THE INCUBATION PERIOD: FROM CLICHY TO SARKOZY
Between 2005 and 2012, a great change took place in French Islam. Only seven years separated the riots from the massacre perpetrated by Merah, but this very dangerous period was a time of missed opportunities. Paradoxically, the spectacular return of jihadi terrorism to France in March 2012 coincided with the beginning of a campaign that led to the election of François Hollande as president of the Republic. Hollande owed his victory in part to the fact that Muslims voted for him in large numbers. It was followed by National Assembly elections that included, for the first time, more than four hundred candidates from Muslim immigrant families. By seeking election, they declared themselves full-fledged members of the nation.
But alongside this ostensible political integration of a group previously excluded from most social institutions, an underground movement appeared. The third generation of French Islam emerged in 2004–2005, between the Stasi Commission1 and the riots. This generation sought to free itself from the state supervision promulgated by former Interior minister Pierre Joxe’s Council for Reflection on French Islam (Corif) and its successor, Nicolas Sarkozy’s French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM); it claimed full citizenship, with the same rights enjoyed by Christians and Jews.
The decoupling of this new political citizenship from its fragile social bases, added to a fractured Islamic religious field in France, created favorable conditions for the development of what its advocates call “total” Islam. The latter offers an imaginary alternative solution to the deadlocks in society that is all the more attractive because it manages to absorb, in part, the pre-existing radical utopian ideals of both the left and the right wings. It can also serve as a substitute for them, as is shown by the unprecedented increase in conversions to Islam.
This movement has been accelerated by the changes international jihadism has undergone. In January 2005, the Syrian-Spaniard Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, alias Abu Musab al-Suri, published online The Global Islamic Resistance Call (Da’wat al-muqawamah al-islamiyyah al-’alamiyyah). This 1,600-page manifesto conceived terrorism in Europe as the main vector of the battle against the West and identified the “poorly integrated” younger generation of Muslims as its preferred instrument. This text breaks with al-Qaeda’s previous strategy, in which the leaders assigned agents from the Middle East to carry out attacks on the United States; instead, it gives priority to offensives in European countries, with the intention of fomenting civil wars in order to make them implode.
These ideas slowly matured as young jihadis left Europe to be trained on battlefields in Iraq and then Afghanistan, producing the milieu from which Mohamed Merah emerged. Conversely, the political integration of young French people from Muslim immigrant families was demonstrated by their willingness to vote and run for office in March 2012, at the very time when Merah committed the massacres in Montauban and Toulouse in the name of jihad—and as an enemy of society.
It is this political integration, the key to building a pluralist French society based upon shared values, that is deeply threatened by the emergence of jihadism at its very heart.
1 A French commission headed by Bernard Stasi that was created in 2003 to reflect on the application of the principle of secularism in France. (Not to be confused with the former East German secret police, also known as the Stasi.)