But Future Street, so luminous a half-century ago during the great postwar European recovery — what the French call “Les Trente Glorieuses” (or the 30 glorious years) — has become a much more ambiguous place. It is now situated, thanks to technology, between homeland and adopted land in the jangling, borderless, cacophonous space of modern civilization.

A bad economy is not what flips young Muslims off Future Street onto the road to Raqqa. It’s the humiliation of purposelessness. It’s a quest for respect. It’s laying the burden of choice to rest through a subsuming mission against the “decadent” West. It’s the discovery of a plausible flight from ambivalent modernity to the Caliphate’s zealous strictures…

Humiliation is an ample notion. It may embrace anything from the Algerian war of more than a half century ago to the Iraq war; it may invoke Gaza; it may be social; it may well be sexual. But whatever its nature, it is escaped by adherence to the Islamic State’s state in the making, that border-straddling land where doubt goes to die, where each day has its assigned task and all needs are met.

The dangerous thing about this ISIS territory, the Caliphate’s embryo, is not so much its oil revenue, or its training facilities, or its proximity to the West, or its control over several million people — it is its magnetic assertion of Suuni jihadist power, the retort to humiliation that drew Abaaoud from Future Street. The United States and Europe would not have accepted its existence in 2001. They would not have accepted that terrorists centered in a sanctuary close to a NATO border could shut down Brussels or the University of Chicago.