Italy’s Manufactured Islamic Threat
Media Panic and the Modena Attack
Last Saturday, a 31-year-old Italian man drove into pedestrians in Modena, a city in northern Italy, known as the birthplace of Enzo Ferrari, the entrepreneur who founded Scuderia Ferrari. The attacker seriously injured seven people, then abandoned the car and attempted to escape on foot. He was then caught by an Egyptian father and son, who took him down, despite him having a knife, and restrained him until the arrival of the police.
The name of this man is Salim El-Koudri, an Italian of Moroccan descent, born and raised in Bergamo, the heart of the country’s industrial region, who graduated in Economics from the University of Modena. Investigators have already ruled out any terrorist scenario, affirming that the attack is most probably related “to a situation of psychiatric distress.” Italian social media users, however, could not let go of that foreign-sounding surname: El-Koudri, and began attaching the label “Islamic” to his name.
The use of the term Islamic next to Mr El-Koudri is neither accidental nor peculiar to his situation. Since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Italian newspapers, magazines, and televised media continuously and inappropriately employ the term “Islamic” to broadly refer to Muslims or people with ethnic roots within the Muslim world. In the Italian language, however, only objects and historical periods are referred to as “Islamic.” A person is described as “Muslim.”
Italian media persistently perpetuates false information and polarises the debate around Islam, whose creed remains significantly misrepresented and unknown among the wider population despite Islam being the second-largest religion in the country. A similar situation, for instance, happens with the word jihad. Because jihad is a masculine noun in Arabic, this word should have been accompanied by the Italian masculine article il. Instead, it is commonly used with the feminine article la, La jihad, thus suggesting a translation of jihad as war, which is a feminine noun in Italian.
The word “Islamic” is also intentionally used pejoratively, aiming to suggest a more nefarious meaning, in part due to this word’s similarity to another controversial word: Islamist, which usually indicates a person who embraces Islam as a political ideology. Mr El-Koudri is indeed a person and perhaps he is Muslim. But it would seem that he is most definitely not Islamic since there is no evidence which would lead anyone to regard him as an “Islamist.”
For 48 hours, however, many claimed they had proof El-Koudri was an “Islamist.” Two major Italian newspapers, La Repubblica and La Stampa, running a photo of a man they claimed was El-Koudri. It was soon discovered that legacy media outlets had failed to undertake due diligence. Their mistake was due to their having taken the photo of a “Salim Koudri”—not El-Koudri—an Algerian who used his social media platform to post prayers to Allah. Due to the amount of xenophobic insults he received after the media misappropriation of his photo, Mr Koudri was forced to remove his social media profile.
Meanwhile, the family and friends of the real Mr El-Koudri promptly distanced themselves from anything religious that might be similarly misused: “He doesn’t even observe Ramadan,” declared Mr El-Koudri’s neighbours, referring to the Muslim month of fasting. “We are not religious, I do not even wear hijab,” commented his sister. “He asked for the Bible,” added his lawyer. As if being a devoted Muslim, an Islamist, is enough for a person to carry out such an act of violence while triggering a terrorism alert across Italy’s vast Muslim community.
Certainly, in Italy the debate surrounding migration and second-generation citizens is extremely polarising. Every public discourse largely shifts between those who fear this reality as a domestic threat, and those who advocate for its cosmopolitan benefits. However, the broader narrative framework remains one: that Islam is a profoundly intolerant faith, incompatible with the modern secular world.
Muslims are welcome in Italy, but only if they are hard workers, moderates, and sympathisers of liberal views. Basically, Muslims who admire the newly appointed mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, and not those who support Sayyid Qutb—the Egyptian political theorist and a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood—are more likely to be positively received by Italians on all sides of the political spectrum.
Emblematic is the controversy in the UK surrounding the case of Shamima Begum, the 15-year-old Londoner who entered Syria to join the Islamic State in February 2015, and whose British citizenship has been revoked by appealing to her Bangladeshi roots. The path of her public redemption meant that she had to change her appearance, moving from traditional aesthetics to modern, Western clothing, with hair uncovered and make-up. Begum’s de-radicalisation was strictly related to her capacity to embrace pop culture and a consumerist lifestyle.
Italy’s geopolitical and historical tradition has always been strictly tied to the East and the Muslim world. Throughout the nineteenth century and even earlier, many famous Italians converted to Islam, encountering usually nothing more than curiosity. One of the most famous of all was Leda Rafanelli, an anarchist who also befriended the young Mussolini, years before he became dictator. Mussolini would write to her: “We will read together Nietzsche and the Quran.”
