Why Young Men

Cécile Van de Velde and Rachad Antonius read the book “Why Young Men” by Jamil Jivani. The day after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Jamil Jivani, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian, opened the newspaper to discover that the men responsible were familiar to him. He didn’t know them, but the communities they’d grown up in and the challenges they’d faced mirrored the circumstances of his own life. Jivani traveled to Belgium in February 2016 to better understand the roots of jihadist radicalization. Less than two months later, Brussels was the victim of a terrorist attack perpetrated by young men who lived in the same neighborhood as him. Why Young Men is not a memoir but a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counter-intuitive, often provocative argument for a radical change in the way we look at young men, and in the way they see themselves.