Confronting Orientalism, Colonialism and Determinism: Deconstructing Contemporary French Jihadism

Abstract

In 2012, Mohammed Merah went on a killing spree in Toulouse and Montauban. Merah, born in Toulouse of Algerian parents, was from a dysfunctional and xenophobic family. His acts signalled the beginning of a wave of often unrelated but spectacularly gruesome, terror attacks that would claim hundreds of lives. Here, quite overtly, the discursive backlash focused on French Muslims, something that was engineered by the French Muslim terrorists themselves, who in their public declarations of allegiance with foreign groups openly pitting their notion of being a ‘Muslim’ against French society. However, this obscured the sociological reality that not only did Islamist terrorism have very little support among French Muslims, but also that many French Muslims died during acts of violence committed overtly in the name of their religion. This chapter disputes current ‘grand theories’ of jihadism in France by challenging the causal claims deployed by scholars. It also uses Muslim victimhood during these attacks to nuance how we understand ‘Islamist’ terror attacks. In March 2012, Mohammed Merah went on a killing spree in Toulouse and Montauban. Merah, born in Toulouse of Algerian parents, was from a dysfunctional and xenophobic family. While his actions, which he nominally claimed under the banner of an Islamist movement, were extremely serious, no one could have surmised that this would be the beginning of a wave of spectacularly gruesome, effective, often well organised but mainly unrelated terror attacks that would claim hundreds of lives. Here, quite overtly, the discursive backlash focused on French Muslims, bringing an already highly securitised community even further under the spotlight (Cesari, 2013a; Hussey, 2014). This was something that was engineered by the French Muslim terrorists themselves, who in their public declarations of allegiance with foreign groups openly pitted their notion of being a ‘Muslim’ against French society. However, this obscured the sociological reality that not only did Islamist terrorism have very little support among French Muslims, but also that many French Muslims died during acts of violence committed overtly in the name of their religion.