But Roy wasn’t trying to be accurate; he was trying to make an existential point. Namely: ISIS did not arouse radicalization among “young Europeans”—modernity did. Hence the existential drama of the converts. If converts could be used as a control group, as it were, to shed light on the more global phenomenon of “radicalism,” it was precisely because they did not come from a Muslim background. Their journey was therefore all the more revelatory. “ISIS,” he wrote, “taps into a reservoir of radicalized young French who, regardless of what happens in the Middle East, have already dissented, and are looking for a cause, some label, a great narrative on which to sign in blood their personal rebellion.” It was indeed a strong idea—spoiled, unfortunately, by the author’s overtly politicized need to dismiss Islam’s role in the situation altogether.

In the French political context of the pre-Bataclan era, the words “radical Muslim” were mostly reserved for the youth that took the road to Syria to fight the Assad regime. One of the first moves of President François Hollande, elected in 2012, was to provide weapons to the anti-Assad rebels. In 2013, after Assad used chemical weapons against his own population, thus crossing President Barack Obama’s purported “red line,” Hollande had prepared France for war. He only came to an abrupt halt when Obama showed sudden confusion about whether his “red line” was actually red or not.

Since then, however, the feeling has remained in France that the anti-Assad cause in Syria was a worthy one. This was a perfectly decent feeling—Bashar Assad was and is a butcher, and his role in the Middle East chaos has been amply demonstrated—which nevertheless provided a certain misplaced understanding of “radicalized” youth. After all, so what if aimless, jobless French youth of the Muslim persuasion, confined in the French cités, tempted by drug traffic, and deprived of any larger reason to live, suddenly found their life’s purpose in fighting Assad? So what if that meant joining Islamist groups, for logistics’ sake? Luc’s mother, for one, believed that her son was, above all, “a good kid revolted by injustice”—an image she struggled to balance with the thought that he was a brainwashed killer, as if he couldn’t be both. As preposterous as it may sound, it wasn’t so rare, at the time, for the French left to compare the anti-fascist movement in Spain joined by Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Malraux with the global recruiting efforts by terror groups such as al-Nusra and al-Qaida for the fight in Syria.

Of course, electoral considerations were by no means absent from this analysis. During the electoral campaign of 2011, the Muslims of France, appalled by the populist-nationalist campaign of President Sarkozy—for whom they had voted in large numbers in 2007—had massively rallied behind Sarkozy’s opponent, the socialist candidate Hollande, who based his own campaign on analysis provided by the main left-wing think tank of the era, Terra Nova. According to that analysis, the “traditional” left-wing electorate of the prosperity decades—a mix of the white working class and civil servants—was now leaving the stage, to be replaced by a melting pot of young, well-off urban gays and lesbians, and the young Muslim offspring of migrant families. Hollande mistook the rallying of anti-Sarkozy Muslims to his campaign as a confirmation of that view.

In November 2013, Hollande sent his minister of justice, a former independence activist of French Guyana called Christiane Taubira, to the National Assembly to defend and pass a law legalizing gay marriage in the name of “socialism.” A similar measure that passed in conservative England two months earlier had triggered no ideological storm. Yet in France, to have the gay marriage law lyrically defended by a Black woman was seen as good politics. That would send, it was assumed, the correct message, which was that a new multicultural agenda was on the march in France.

The move proved disastrous. In January, while the municipal campaign was being set off, a bizarre mix of reactionary Catholics and conservative Muslims fueled with Salafi propaganda took to the streets and, with the support of the antisemitic Black comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, helped foment a “pre-riot” atmosphere across the country, targeting the godless, socialist government which was being manipulated by “the Zionists.” As antisemitic incidents exploded that same spring inside the cités and beyond, agitprop activists campaigned door to door to sell a conspiracy theory: There was a secret plan inside the government to change Muslim boys into girls. As one of these activists told me when I interviewed her, “It worked wonderfully.” The result, in March, during the elections, was that the Socialists lost most of the towns it had held since the 1920s. Yet by default, or because it had nothing else to hold onto, the Socialist Party stuck to its new doctrine, according to which Muslims would accept and vote for a party that put gay rights at the center of its politics. In order to entertain that notion, it was necessary to dismiss the idea that conservative Muslim and Islamist networks had any real influence within their communities.

