Gilles Kepel

Gilles Kepel is the French political scientist whose account of Islamism has shaped how European governments talk about it, and who has spent two decades in a public argument with Olivier Roy about what it is. He learned Arabic in Damascus, did his doctoral fieldwork in the Egyptian suburbs among the networks that had produced Sadat's assassins, and published it in 1984. His later books traced political Islam from the 1970s revival through the Afghan war to what he argued in Jihad in 2000 was its decline as a mass movement - a claim the following year made look premature and which he has defended in modified form since. His current position is that European jihadism is a radicalisation of Islam, growing out of Salafist preaching and the failure of integration in particular suburbs, which he calls a third generation shaped by the internet. Roy argues almost the opposite, that it is an Islamisation of radicalism and that its recruits are drawn from the same pool as any other nihilist movement. The dispute is genuinely about evidence and has become political in France, where Kepel is read as harder on Islamism and Roy on the state. Kepel has lived under police protection since being named on a jihadist list in 2015. His fieldwork method - going to the suburb, learning the language, staying - is what both sides of the argument respect about him, and it is why the dispute with Roy has stayed a scholarly one rather than becoming purely political. He has taught at Sciences Po and NYU. The French state's approach to what it calls separatism draws heavily on his analysis, which he has both encouraged and complained about.

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