Ahmed is from a working-class family. He dropped out of high school and became an apprentice electrician, but jobs were almost impossible to find. He got high with his friends and became a soccer fanatic—an Ultra—following his favorite team around the country. It was a way to relieve the stress of being jobless, but wherever he went he and the others in his group were insulted or beat up by the local cops, until he began to hate the life of an Ultra and gave it up. When the revolution came, he participated in the protests that drove out Ben Ali.

“There was a boom after the revolution—in religion, in drugs, in everything—because of the new freedom,” Ahmed said. There was even a boom in emigration, and in the first three months after the revolution twenty-five thousand Tunisians took to the Mediterranean on boats bound for Sicily. On New Year’s Eve, 2011, Ahmed tried to become a refugee. But by then the police had cracked down on stowaways, and he wasn’t able to get near the container ship he’d scoped out at the port in La Goulette.

Ahmed told himself, “If I pray and ask for divine intervention, maybe things will get better.” Praying did not lead him to the moderate democratic Islam of Ennahdha. His thoughts turned more and more extreme, and he became a Salafi. He quit smoking marijuana and grew his beard long and adopted the ankle-length robe called a qamis. He un-friended all his female friends on Facebook, stopped listening to music, and thought about jihad. On Internet forums, he met jihadis who had been in Iraq and gave him suggestions for reading. Ahmed downloaded a book with instructions for making bombs. In the period of lax security under Ennahdha, he fell in with a radical mosque in Tunis. He was corresponding with so many friends who’d gone to Syria that Facebook deactivated his account. Some of them became leaders in the Islamic State, and they wrote of making thirty-five thousand dollars a year and having a gorgeous European wife or two. Ahmed couldn’t get a girlfriend or buy a pack of cigarettes.

“It was part of my thought at that moment to leave,” Ahmed said. I asked if the impulse came from his poverty. “Not really,” he said. “It was because it was the right path.”

We were sitting at a table outside a nearly empty café, along a dark highway between an industrial zone and a poor residential district. Ahmed wore jeans and a leather jacket. He chain-smoked Tunisian cigarettes and kept rubbing his eyes, which had a fragile shine.

“It’s a sense of revenge for the injustice in this country,” he went on. “You can be walking and a policeman will insult you, insult your mother, call you over, pull you into the police van, hit you, then throw you out.” This had happened to him once, before the revolution, when he was an Ultra heading home from a soccer match. It was humiliation—the opposite of karama. Part of karama was not using poverty as a reason to join the jihad.

In the spring of 2013, Ahmed tried to leave Tunisia again—this time for Syria, by way of Libya. His father, a taxi-driver, had confiscated his passport to prevent precisely this from happening, so Ahmed decided to get himself smuggled across the border. The best way was through a network of jihadis at his mosque, but some of them had been arrested. So he went to Ben Gardane alone.

Ahmed had a friend in Ben Gardane—Walid. They used to hang out together in Tunis. When he got to Ben Gardane, he called Walid to ask for help crossing the border. But Walid, who had just returned from Syria, tried to discourage him.

“Dude, don’t go!” Walid said when they met on the street. “It’s just a trap for young people to die.” To Walid, Ahmed was exactly the type of young person isis exploited—naïve, lost, looking for the shortest path to Heaven. Al Qaeda had comparatively higher standards: some of its recruits had to fill out lengthy application forms in which they were asked to name their favorite Islamic scholars. Walid could answer such questions, but they would stump Ahmed and most other Tunisian jihadis.

“Dying as a martyr is a beautiful thing,” Walid told Ahmed. “But dying as a martyr at the expense of a people and a nation isn’t the right thing to do. If you can help your own nation, it’s better than dying to make a hell for other people.”

The two friends spoke for an hour, and by the end Walid thought he’d persuaded Ahmed to turn around. Instead, Ahmed went off to meet a smuggler and tried to negotiate a price to cross the border. But the smuggler wanted more money than Ahmed could afford. There was no way for him to get into Libya. Having failed at his second effort to leave Tunisia, Ahmed searched for a minivan back to Tunis. Someone tipped off the Ben Gardane police—maybe it was Ahmed’s long beard, or the fact that he was a stranger in town—and he was brought in for a beating. Back in Tunis, the cops called him in and gave him another beating and kept him overnight. “Fuck your mother—you should stop praying!” they screamed. “Who got you to Libya? Who are they?”

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“Would you release me if I stopped praying?” Ahmed asked. The police agreed, and Ahmed signed a document saying that he would go home to his parents, shave his beard, and never return to Ben Gardane.

Ahmed’s desire to wage jihad faded, and he resumed smoking weed. His faith was weakening and, with it, his ambition.

One night in July, at the end of Ramadan, Ahmed drank and got high on Equanil—an anti-anxiety drug that’s popular in the poor suburbs—and punched out an acquaintance who’d refused to lend him a cigarette. He spent a week in a jail cell so overcrowded that there was nowhere to sleep. Shit from the toilet flowed across the floor. Among the drug users, homosexuals, and Salafis in the cell, the Salafis held complete control, and they beat up anyone who challenged them.

The police wanted to pin a marijuana charge on Ahmed. In Tunisia, such a charge carries a minimum sentence of one year, and as much as a third of Tunisia’s prison population is locked up on drug charges. (Reformers are trying to amend the law.) The cops tortured a confession out of Ahmed, but when they tried to get a urine sample he refused for two days, until they poured cold water on him, forcing him to piss—the final indignity. But the results took so long to come back from the lab that the police had to release him. He returned to his parents’ house, where he went into hiding. He didn’t show up on the day of his sentencing.

“I’ve tried all kinds of things, and nothing is working,” Ahmed said. He was still looking for a way to escape, perhaps to Canada or Australia. “It’s not only me. All of Tunisia wants to leave.”

Walid, whose passport was taken by the police upon his return from Syria, has no choice but to stay. “It’s not a nice thing to say you detest your country, but I detest Tunisia,” he said. “It’s a place where they just want the youth to be banal, like little babies, and have fun, so the businessmen can make more money. This country doesn’t deserve its rebels. I’ve lost, what, twelve or fourteen years trying to find a better way? Maybe I’m just one of the losers—the silent majority who lower their heads and work and have a family and stay out of trouble.”

Walid hadn’t lost his faith that Sharia would one day save the world, but at present Muslims were doomed to fitna—discord and fighting among themselves, their destiny written in blood. The Prophet had predicted it. The jihadi groups, including Al Qaeda, no longer had relevant answers for the situation of young people in Tunisia. The jihadis wanted all or nothing, and that would never work. Walid no longer believed in that life. He was accommodating himself to slow, ambiguous change—and, after all, the revolution had achieved some things to build on.

“We need to reform our country and learn how to make it civilized,” he said. “In Tunisia, when you finish your pack of cigarettes, you’ll throw it on the ground. What we need is an intellectual revolution, a revolution of minds, and that will take not one, not two, but three generations.” ♦