exactly the identities that most French people thought of when they heard the expression “political Islam.” The youths sympathized with jihad, the report admitted. They were furious partisans of the Arab cause in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. They embraced an autodidactic version of fundamentalism that the report’s authors called “shaykhist salafism.” The three urgent recommendations the ICG made to French authorities—stop police repression, increase Muslim political participation, and address the rioters’ discontent about Palestine and Iraq—did not leave the impression that political Islam played no role in the uprising.

Perhaps the ICG was looking for a religious rationale for the riots, as opposed to a sociological one. But theology is not the whole of religion, and theological disputation was not something these sneaker-obsessed gangstas of the banlieues were particularly interested in. A religion can cast a shadow of group allegiance that has nothing superficially to do with religious doctrine. Maybe the rioters were not attacking enemies of the Muslim religion. But they were attacking enemies (as they saw it) of the Muslim people. Even if they did not believe in Islam, they believed in Team Islam.

This effect should not surprise Westerners. It is not unique to Islam. As the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut explained in the weeks after the riot, “Religion plays a part—not as religion, but as an anchor of identity. Religion as it appears on the Internet, on the Arab television stations, serves as an anchor of identity for some of these youths.” Finkielkraut was looking at the same evidence as the International Crisis Group. The difference was that he chose to see the rioters as historical actors rather than as victims of a callous society. He argued that the rioters were burning schools and institutions of the state not because they had been thwarted by an uncaring society but because they wanted to attack schools and institutions of the state. “Instead of hearing what they’re saying—Fuck your mother! Fuck the state! Fuck the police!—we hear them out,” Finkielkraut said. “That is, we translate their appeals to hatred into cries for help, and their vandalism of schools into demands for education.”

The distinction between sedition and protest is often blurry. In early 2007, Angelo Hoekelet, a thirty-two-year-old Congo-born immigrant with a long criminal record and no fixed address, attacked two agents who had stopped him in the Gare du Nord in Paris for traveling without a ticket. When Hoekelet hollered for help, dozens—and eventually hundreds—of youths gathered, chanting, howling, and riled up by wild rumors passed over their mobile phones. A small uprising ensued, and lasted until the wee hours of the next day—with fires, looting, and various windows and advertisements smashed by youths wielding metal bars. The rioters understood their attack as aimed at France and its symbols: “From the moment policemen or agents stop someone,” said one leader of a police trade union after the Gare du Nord riots, “the crowd doesn’t try to understand what is going on—it turns on the uniform.” As Hoekelet was arrested, some in the crowd began shouting, as has become normal in such circumstances, “Nique la France!” (“Fuck France!”)

Ought these people, assuming they are noncitizens, be put on the next plane out of the country? That depends on what “Fuck France!” means. It may be a constitutionally protected gripe, spoken with less than optimal decorum. It may also be a rallying cry against France itself. It can mean disappointment or enmity.

Tribalism, ideology, and escalation

Finkielkraut’s assessment of the riots’ causes was accurate. It was also, as things turned out, brave, because his opinions proved intolerable to certain guardians of French public opinion. He discussed the riots as a product of ghetto kids’ aspirations rather than their grievances—as an ideology generated in the ghetto itself, rather than as a reaction to oppression. To do so was to question the premise that ethnic violence is always the result of social unfairness or native racism.

Similar uprisings had taken place where white people were altogether absent, and where European racism was therefore an implausible culprit. Just days before the French banlieue riots, there had been two nights of murderous violence in the Lozells neighborhood of Birmingham, where tensions had long simmered between South Asian Muslims and Caribbean blacks. Pakistani shop owners had broken an unwritten neighborhood rule by selling products that appealed to West Indian customers, harming business for West Indian proprietors.

A rumor began to spread on black radio stations and websites—without a scrap of evidence ever presented to back it up—that a fourteen-year-old West Indian girl had been caught shoplifting in a Pakistani-owned cosmetics shop. As punishment, the tale continued, she had been gang-raped by nineteen Pakistani men. This, too, was untrue, although that did not stop the Voice, the leading national black newspaper in Britain, from running a page-one headline that read, “Gang of 19 rape teen.” Mobs of armed men began assembling in the streets and a young West Indian was stabbed to death by Pakistanis. It is exceedingly unlikely that many of them were motivated by racism, unless we water that term down to the point of meaninglessness. If one could have polled Birmingham’s blacks and Asians on whether they wanted a Britain where skin color determined what people could do and be, both would almost certainly have voted no in a landslide. What there was was a clash of interests among mistrustful tribes.

Rioting tends to escalate. Millions of middle-class Frenchmen who had been laissez-faire about inner-city policies until 2005 came to support emergency powers for the governments thereafter. Hundreds of kids who, on the eve of the French ghetto uprisings, did not know how to make Molotov cocktails emerged as tested paramilitary leaders. In the last days of 2007 in Villiers-le-Bel, one of the communities that had remained relatively calm two years earlier, a fifteen-year-old Moroccan named Moushin Souhelli and his sixteen-year-old Senegalese friend Larami Samoura, traveling seventy kilometers an hour on a mini-motorbike, hit a police car and were killed. This time, the violence reached maximum seriousness in less than forty-eight hours. In one night alone, 138 cars were burned and eighty-two policemen were wounded, many by shotgun blasts. It took a deployment of a thousand heavily armed police the following day to calm the neighborhood down. “There are entire populations here who no longer feel they are part of this country,” warned Malek Boutih, the French Socialist secretary for social affairs and former president of the government-linked public-service group SOS Racisme. He added that violence was “rising, and will continue to rise.”

What was new and unsettling about the riots in Villiers-le-Bel was that its residents were ready for a confrontation with authorities before the two kids crashed their dirt bike. Gasoline had been stockpiled, rioters used walkie-talkies to communicate information about the movements of police to one another, and one woman told Le Monde that, with the police, “It’s war.” While there is no evidence that the two boys had been looking for trouble, it is clear they considered themselves in a state of cold war with the authorities. It turned out that one of them, Larami, the Senegalese, had kept a blog, on which he had posted, shortly before his death: “I’d happily die, just not killed by a cop.” The two teenagers, both of them French citizens, were sent to Morocco and Senegal, respectively, for burial.

A phrase that was coined to describe the allegiances of the rioters was nationalisme de quartier: “neighborhood nationalism.” The expression was also invoked to explain the traditions of omertà that were developing in Europe’s Muslim neighborhoods. The implication was that the solidarity that led boys to wreak destruction in the streets was just a particularly passionate kind of old-fashioned neighborliness, consisting mostly of a sentimental attachment to the kids with whom one had shared one’s childhood. But this made absolutely no sense. It did not explain why an episode in Clichy should provoke uprisings in Brittany and even Brussels. If there was such a thing as nationalisme de quartier, it was 99 percent nationalisme and 1 percent quartier. Larger identities were involved—political identities or, to put it more sharply, tribal identities. But what identities? Who, exactly, did European Muslims think they were?