Searching For The Source Of The Bile

Three authors look for the roots of virulent, violent Islamism

CHARLIE HEBDO, Bataclan, Brussels,Nice, Berlin, Manchester and now London. The trail of blood of what Gilles Kepel calls the “third wave” of jihad grows ever longer. The first of Mr Kepel’s waves featured fighters against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then against Arab regimes. The second was led by Osama bin Laden, who turned from the “near enemy” to the “far enemy”, ie, America. The third is made up of loose networks of radical Muslims in the West who murder with little or no control from al-Qaeda or, latterly, Islamic State (IS). Some think IS is lashing out abroad as it loses ground in Iraq and Syria. Perhaps. But even if the physical “caliphate” is destroyed, the jihadist empire of the mind seems bound to endure.

Mr Kepel has long been at the forefront of scholarship on Islamist radicalism. His latest book examines how the third wave washed over France. His workbears studying: at least until this year’s attacks in Britain, France appeared to be the main incubator of European jihadism. Mr Kepel puts the turning point at around 2005: the year when Abu Musab al-Suri (real name: Mustafa Setmariam Nasar) published a 1,600page tract entitled “The Call for Global Islamic Resistance”. YouTube was launched that same year, giving jihadists a direct, vivid means of publicising their grisly deeds and radicalising Muslims. Finally, it was the year when the alienated banlieues of French cities erupted in riots. The seeds of jihad were also fertilised by the memory of French colonialism in north Africa, the experience of French prisons and the proximity of the war in Syria, which provided a call to arms and military training.