Globalized Islam : The Search for a New Ummah

by Roy, Olivier

• ISBN13: 9780231134996
• ISBN10: 0231134991
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-15
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
1. Introduction: Islam: A Passage to the West	1	(57)
The failure of political Islam: and what?	1	(16)
Islam as a minority	17	(4)
Acculturation and 'objectation' of Islam	21	(5)
Recasting identities, westernising religiosity	26	(3)
Where are the Muslim reformers?	29	(4)
Crisis of authority and self-enunciation	33	(2)
Religion as identity	35	(3)
The triumph of the self	38	(2)
Secularisation through religion?	40	(1)
Is jihad closer to Marx than to the Koran?	41	(14)
What is Bin Laden's strategy?	55	(3)
2. Post-Islamism	58	(42)
The failure of political Islam revisited	58	(4)
From Islamism to nationalism	62	(3)
States without nation, brothers without state	65	(2)
The crisis of diasporas	67	(2)
Islam is never a strategic factor as such	69	(3)
The political integration of Islamists	72	(3)
From utopia to conservatism	75	(3)
The elusive 'Muslim vote'	78	(2)
Democracy without democrats	80	(3)
The Iranian Islamic revolution: how politics defines religion	83	(5)
Islamisation as a factor of secularisation	88	(4)
Conservative re-Islamisation	92	(5)
Post-Islamism: the privatisation of religion	97	(3)
3. Muslims in the West	100	(48)
How to live as a stateless Muslim minority	107	(4)
Historical paradigms of Muslims as a minority	111	(6)
Acculturation and identity reconstruction	117	(31)
4. The Triumph of the Religious Self	148	(53)
The loss of religious authority and the 'objectification' of Islam	151	(5)
Immigration and reformulation of Islam	156	(2)
The crisis of authority and religious knowledge	158	(13)
The religious market and the sociology of Islamic actors	171	(4)
Individualisation of enunciation and propaganda	175	(10)
Faith and self	185	(2)
Humanism, ethical Islam and salvation	187	(5)
Enunciation of the self	192	(5)
Recommunitarisation and construction of identity	197	(4)
5. Islam in the West or the Westernisation of Islam	201	(31)
The building of Muslim 'churches'	201	(19)
Neo-brotherhoods and New Age religiosity	220	(12)
6. The Modernity of an Archaic Way of Thinking: Neofundamentalism	232	(58)
Sources and actors of neofundamentalism	234	(9)
The basic tenets of neofundamentalism	243	(4)
Neofundamentalists and Islamists	247	(7)
Neofundamentalists and radical violence	254	(3)
Why is neofundamentalism successful?	257	(30)
The new frontier of the imagined ummah	287	(3)
7. On the Path to War: Bin Laden and Others	290	(36)
Al Qaeda and the new terrorists	294	(10)
Deterritorialisation	304	(4)
Re-Islamisation in the West	308	(1)
Uprooting and acculturation	309	(3)
The peripheral jihad	312	(3)
The Western-born or second generation Muslims	315	(2)
The converts and the 'protest conversion'	317	(2)
The subcontractors	319	(2)
The future of Al Qaeda	321	(5)
8. Remapping the World: Civilisation, Religion and Strategy	326	(15)
Culture, religion and civilisations: the conundrum of clash and dialogue	328	(7)
The debate on values	335	(2)
Military strategy on abstract territories	337	(4)
Index	341