Khaled Kelkal, a small but solidly built young man with a shock of dense black curls, entered prison at 19, evincing the sort of defiant frivolity that remains the mark of so many young men of his circumstance, the unwanted Arabs of the French banlieues. His robberies, the police chases, had all seemed to him a “game,” he told a sociologist in 1992. His incarceration chastened him. “You know, in prison you can’t help but mull things over. And I really mulled a lot of things over,” he told the researcher.“Everything my mother told me, everything my father told me, it’s all true. But you only realize that after the fact, because in the moment, you’re on stage. And in prison, all of a sudden you’re in the audience, and you say to yourself: ‘This isn’t life anymore, what have I done?’”
Kelkal returned to the Islam with which he had been raised, now finding in it a sense of camaraderie and inclusion akin to that he’d found in crime. “I’m not Arab, I’m not French, I’m Muslim. I make no distinctions. Now if a French person becomes a Muslim, he’s the same as me, we both prostrate ourselves before God. There’s no more races, nothing, everything is switched off, it’s oneness, we’re united,”he said. “You go into a mosque, you’re immediately at ease, they shake your hand, they think of you like a friend they’ve known for a long time.”
[For more of this story, written by Scott Sayare, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/int...haled-kelkal/481908/]
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