Before 2013, no one talked much about “radicalization” in Tunisia. They talked about fucking off to Syria to find a job, to build a polity for Islam, to fight Bashar al-Assad, to join a militant group, to rescue a dying child, to ensure a place in heaven, or some combination of all those things. Those choices and motivations were taken at face value; no one imagined that the young people going to Syria didn’t actually feel these things, that there was instead some fuzzy ideological process called radicalization happening to all of them.