Maintaining that doctrine was Olivier Roy’s job. On March 23, 2012, three days after the murder of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse—that is to say, before any investigation into the killings had begun—Roy penned an op-ed in The New York Times titled “Loner, Loser, Killer.” In it, he stated with absolute certainty that Abdelkader Merah, the killer, “was not known for his piety: He did not belong to any religious congregation; he did not belong to any radical group or even to a local Islamic movement. A petty delinquent, psychologically fragile, he … found in Al Qaeda a narrative of solitary heroism and a way, after months of watching videos on the Internet, to achieve short-term notoriety and find a place in the real world.” The same day, in Paris, Bernard Squarcini, then head of the DCRI (the French FBI), gave an interview to Le Monde arguing essentially the same thing: Merah the “lone wolf” (Squarcini’s expression) had no connections among French Muslims.

As was intuitively obvious then, and has been amply demonstrated since—most notably during Merah’s trial in 2019—this was complete bullshit. Merah was in fact an active part of a Salafi terror network which had been under surveillance for years. In turn, three years later, the voices of his mentors, the Clain brothers, would be heard on the ISIS tape claiming responsibility for the Bataclan massacre.

In a sense, Roy’s 2015 Le Monde piece on nihilism in the aftermath of Bataclan was a reprisal of his 2012 New York Times op-ed on Merah, except smarter. But in the interim, France had changed, and brutally so. Whereas the killings of French soldiers and Jews in 2012 had passed as “understandable,” the random murder of more than a hundred people in a single night could not be understood as something that could only happen to other people. In the following months, the contract between the government and the Prevention Center came to an end, and French authorities began to turn toward a completely different intellectual figure as their spirit-guide to Islamist violence—Roy’s longtime antagonist, Gilles Kepel.

Ever since, the debate in France over its relationship with its Muslim citizens has been framed by Olivier Roy’s existential theories on the one hand, and Gilles Kepel’s data-driven rebuttals on the other. While Roy provided the official narrative about Islam and domestic terror until the end of Hollande’s presidency, Kepel feeds the Macron government with data on Islamist entryism and geopolitical connections. The outcome of the debate between Roy and Kepel is therefore likely to shape the future of France for years to come. Needless to say, the debate is fueled by personal antagonism.

The discord between the two leading interpreters of Islamic radicalism in France has been characterized by the French press as everything from a social competition between an academic mandarin (Roy) and an arriviste courtesan (Kepel), to an ideological war between an alleged “liberal Anglo-Saxon left” (i.e., Roy, for whom religious communities should have a say in the public debate) and a stricter conception of state authority (i.e., Kepel, who is said to represent the French version of secularism known as laïcité).

In fact, Roy’s vision owes more to postmodern French writers, and to the French Orientalist school, than to any “Anglo-Saxon” tradition, whatever that may mean. As for Kepel, despite his avowed atheism and his support of the freedom to blaspheme, he hardly fits the definition of a “laïcard” (to use the derogatory slang that the far right once used to label the enemies of the church in France, and that is now part of the far left’s daily rhetoric): Not only does Kepel’s last book insist on the need to “respect” the “dignity” of believers, it also expresses the utmost contempt for Charlie Hebdo’s “ignorance,” “stupidity,” and “obscenity.”

Perhaps a less trivial and more fruitful way to see the Roy-Kepel distinction would be to acknowledge that, although pacing the same field of study, the two men do not actually study the same things.

The few points the two have in common mainly serve to underline their differences. They are both former leftists—born in 1949, Roy was a Maoist in 1968; Kepel, six years younger, was briefly a Trotskyite—and both left for “the Orient” during the mid-1970s. In their youth, helped along by the hippie movement, Roy and Kepel shared the same orientalist folklore and the same attraction to Islam—an attraction rooted in the romantic European quest for an alternative to the rising urban modernity and its discontents, whose paradoxes would plague the colonial era and resonate to this day. In the late 1970s, Roy and Kepel also shared the same mentor, Rémy Leveau, the first professor in France’s elite institutes to introduce modern sociology and factual research into “Oriental” studies. It is telling that, at the same time, Leveau himself was a high-ranking “Orientalist” in the Quai d’Orsay (France’s State Department) and served as legal adviser to the Moroccan Ministry of Interior, during Hassan II’s brutal reign. France’s colonization, its attraction to “the Orient,” and its concessions to the dictatorships of the Muslim world after the collapse of its empire have always been part of the same dynamic.

