The French political scientist Olivier Roy in the 1990s and 2000’s was an authoritative voice on Islam as a political and social phenomenon, and certainly on the radicalization that has been under way for almost 50 years in the Muslim world. This little book dates from 1995 and was given an additional foreword when republished in 2002, after Nine-eleven.
The merit of Roy is that he convincingly proves that Islamism is primarily a political response to the confrontation of the Muslim world with the modernity that was introduced by the Western countries by force (through colonialism), and which is still maintained by the support for usually corrupt, authoritarian regimes. This new radicalism therefore is at odds with traditional fundamentalism, which is simply a conservative-reactionary movement that has existed for centuries in Islam, and which is usually confined to the moral-legal domain.
That distinction is certainly enlightening and relevant, at least up to the 1990s, but this booklet also proves that it has not been that relevant any more since then. Roy himself acknowledges that the latest radical movements - which he describes as neo-fundamentalism - again focus on the moral-legal domain and put a heavy emphasis on identity, with elements like the headscarf and sharia. But precisely because neo-fundamentalism remains more in the cultural sphere (and much less in the political), it is also more local-tribal-ethnically or nationally bound, and thus more fragmented. There is no International of Islam, and it will never come, according to Roy, Islamism has proved to be a failed project.
Now, that is strange, because what with the emergence of Al Quaida or IS/Daesh, since the end of the 1990s? Strictly speaking these were or are of course not real international organizations, but their cosmopolitan image effectively did resonate in the broad Muslim world, and inspired many terrorist acts. In his foreword for this 2002-edition, Roy argues that the new Islamic terror movements are in their turn an answer to the globalization that has been introduced in the 1980s. And of course, that is partly true, but this view doesn’t really satisfy me. There’s more to it, I guess.
In the final chapter Roy certainly asks relevant questions: is Islam a threat for western civilization or not, and is Islam reformable or not? Are Islamism and neo-fundamentalism logical consequences of the core-message of the Coran, or are they (temporary) deformations of islam? He gives a short outline of the debate and the polarisation that is going on about these issues. But it’s a pity Roy only partially answers these questions, and in a rather hasty and superficial way. So, all in all, this book seems to me to be rather out of date and not to offer many relevant insights anymore. ( )