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Summary
Summary
The spread of Islam around the globe has blurred the connection between a religion, a specific society, and a territory. One-third of the world's Muslims now live as members of a minority. At the heart of this development is, on the one hand, the voluntary settlement of Muslims in Western societies and, on the other, the pervasiveness and influence of Western cultural models and social norms. The revival of Islam among Muslim populations in the last twenty years is often wrongly perceived as a backlash against westernization rather than as one of its consequences. Neofundamentalism has been gaining ground among a rootless Muslim youth--particularly among the second- and third-generation migrants in the West--and this phenomenon is feeding new forms of radicalism, ranging from support for Al Qaeda to the outright rejection of integration into Western society.
In this brilliant exegesis of the movement of Islam beyond traditional borders and its unwitting westernization, Olivier Roy argues that Islamic revival, or "re-Islamization," results from the efforts of westernized Muslims to assert their identity in a non-Muslim context. A schism has emerged between mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world--including Hamas of Palestine and Hezbollah of Lebanon--and the uprooted militants who strive to establish an imaginary ummah, or Muslim community, not embedded in any particular society or territory. Roy provides a detailed comparison of these transnational movements, whether peaceful, like Tablighi Jama'at and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda. He shows how neofundamentalism acknowledges without nostalgia the loss of pristine cultures, constructing instead a universal religious identity that transcends the very notion of culture. Thus contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is not a single-note reaction against westernization but a product and an agent of the complex forces of globalization.
Author Notes
Olivier Roy is a professor at EHESS, the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. Among his books are The Failure of Political Islam, The New Central Asia, and (with Mariam Abou Zahab) Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (Columbia, 2004).
Reviews 1
Choice Review
This book by a leading scholar-specialist on Islam is an in-depth analysis of the spread of this religion globally in the 20th and 21st centuries and the challenges Muslims face as they struggle to come to terms with today's technicalized world. The book's subtitle underscores this struggle, neatly summed up in what Roy describes as "the great divide between neofundamentalists and Islamists" in establishing the parameters of a viable global Islamic community. This is an ambitious project, one whose breadth of detail makes for heavy reading. Perhaps most useful are the chapters on Muslims in non-Muslim societies, notably the US and Europe, and on Osama Bin Laden and his "peripheral jihad." As Roy notes, Al Qaeda has evolved into a "deterritorialized," decentralized organization that knows no borders, but it has yet to develop a coherent long-term strategy with formalized goals. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty. W. Spencer Flagler College
Table of Contents
| Preface |
| 1 Introduction: Islam: A Passage to the West |
| The failure of political Islam: and what? |
| Islam as a minority |
| Acculturation and 'objectification' of Islam |
| Recasting identities, westernising religiosity |
| Where are the Muslim reformers? |
| Crisis of authority and self-enunciation |
| Religion as identity |
| The triumph of the self |
| Secularisation through religion? |
| Is jihad closer to Marx than to the Koran? |
| What is Bin Laden's stategy? |
| 2 Post-Islamism |
| The failure of political Islam revisited |
| From Islamism to nationalism |
| States without nation, brothers and state |
| The crisis of diasporas |
| Islam is never a stretegic factor as such |
| The political integratoin of Islamists |
| From utopia to conservatism |
| The elusive 'Muslim vote' |
| Democracy without democrats |
| The Iranian Islamic revolution: how politics defines religion |
| Islamisation as a factor secularisation |
| Conservative re-Islamisation |
| Post-Islamism: the privatisation of religion |
| 3 Muslims in the West |
| How to live as a sateless Muslim minority |
| Historical paradigms of Muslims as a minority |
| Acculturation and identity reconstruction |
| 4 The Triumph of hte Religios Self |
| The loss of religious authority and the 'objectification' of Islam |
| Immigration and reformulation of Islam |
| The crisis of authority and religious knowledge |
| The religious market and the sociology of Islamic actors |
| Individualisation of enunciation and propaganda |
| Faith and self |
| Humanism, ethical Islam and salvation |
| Enunciation of the self |
| Recommunitarisation and construction of identity |
| 5 Islam in the West or the Westernisation of Islam |
| The building of Muslim 'churches' |
| Neo-brohterhoos and New Age religiosity |
| 6 The Modernity of an Archaic Way of Thinking: Neofundamentalism |
| Sources and actors of neofundamentalism |
| The basic tenets of neofundamentalism |
| Neofundamentalists and Islamists |
| Neofundamentalists and radical violence |
| Why is neofundamentalism successful? |
| The new frontier of the imagined ummah |
| 7 On the Path to War: Bin Laden and Others |
| Al Qaeda and the new terrorists |
| Deterritorialisation |
| Re-islamisation in the West Uprooting and acculturation |
| The peripheral jihad |
| The Western-born or second-generation Muslims |
| The converts and the 'protest conversion' |
| The subcontractors |
| The future of Al Qaeda |
| 8 Remapping the World: Civilisation, Religion and Strategy |
| Culture, religion and civilisations: the conundrum of clash and dialogue |
| The debate on values |
| Military strategy on abstract territories |
| Index |
