HENT DE VRIESnationalism and ethnicity, not religion. Two factors give Islam apost hocimportance: the
reciprocal rationalization of some conflicts in religious or civilizational terms, and the
growing deterritorialization of Islam, which leads to the political reformulation of an
imaginaryummah.’’^36
In this view, radical jihadism is merely the contemporary successor form of an inter-
nationalist struggle, taken up by marginalized youths from Muslim immigrant communi-
ties (or, in a few cases, by converts) for whom the old leftist movement—or, for that
matter, present-day antiglobalization movements—are no longer available options. We
are thus dealing with ‘‘a ‘modern’ coalition of ‘negative’ and radical forces whose roots
are not in the Koran but in a Western tradition of a ‘red-brown’ confusion, which has
recently been given some green brushstrokes by Islamic radicals.’’^37 This conjunction has
everything to do with the influence of popular culture and the role of media:
the fault-line between Europe and the Third World goes through Muslim countries,
and former spaces of social exclusion in Western Europe are partly inhabited by
Muslims at a time when the radical Marxist Left has disappeared from them. But a
closer look shows that these antagonistic identities are less entrenched in the actors
than ‘‘played’’ by them. The Islamization of the French suburbs is largely a myth:
youngsters are fascinated by Western urban youth subculture (baseball caps, ham-
burgers, rap or hip hop, fashionable dress, consumerism).^38Indeed, he notes, we should understand that in the outburst of rioting in fall 2005 in
destitute neighborhoods and slum-suburbs (cite ́sorbanlieus) of Paris and other French
cities there was ‘‘nothing particularly Muslim or even French,’’ and that the phenomenon
was merely ‘‘the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culture
that reaches from Paris to London to Los Angeles and beyond.’’^39 The insight that those
involved were second-generation immigrant (and male) youth of French citizenship, who
were burning property (cars, schools, gymnasiums, etc.) belonging to their own commu-
nities in a self-destructive response to unemployment and racism, economic and social
exclusion, with a counter- or subcultural gusto whose model stems from Western urban
centers rather than from the rioters’ Arab or African countries and communities of origin,
inspiredNew York Timescolumnist David Brooks to see in it a tragic paradox of global
hegemony: the fact that the pop- or counterculture of gangsta rap and hip hop, with
its accompanying ‘‘poses of exaggerated manhood,’’ by now defines ‘‘how to be anti-
American.’’^40
This being said, the local detail of the events in France and their context in the
everyday lifeworld were barely reported by the media (an exception being the work done
by the blogger-reporters on location in Bondy for the Swiss journalL’Hebdoand by a new
generation of scholars in France who align themselves under the ambitious title ‘‘La Nou-
velle Critique Sociale’’).^41 What apparently stuck in viewers’ and readers’ minds was yet
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