WHY YOUNG MEN?

On the day after the tragic Paris attacks in 2015, Jamil Jivani opened the newspaper to find that the young men responsible were familiar to him. Jamil didn't know them personally, but the communities they grew up in and the challenges they faced mirrored many of the things he'd encountered in his own life.

Jamil traveled to Molenbeek, Belgium in February 2016 to better understand the roots of jihadi radicalization. Less than two months later, he witnessed Brussels fall victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men living in the same neighborhood as himself. His research also took him to Cairo, Egypt, and in both countries Jamil noticed common experiences in his life as a young black male in North America and the lives of young Muslim men in Europe and Africa. Jamil grew up in a mostly immigrant community with serious integration challenges, like out of touch schools and policing plagued by racial politics. He's personally seen the impact of dependency on extreme left-wing activism, disengagement from the private sector, intense media visibility and highly political identities. He knows what it's like to want to be an agent of change in the world, and to have that desire corrupted by gangster culture and radical ideologies associated with Islam.

This book is about the transformations and experiences that help us understand why young men are at the center of our biggest concerns about crime and national security, why young men are being exploited by our enemies abroad with antisocial and destructive ideas, why young men who engage with these ideologies should not be dismissed and, most importantly, why young men can help lead us to a safer and more prosperous world. We need to understand that the growing culture of jihadi radicalization in the West is a problem that transcends race and religion.

JAMIL JIVANI is an emerging leader who tackles some of the biggest challenges in the world today as a lawyer, community organizer and teacher. Jamil is a visiting professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, where he focuses on issues that impact youth, immigrants and low-income families. He is also the founder of the Citizen Empowerment Project. Jamil formerly worked for Senator Cory Booker in New Jersey, as a Connecticut high school teacher and as a Manhattan corporate lawyer. Since graduating from Yale law school he practiced corporate law in Toronto and was named the 2015 Young Lawyer of the Year by the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers.