...The subjects of the Khosrokhavar interviews defy the stock image that many Western observers will have of Islamists as highly exotic Arabic-speakers from the Middle East. On the contrary, they are, in effect, “Western” or at least “nearly Western.” They all speak fluent French, and French for the most part — not Arabic — is their mother tongue. The learning of Arabic — in order to be able to read the Quran in the original — is indeed frequently mentioned in the interviews as a crucial stage in the process of the inmates’ Islamic radicalization. Several of the inmates — perhaps as many as half — were born in France, including the convert. The rest come from the Maghreb, the formerly French-controlled territories of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, with the largest contingent from Algeria. All but one, however, have lived for extensive periods in France. (The one exception is “Mohammad,” the veteran of the Bosnian war, who astonishingly claims never to have set foot in France prior to his extradition.) Most are French citizens; some have earned advanced degrees from French universities; and even if they happen to have grown up in the Maghreb, French culture, as their testimonials make abundantly clear, has been a constant point of reference in their lives.4

While Khosrokhavar’s sample of Islamists may not be “typical,” in light of this strong French connection, the fact is that Islamism as a self-consciously transnational ideology — in this respect, as in so many others, resembling twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism — draws its adherents from widely different parts of the globe: both from the Dar al-Islam, the traditional Islamic lands, and from the Dar al-Dawa, the lands of Islamic proselytism. In contemporary Islamist discourse — in the fatwas of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, for example, or in the writings of Qaradawi’s admirer Tariq Ramadan — Europe precisely represents a privileged terrain for Dawa: for proselytism.5 It is thus distinguished from, say, Russia or Israel or, for that matter, the United States, all of which, as judged by the practice of the jihadists, clearly fall within the Dar al-Harb: the lands “of war” targeted for military defeat...

...And then, of course, there is the most famous French jihadist of all: Zacarias Moussaoui.7 As with the subjects of the Khosrokhavar interviews, Moussaoui’s relationship to France is “conflicted,” to say the least. Nonetheless, when, early on in the court proceedings against him and in an apparent gesture of multicultural sensitivity, Judge Leonie Brinkema advised Moussaoui that he would in her court have to abide by rules with which he might be unfamiliar from “his culture,” Moussaoui pointedly replied: “by the way, I’m born in France, educated — I have a masters degree in international business. I’m fully acquainted with western system of justice, okay? I never live in the Middle East country or in Arabic country, okay?”...