Because of her French literature and philosophy education coupled with her sense of being an outcast, highly sensitive Iman experiences even the slightest disappointment as a tragedy. She has broken up with her boyfriend and failed on one of her exams that she must now take again in September. Her mother is leaving for Tunis for a few days and she will be alone with her brother who is mostly absent. She finds all the ingredients for her suicide on the internet (the website has since been shut down) and decides on a gentle way to die, with Nivaquine. She will then have to trick the drugstore into prescribing the drug to her. Iman uses her intelligence and dexterity for her sordid fate.

Afterwards, the lives of all her beloved will be forever saddened.

The death of Iman is different from those of other young French women. Aside from a few bridges linked to her age group, the fundamental question of her belonging is a key factor in her suicide.

The Muslim identity is caricatured in Europe. More and more young people feel incapable of dealing with this pariah-like portrayal when they are making tremendous efforts to do the right thing. The Canadian writer, Irshad Manji, who published the acclaimed book, The Trouble with Islam Today, explores the suffering inherent in the reluctant marriage between Islam and the West. Irshad lived through difficult teenage years after arriving in Canada as a refugee from Uganda. Living in Richmond, a Vancouver suburb, she had to make sense of both the teachings of the typical North American school, with those of the rigid Madrassa she attended afterwards. She could have then done what the majority of young Muslim girls do and turn to hamburgers and Coca Cola, thus hiding her origins and religion from both herself and others. Instead, she did just the opposite.

She studied the Koran and from this religious knowledge came a few embarrassing questions: the inferior treatment of women in Islam; the Jew-bashing that so many Muslims persistently engage in; and the continuing scourge of slavery in countries ruled by Islamic regimes (muslim-refusnik.com). If given the chance, she might have been the kind of powerful thinker that could have shown Iman she was not alone in her suffering and offer the troubled girl a sense of solidarity.

Young Muslim men in Europe also live with strong personality conflicts, and their despair is just as strong in the face of the duality confronting young women like Iman, but it can often take on a more violent form. The evolution of this stress is mingled with the physical development of their bodies, the assertion of their virility, their need to be acknowledged, to feel needed and useful to society. Young Muslim men try desperately to struggle against the image of failure and the judgment of incapability the society is eager to place on them. This is why they sometimes fall prey to the Muslim extremists who roam the downtrodden ghettos.

Political Muslim activists persuade these young men into believing they are truly turning to a spiritual life to help them in their daily European lives. Even for those who make it and find decent jobs, they still face the hurdle of learning to be open with their religious practices.

An existential doubt about their place in Europe will slowly creep into the backs of their minds and grow into a revolt for a decent future. The daily images of violence, the numerous deaths of Muslim civilians in the news from the war in Iraq and middle eastern conflicts slowly wear on them. The indifference of people around them only erodes their trust in the world. They grieve over the seemingly worthlessness of the young Muslim life and at the fact that their future is jeopardized before they even can have a say in the matter. To escape this aggression on their psyche many turn to drugs or alcohol, some commit suicide in prison, while others choose another form of suicide and leave for Iraq.

In December 2004, Scheherazade Faramarzi wrote a story for the Associated Press describing “two teenage friends who hardly seemed like Islamic radicals. They smoked marijuana, drank beer, listened to rap and wore jeans. Yet the pair of French Muslims died as rebels in Iraq — one as a suicide car bomber, said relatives who traced the young men's path from the slums of Paris through a religious school in Syria to the fight against the U.S.-led coalition next door. Like many young Muslims here, Abdelhalim Badjoudj and Redouane el-Hakim didn't have jobs, and relatives and friends say they grew more alienated in recent years, surrounded by secular Western culture and by what many Muslims see as a subtle bigotry among the French against Arabs. Badjoudj, who would have turned 19 on Dec. 16, is thought to have blown himself up on Oct. 20 while driving a car filled with explosives near a U.S. patrol on Baghdad's airport road, wounding two American soldiers and two Iraqi police officers. He is thought to have been the second French citizen to have carried out a suicide attack in Iraq. The body of el-Hakim, 19, reportedly was found July 17, after U.S. troops bombed a suspected insurgent hide-out in Fallujah.”

In the ghastly towers of the projects, factory workers’ children will find being a ‘martyr’ a better option than being turned down one job interview after another. The work of the radical Islamists is somewhat done for them because they essentially just have to levy this pervasive sentiment of injustice to recruit their kamikazes for jihad. These are the sons of rural immigrants who came to France in the 1960s for the promise of work in the newly built automotive factories. They were peasants who had a difficult time adjusting to the high-rise ghettos the factories built for their workers. In the 40 or so years since their construction, these projects have yet to be renovated.

Iman reacted passively where Redouane envisioned himself as a warrior of utopia! The main difference between Iman and Redouane, who were roughly the same age, is their social background. Iman came from the Tunisian upper class, was categorized upper middle class in Paris as well, and executed her studies successfully. As for Redouane, the worker’s son lived in a ghetto where he didn’t even have a chance. However they were both French, both categorized as Muslim, both in deep despair and today, both are dead.

Originally published in French by Kulturissimo