Radicalized Loyalties - Becoming Muslim in the West

Truong vividly describes the lives of young men from immigrant backgrounds in the Paris banlieue, charting their trajectories from dropping out of school towards crime and then prison. This is an extremely valuable book, rich in ethnographic detail and very well written: I was irresistibly drawn in to this world of kickbacks, payoffs and unsettlingly deep resentment against the whole of French society. David Lehmann, University of Cambridge, UK Truong take us deep inside the personal world of six immigrant young men from France's disreputable urban periphery. He shows how they navigate the promises and demands of the school, the street economy, the prison and the police, and why they are attracted (or not) by Islam as a 'floating political imaginary.' An insightful and urgent contribution to the analysis of the social fabrication of terrorists that punctures the sonorous but empty notion of 'radicalization.' Lo c Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley It is not a clash of civilizations that Fabien Truong vividly describes but a collapse of communities, as young men in transitional stages of their life search for significance in the West's Muslim diaspora. If you want to understand how most overcome feelings of rootlessness and despair and how a few become jihadis, read this book. Scott Atran, CNRS, Paris, and University of Oxford an excellent ethnography of Muslim masculinity Times Higher Education Truong's is a thoughtful, well-crafted ethnography that humanizes the faceless, amorphous Muslim youth of the French banlieues. [...] Truong's finely grained ethnographic analysis should be read as an important expos of such pathologies. Ultimately, it is an indictment of the modern French liberal experiment that currently appears to be both unwilling and unable to challenge and transcend the pitfalls of deeply rooted racism, virulent religious bigotry, and entrenched cultural parochialism. Asma Afsaruddin, LARB