Between the Rif and Brussels: Terrorism and Murderous Anomic Identities in Yasmina Khadra’s Khalil

This article provides a critical reading of Yasmina Khadra’s Khalil (2018), raising questions about the nature of homegrown terrorism in contemporary Europe and how young diasporic men are transformed into suicide bombers. The novel fictionalizes the November 2015 Paris attacks through the eyes of a Belgian-Moroccan would-be martyr whose explosive belt fails to detonate. Drawing on Durkheim’s theory of anomie, this paper argues that characters like Khalil are anomic par excellence; they are products of class struggle and integration failure, beings with no sense of belonging. We examine how the novelist dramatizes the conditions that breed such a figure — ghettoization, discrimination, religious ignorance, and the collapse of belonging into what Amin Maalouf calls “murderous identities” — conditions that extremists exploit for their Machiavellian ends. Furthermore, we are interested in the literary representations of the terrorist persona and how Khadra deploys figurative language, metaphor, and symbolism to render it with unprecedented intimacy.