It was only in 2001 when George W. Bush described the war on terror as “a very long struggle against evil,” that the mechanism of linguistic transformation was activated. Italian journalists and commentators began to fuel the perception of an imminent Islamic invasion. Since the Global War on Terror, Italian magazines and publishers regularly fuel the myths of Islamic intolerance toward Christmas, even depicting—and misrepresenting—related local celebrations in public spaces. Instead of talking with academic experts, journalists carry out street interviews with Muslim residents in Italy who are often unable to speak Italian fluently. They then create caricatures of Muslims, asking them questions such as whether they believe in sharia, taking their affirmative answer as proof of their radicalisation.
Italy also frequently uses administrative deportations as a counter-terrorism strategy, referring to indicators that are often cultural rather than indicative of a possible, much less plausible, threat. Emblematic is the case of a family who was expelled for naming their daughter Jihad, a name popular in certain African countries.
Meanwhile, and more broadly in the western world, a new field in the social sciences has been created: Terrorism Studies. This has quickly become a real industry, with self-appointed experts who, according to Lisa Stampnitzky, a lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield, have contributed to the rise of censorship and anti-intellectualism. Terrorism is now widely believed to be a symptom of the malaise of Muslim countries that failed to modernise. While in Europe these projections of colonial modernity have been brought forth to the twenty-first century such that Muslim immigrants who might dress in a traditional fashion or embrace their faith are represented as having rejected western modernity both as a lifestyle and political project. Such judicial prejudice is irrational, and such bigotry pervades Italian social and political systems, especially when no other motives for resistance to the West’s neocolonial actions and violence are found.
This pattern continues to the present day. From what has emerged, Mr El-Koudri’s primary focus was his unemployment. Like many of his generation, his successful graduation was followed by the drama of a stagnant market and lack of opportunities. The Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano reports four emails sent by Mr El-Koudri to his University. All sent the same day, he showed clear signs of frustration over the lack of employment opportunities and recognition of his studies.
In the first email, he wrote: “I want to work.” Then, he followed up: “I want a job as an employee, not a warehouse worker.” In the third email, he changed tone and became aggressive calling the university administrators “Christian bastards.” After half an hour he sent another email: “I apologise for misbehaving.”
What remains the focus of Italian media was not the clear sense of failure and desperation of a young graduate, but the use of the words “You Christian bastards.”
The Italian Interior Minister Piantedosi, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Giornale, talks about Mr El Koudri’s offensive words to his university, defining them as worrisome and blasphemous. He also reiterates the lone-wolf threat as “the most insidious,” while noting the possibility for people to radicalise in the isolation of their own room, outside a terrorist network.
Once again, it is the underlying idea of Islam as a doctrine hostile to the democratic world that is vilely insinuated to the broader public. The elephant in the room, however, remains majestically overlooked.
Italy has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the European Union, which currently stands at around 19%. Plus, the job market is unable to absorb graduates. Last month, news from the European Personnel Selection Office went viral on LinkedIn, after they received 79,450 applicants from Italy, followed by Germany and Spain, with 11,705 and 13,796.
The fact that so many young Italian graduates look to Brussels, along with those who flee Italy in search of work abroad, is clearly a problematic historical pattern that Italian politicians and media need to both face and address.
Why a young man attempted to carry out a massacre is speculative. To date, Italian legacy media has reported that Mr El-Koudri was under psychiatric care for a disorder until 2024. What is certain is that he is a son of twentieth-century Gnosticism, born and raised in a society where self-approval significantly depends upon public recognition and self-affirmation, while this same society fails to offer meaningful opportunities for success.
While Italy and the Western world hold heated debates about Islam—particularly among those who perceive it as a “backward religion” unable to embrace the reforms necessary for entry into a modern secular society—the unsustainable fatigue produced by life within those very same societies, themselves governed by an amorphous bureaucratic apparatus, manifests in different forms: the rise of suicide and mental illness, the widespread use of drugs and other forms of addiction, and a dramatically low birth rate, indicative of a society deeply rooted in the present and unable to project itself into, much less imagine, a collective future.
While this system keeps failing to respond to basic demands of the people such as housing, work, health, and dignity, no external threat will spare western society from the manifestation of a wider socio-economic malaise that continues to remain without definition or a name. All the while, social and political structures within Italian society sustain this collective farce amidst the silent complicity of the masses.
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