In Europe, repeated jihadist attacks and ISIS propaganda have caused a growing fear of terrorism — but also a more general fear of working-class young people from immigrant backgrounds living on the edges of Europe’s major metropolises. The subject has given rise to a series of debates in the media and in the political sphere: Has Islam itself radicalized? What brought about such violence and intolerance? Is it growing? Most such debates consist of little more than punditry based on partial, secondhand information — a discourse in which jihadist propaganda and bellicose Western triumphalism echo each other even as they do battle.

But in his ethnographic study Radicalized Loyalties, based on years of observation and immersion in working-class French neighborhoods, sociologist Fabien Truong offers a concrete portrait of how violence cuts through the lives of young men in marginalized suburbs, and the intimate yet highly politicized relationship with Islam that has emerged among some of them. Praised as “a patient observation of human beings” by the Los Angeles Review of Books, the book plays host to a welter of contrasting and discordant voices — none more striking than those of the friends and relatives of Amédy Coulibaly, one of the infamous perpetrators of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack.

In this interview with Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman, the book’s English translator, Truong reveals how, behind the rhetoric of a “clash of civilizations,” the appeal of jihadism to young people in Europe grows out of the contradictions and dilemmas of Western society itself.