The Radicalization Of A Muslim - The Violent Streets Of Paris And The Medieval Dungeon Of Saint-Martin-Les-Abbayes

Mehmet Bey Osman had been a quiet man, devout, prayerful, and obedient.  He observed all the Muslim holidays, feasted and fasted when required, attended the mosque regularly, and had high hopes for eventual ascension to the Kingdom of Heaven. He pinned prayer notes on the rose bush at Hidirellez, sacrificed a lamb at Kurban Bayram, and visited the old during Ramadan. 

Mehmet Bey was a good, faithful, observant Muslim, and his religion sustained him through a difficult childhood and adolescence.  He was from eastern Turkey, a land and world apart from Istanbul and the West - a medieval place which had never emerged from the severe, punitive traditions of his ancestors.  

His father was a brutal patriarch, his mother, an intimidated woman in chador who never had a bright moment, so terrorized was she by her husband.  Yet she managed on the marginal income provided by him, an ignorant man of itinerant trade, and treated her five children well. 

Religion was a harsh affair in the village, and even the smallest of the Osman children prayed on the floor of their simple home five times day, went to a madrassa to study the Koran, and recited the most inflammatory verses with their father in the evening.  

Old Murat took the injunctions of the Holy Book seriously, and dreamed of an Islamic caliphate stretching from east to west, a Muslim empire, clean and pure, a believing, trusting land of faith and devotion.  The Jews would be washed into the sea and Christians, thanks to Muslim evangelism, would be converted.  It would be truly a land of peace and heavenly beauty. 

 

Although Murat could do little to further this idyll, isolated as he was in his poor village, he followed with passionate interest the uprisings in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank, cheered ISIS, al-Shabab, and al-Haram as they, the gladiators of the faith, extended the reach of Islam far and wide.  There was no room in this world for the Jew and even less for their Christian lackeys.  What Muslim could forget the apostate Urban II who sent the First Crusade to Jerusalem to rid the Holy Land of Muhammed's followers ?

Mehmet Bey knew no different.  There were no voices of moderation in his village and few in his region so close to Syria and Iraq that they considered themselves more Arab than Turkish.  The ethos was that of Islamic brotherhood, joined in the common desire for a worldwide Islamic state. 

As a young man, Mehmet Bey felt that this sense of commonality and unified religious purpose was too timid and tepid.  The world must be put on alert, prepared for the coming of Islamic rule; and only in Western Europe was this militancy at a fever pitch.  There was something revolutionary about living in the confines of a Christian society where Muslims were marginalized, dismissed, and maltreated.  

The more that Paris, Stockholm, and Amsterdam forced Christian compliance on observant Muslims, the more the diaspora revolted.  The northern suburbs of Paris were uniformly Muslim and angry, restive, and impatient for the establishment of sharia, Islamic dominance, and cultural hegemony. 

And so it was that Mehmet Bey made his way across the sea to Greece and from there to Paris where he joined other Muslim immigrants in Seine-Saint-Denis.  At first, relocation was difficult.  The Northern suburbs were predominantly African, the language French, and the culture a mixture of Sunni and Shi'a, north and south; but there was, as he had hoped, a Muslim solidarity, especially now that the genocidal Israeli campaign to destroy Gaza and all its inhabitants was underway.  It mattered little to these Algerians, Chadians, and Malians that their homes were far from the Middle East.  The suffering of Muslims anywhere was their suffering. 

 

The brotherhood of Muslims was so unifying that his Turkish, non-French speaking roots made no difference in Seine-Saint-Denis, and once his radicalism was tested and proven, he was accepted; and the more he became a fearless protestor on the front lines of pro-Palestinian outrage, a rock-throwing militant in the service of Allah, the higher he rose in the leadership of the pan-Muslim revolt. 

It felt good to be out of his small village in Turkey and free from the impotent sanctimony of his father and his clerical friends. Here in Paris Muslims did not simply sit, listen, hope, and pray but took to the streets in the inevitable clash with Christians foreseen in the Koran.  

The infidel must be fought with resolve, passion, and faith; and although he did not yet take up arms against them, the aggression and mayhem of the tony streets of the 7th and the 16th was a good beginning, 

After a week in a Parisian jail where he had been strip-searched, baton-buggered, and beaten by the secret police who tried to extort information from him about the doings in Seine-Saint-Denis; and after being released after telling them nothing, Mehmet Bey was even more adamantly radical.  

He and his ultra-revolutionary cabal would resort to more and more intimidating violence. The West must take Muslims seriously once and for all.  No power on earth, not the might of the United States or its puppet Israel could stop the Islamic surge.  Within his generation Israel would be wiped off the map and every European country from east to west would be under Muslim control.

'Islam is a peaceful religion', explained European multiculturalists, and its current radicalization was but an aberration from Muhammed's teachings, the true spiritual center of the religion; but common sense said otherwise, and European politicians like Wilders, Le Pen, Meloni, Duda, and Orman were outspoken about the danger of Islamization. 

 

Muslims were not integrating peacefully in France, said Marion Marechal, a deputy to the European Union and a leader of the French Right, and in their separatism, hostility to French Christian culture, and insistence on the hegemony of Islam were not welcome. 

This infuriated Mehmet Bey and his fellows.  How could this...and here in Turkish, Arabic, and French, the vile epithets for this young blonde imperious woman poured out...even suggest such a thing; and the street protests only increased.  The predominantly Muslim quartiers of Paris became sanctuary arrondissements, welcoming non-documented refugees with open arms, thus adding to their numbers and influence. 

Each of these quarters became increasingly militant, and nowhere was a moderating, spiritual message conveyed.  The imams at Friday prayers in the increasing number of mosques everywhere were as passionately driven by the desire for Muslim hegemony, the annihilation of the Jew, and the retreat of the Christian.  Radical Islam was becoming endemic and widespread. 

The voices of reason, moderation, tolerance, and compassion were nowhere heard.  Not one imam spoke kindly about God, peaceful spiritual evolution, and the kindliness and good faith of Islam.  In their hands, the religion had become the very epitome of Christian caricature.  They did not want Islam to be a peaceful religion, for with that craven, timorous attitude, the vision of an Islamic caliphate and eventual Islamic rule would never happen.

 

'We are at war', said the imam before a full congregation at the al-Aksa mosque in Seine-Saint-Denis, 'as we have always been.  The defeat of the Saracens, Allah's anointed warriors, at the hands of the bloody French in the Pyrenees will never be forgotten.'

There were times when Mehmet Bey's thoughts turned to an all-knowing, perfect God - the God of his childhood, the God of heaven and earth, the Supreme One watching over him - but he ignored them.  Such religion was for the weak, the cowardly, the sedentary, impotent masses.  He was Allah's gladiator, his earthy imperator, his militant disciple, and he would prevail. 

After another arrest and a year in a French prison, he was deported to Turkey where he returned to his village in the east.  He was welcomed back as a returning hero, embraced and feted as a real man, a real Muslim; but it wouldn't be long before the same restiveness and impatience would return, and despite the good will and appreciation of his family and friends, he knew he would not stay. 

He returned to France, but by this time the French police had resorted to every judicial and extra-judicial means at their disposal to root out endemic Muslim terrorism, and in a brutal raid of Seine-Saint-Denis, Mehmet Bey was caught and thrown into Martin-Les-Abbayes a former medieval dungeon, repurposed for the imprisonment of foreign terrorists, to be held without trial, ad infinitum. 

The French Right had taken a leaf out of the notebook of Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador who had rounded up without trial every last member of MS-13, a brutal terrorist gang that had held the country hostage for a decade, and turned his country into one of the safest in the region.

Mehmet Bey's father, Murat, tried to find out the whereabouts and disposition of his son but he, with means, experience, or resources, could do nothing; and as far as his former colleagues knew, Mehmet Bey was still in Martin-Les-Abbayes and would likely never be released.