Stints
in prison were seminal for Chérif Kouachi, Amedy Coulibaly and other
major figures of French jihadism in recent years — Mohammed Merah, Mehdi
Nemmouche, Khaled Kelkal — as both a rite of passage and a gateway to
radicalism.
Muslims account for about 7-10 percent of France’s
total population but around half of its prison population of 68,000.
Muslims are even more numerous in facilities near large cities,
particularly in maisons d’arrêt, which hold prisoners serving shorter
sentences.
Precise
figures are unavailable because laïcité, France’s strict form of
secularism, prohibits officially asking and collecting data about
people’s religious preferences. These estimates are based on research I
conducted in French prisons in 2000-3 and again in 2011-3, when I
interviewed some 160 inmates and many guards, doctors and social workers
in four major facilities, some among the largest in Europe. Fifteen of
those inmates had been sentenced for terrorist acts.
Many
Muslims feel marginalized when they get to prison, due to exclusion and
bigotry from the white majority in mainstream society, and their own
counterracism. Although in urban prisons they are a majority, they
continue to feel victimized and trapped. Very few guards are Muslim, and
prison officials, who tend to be hypersecular, have little
understanding of Islam, for example confusing fundamentalism with
extremism.
“Look
at how a Catholic or a Jew is treated, and look at how we are treated,”
Abdelkarim, a Frenchman of Italian origin in his late 20s who was
serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery, told me in 2012. “They
have their weekly prayers; in this prison we don’t have Friday prayers.
Their rabbi can go to all the cells; our Muslim minister cannot. There’s
kosher food, but no halal meat. They despise us, and they call that
laïcité.”
In
fact, Muslim ministers can visit Muslim inmates in their cells but
usually don’t do it for lack of time, and halal meat is increasingly
available. But such misperceptions are common, and they only reinforce
the appeal of Islam as the religion of choice for the stigmatized and
the oppressed. Unlike Christianity, it has an anti-Western and
anti-imperialist bend.
One
young French inmate of Algerian origin told me in 2013, “If you are a
Muslim and ask to participate in the Friday prayers, they take your name
down and hand it over to the Renseignements Généraux.” (The
Renseignements Généraux is the French equivalent of the FBI.) He added:
“If I try to take my prayer carpet to the courtyard, they prohibit it.
If I grow a beard, the guards call me Bin Laden, smiling and mocking me.
They hate Islam. But Islam can take revenge!”
Adherence
to radical Islam is largely the transfer into the spiritual realm of
that particular combination of indignation, rancor and wholesale
rejection encompassed by the expression, widespread among prisoners,
“avoir la haine” (to have hate). For some inmates, especially those who
were only nominally Muslim and nonpracticing, violent aspirations emerge
first, with religiosity — and often a very approximate understanding of
Islam — grafting itself onto to them later.
Abdelkarim,
who converted to Islam (and adopted an Arabic name) about a decade
before I met him, acted as an informal Salafist chaplain; his prison
counted about 1,000 Muslim inmates and just one Muslim minister, an
older gentleman from North Africa out of touch with the young prisoners’
concerns. Each time Abdelkarim sang the call to prayer at dawn he would
be sent to solitary confinement for a few days; eventually he was
transferred to another jail. Nationwide, there is only about one Muslim
minister for every 190 inmates, leaving self-proclaimed ulama to proffer
their own religious guidance.
Radical
preaching catches on because it offers young Muslim prisoners a way to
escape their predicament and develop a fantasy of omnipotence by
declaring death onto their oppressors. During my research in 2000-3, the
prisoners idolized Khaled Kelkal, whose network killed eight people in a
Paris subway station in 1995 to punish the French government for
backing a military coup against an Islamist party in Algeria. A decade
later their new icon was Mohammed Merah, who in 2012 shot down seven
people, including soldiers and Jewish children, in the name of radical
Islam; some inmates even impersonated him. Now the new celebrities will
be the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly.
About
three months ago, the authorities at Fresnes, a very large prison known
for its strict discipline, started experimenting with separating
suspected Muslim radicals from the general population, grouping them in
special cells. Although it is too early to assess the measure’s
effectiveness, the provisional results are mixed.
The
prisoners’ segregation at Fresnes is incomplete, owing to the shape of
the 19th-century building. With rows of cell blocks branching out
perpendicularly from a central corridor, the inmates can communicate
with each other simply by shouting. The radicalized prisoners now have
less influence on other inmates, especially ones who are impressionable
or have mental disorders. But they are in closer contact with one
another, allowing them to organize and make plans.
Prime
Minister Manuel Valls announced recently that the quarantine program
would be expanded in several prisons around Paris. The proposal needs to
be refined. Seasoned jihadists must be separated from untested radicals
and the returnees from, say, Syria and Iraq, who may have been
traumatized or disappointed by their experience of jihad and still stand
a chance of being reintegrated into mainstream society.
More
must also be done to address the legitimate claims of Muslim inmates.
Collective Friday prayers should be allowed in all French prisons, for
example. The government announced last week that 60 Muslim ministers
would be trained to supplement the 182 or so currently in service. This
is a welcome proposal. But at least three times as many ministers are
needed, and they must be more uniformly distributed throughout the
prisons. Above all, they will need to be coached to better understand
and address the concerns of disaffected young Muslim prisoners.
Indeed,
reform must begin with respect. For if French prisons have become a
breeding ground for radicalism, it is partly because they mistreat the
Islamic faith itself.
Credit to Farhad Khosrokhavar