It is tempting to see Roy and Kepel as the two faces of French ambiguity toward the Muslim world, caught between a fascination with “the Other” and the cold gathering of facts. Something about their respective journeys does favor such an interpretation. Olivier Roy was 19, when, after traveling to Kathmandu in 1969, he discovered Afghanistan for the first time—a country he saw as unchanged since Kipling’s novels, if not since Alexander the Great. He kept going back there, and in 1980, as a young historian appointed to the French National Centre for Scientific Research, he went back again—this time to fight with the mujahedeen against the Red Army. “My generation,” he said in a biographical interview in 2017, “first loved Guevara and Mao and in the seventies, discovered the realities of the Communist regimes and became anti-totalitarian. Some went to Poland to help Solidarnosc, but I, who knew Afghanistan and spoke the language a little, choose to go there.”

What is striking here of course is the comparison between the struggle of democratic dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Afghan jihad that in less than 10 years would give birth to al-Qaida and the totalitarian Islamist currents in Algeria (among many other places). Yet Roy was by no means the only one to draw such a comparison. In the United States, Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson famously had the U.S. Congress financing the Afghan jihadists on the very same grounds.

Because Roy really spoke only French and some English, his contacts in Afghanistan were limited to the members of what the Afghans called “the foreigner’s movement,” a unit composed of volunteers from all over the world—including Osama bin Laden—and that, indeed, defined itself as an Islamist version of the Spanish Civil War’s communist International Brigades. If Roy did not meet bin Laden, he did sympathize with the French-speaking foreigners there, and particularly with the Algerian Abdulla Nass, who a decade later would preside over the founding in Algeria of the Front Islamique du Salut, or the Islamic Salvation Front, one of the main actors in that country’s bloody civil war throughout the 1990s between a corrupt secularist government and radical Salafists.

But in his own eyes, the most fascinating episode of Roy’s long journey remained his flight from Afghanistan to Pakistan disguised as an Afghan peasant, with his then-wife hidden under a burqa, to escape border controls. The experience was so profound that in 2017 he still called it “an initiation” (to what remains unclear): “It was a symbiotic moment. … I think we can speak of physical mutation, can’t we? And when you become the Other like this, you begin to see things from a completely new angle. I had become the husband of a wife in burqa. This changed my every social interaction.” Olivier Roy never became a Muslim himself. But by his own admission, the episode was central to his later interest in what he calls “the religious phenomenon.”

In 1980, around the time Roy was beginning to enjoy life as a Kipling character, Gilles Kepel was traveling to Cairo as a young researcher to study a group of Salafi Islamists there called Al Jihad—a group that was so small and marginal almost no one had heard of it. But perhaps because his father, Milan, was Czech—and a French translator for Václav Havel—there was in Kepel something naturally cosmopolitan, something that, after his first trips to the Middle East, had led him to study Arabic in Paris. As a result, his attraction to Al Jihad, indeed his very awareness that the tiny group existed at all, came from the fact that he was one of the few foreigners able to follow the writings of its members as well as the sermons of their preachers in the mosques. He was not too surprised when, one year after his arrival, Egypt’s peacemaking President Anwar Sadat was killed in a spectacular attack by Al Jihad terrorists for having signed the famous Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978.

In 1984, Kepel turned his thesis, Islamist Movements in Contemporary Egypt, into his first book, The Prophet and the Pharaoh, which was translated into English quickly and became an international scholarly landmark. But a bigger turning point came when his mentor Leveau suggested that he turn his attention to the Muslim families of France—another group that, in the early 1980s, no one thought was terribly important.

Gilles Kepel, 2018STEPHANE REMAEL/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES