One boy, seated toward the rear of the boat, was singing over the thrum of the motor, perhaps out of exhilaration, perhaps out of boredom, or perhaps out of fear, though four years of war in Syria had dulled his sensitivity to risk and it had not been strong to start. The others were praying. O sea, be kind! the boy sang. “Shut up!” the others pleaded. Near the end of the crossing, with Turkey well behind them, the boat's motor gave out. The boy threw himself over the side of the rubber dinghy and began to flail his way toward the Greek shore, several hundred yards off; this was another mark of his heedlessness, as the water was cold and dangerously choppy. The others stayed in the boat.

A rescuer swam to the boy and dragged him to the beach, on the island of Lesbos. A nurse brought him to a nearby tent. “Okay, talk,” she said.

“What do you want to hear?” the boy asked. He was warm and dry now but not entirely certain who the woman was.

“I want to hear everything,” the nurse replied. His name was Paul, he said, and he was 16 years old. He was angular and trim, with ropy limbs and thick hands and a brow that ran across his face in a brooding crease. His eyes were black and deep-set, and there was something distant and inscrutable but immediately attractive about him, an air of slight deviousness. His speech was somewhat wooden, as if he had recently memorized certain details of his life, but the nurse found his story to be broadly credible. As a Christian in wartime Syria, he said, he had been repeatedly imprisoned by jihadists. He glanced at the nurse's hijab. “Maybe you're one of them?” he asked. The question was playful, but the boy had not expected that his first encounter in Europe would be with a Muslim speaking Syrian Arabic, and he was wary. “Are you crazy?” she said.

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Gilles Kepel, a French political scientist, was at home in Paris brushing his teeth one morning last June when his cellphone rattled on the sink. It was a text from a journalist he knew: “I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re on the death list.” Kepel turned toward his TV, which was already on, and the top story eliminated any confusion. A French-born jihadi named Larossi Abballa had murdered a police officer and his wife in a town west of Paris and then delivered a macabre speech on Facebook Live — with the couple’s 3-year-old child cowering nearby — in which he called for the killing of seven public figures. The French media omitted the details, but an Interior Ministry official soon called with confirmation: Kepel’s name was near the top of the list. His initial feeling, he later told me, was “as if the subject I’ve been studying for 35 years had turned around to strike at me.” Within hours, he had a government security team assigned to guard him 24 hours a day. A similar death warrant was issued against him later that summer, elevating the sense of danger.

The threats came at an unusual turn in Kepel’s career. He has long been a prominent figure in the French intellectual world, a scholar whose face — a distinctive, narrow-eyed mask of polished sobriety — is often seen on TV news shows. But recently he has assumed a far more combative stance. Kepel has argued that much of France’s left-leaning intelligentsia fails to understand the nature of the threat the country faces — not just from foreign terrorists but also from the Islamist provocateurs in its exurban ghettos, the banlieues. Unlike the Islam-bashing polemicists who haunt French opinion pages, Kepel brings a lifetime of scholarship to this argument. He has always been careful to distinguish mainstream Islam from the hard-line Islamist ideologues of the banlieues, who have no real equivalent in the United States. He has long been a man of the left; his wife’s family is from North Africa, and he has no sympathy for the xenophobia of the right-wing National Front. But he believes that radical Islamists are trying to shred France’s social fabric and foster a civil war, and that many leftists are unwittingly playing into their hands. This view has made him a target for almost everyone.

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