Delivered. What is the typical profile of the European jihadist of the past ten years? Rather masculine, quite young, even very when it comes to women, from an immigrant background but rather of second generation, socially precarious and living in disadvantaged neighborhoods of urban centers. This is the statistical table drawn up by Hakim El Karoui and Benjamin Hodayé, who worked on the data of more than 1,400 individuals from four Western European countries (half French, the others being distributed between the United Kingdom). United, Belgium and Germany) during the last ten years.
This work, carried out under the aegis of the Institut Montaigne, has given rise to a voluminous work, Jihad Militants. Portrait of a generation, which, despite the aridity of the material and the figures, is fascinating. The numerous examples of courses cited give flesh to the profusion of statistics. We thus discover that the United Kingdom is distinguished by the level of education higher than the average of “its” jihadists, unlike France or Belgium.
Adherence to an extreme conception of Islam
The fact remains that sociological (level of education, poverty, housing) or personal factors (addiction, family background, mental disorders) are not decisive for the authors. They are a backdrop more or less favorable to the permeability of ideas and to the temptation of the passage to the violent act. What counts, for El Karoui and Hodayé, is above all adherence to an extreme conception and practice of Islam. A practice very close, even resulting from Salafism. The authors see a continuity between these two forms of Islamism: “Salafism wants to separate from the latter [la société mécréante], and jihadism plans to implement its destruction. “
In the great “dispute” between the theses of Gilles Kepel (“the violence of Islamization”: the ferment of radicalism is in religion itself) and Olivier Roy (“the Islamization of violence”: religion is only the tinsel of a pre-existing desire for violence), Karoui and Hodayé lean towards Kepel. They insist on the force of attraction of the jihadist ideology, but take care to distinguish radicalized and jihadists, violent and non-violent.
The comparison of forms of jihadist sociability and networking is a good example of the rich, subtle, and grounded nature of this work. Each country has its specificity: community structuring in the United Kingdom, European identity in Belgium, the significance of Salafism in Germany and, in France, the importance of neighborhood solidarity and intergenerational transmission.
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