Olivier Roy

In this book, Olivier Roy, Europe's leading scholar of political Islam, argues that the consequences of the "war on terror" have artificially conflated conflicts in the Middle East in such a way that they appear to be the expression of a widespread "Muslim anger" against the West. But in reality, there are no us and them. Instead, the West faces an array of "reverse alliances" that operate according to their own logic and dynamics. The West supports General Musharraf in Pakistan, yet his military intelligence services are in league with the Taliban; in Iraq, the United States shores up a government that is closely linked to its archenemy, Iran; Iraqi Kurds, allies of the Americans, give sanctuary to the PKK, an adversary of a fellow NATO member, Turkey; while the Saudis support the Iraqi Sunnis who are, in turn, fighting Coalition forces. As if these issues were not complicated enough, the ever-worsening Shia-Sunni divide now threatens to disrupt any future strategic planning the West might attempt in the Middle East. Roy unravels the complexity of these conflicts in order to better understand the political discontent that sustains them. He also emphasizes that the war on terror should not be regarded merely as a geopolitical blunder committed by a fringe group of neoconservatives. It is instead a problematic outgrowth of our deeply rooted Western perceptions of the Middle East, including the belief that Islam, rather than politics, is the overarching factor in these conflicts, thus explaining the West's support for either would-be secular democrats or (more or less) benign dictators. Roy's conclusion argues that the West has no alternative but to engage in a dialogue with the political forces that truly matter—namely the Islamo-nationalists of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

"The denunciation of fundamentalism in France, embodied in the law against the veil and the deportation of imams, has shifted into a systematic attack on all Muslims and Islam. This hostility is rooted in the belief that Islam cannot be integrated into French - and, consequently, secular and liberal - society. However, as Olivier Roy makes clear in this book, Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live concretely in a secularized world while maintaining their identities as "true believers." They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society." "Roy's rare portrait of the realities of immigrant Muslim life offers a necessary alternative to the popular specter of an "Islamic threat." Supporting his arguments with his extensive research on Islamic history, sociology, and politics, Roy demonstrates the limits of our understanding of contemporary Islamic religious practice in the West and the role of Islam as a screen onto which Western societies project their own identity crisis."--Jacket.

"In this exegesis of the movement of Islam beyond traditional borders and its unwitting westernisation, Olivier Roy argues that Islamic revival, or 're-Islamisation', results from the efforts of westernised 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 unimah, or Muslim community, not attached to 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 simple reaction against westernisation but a product and an agent of the complex forces of globalisation."--Jacket.

For many Westerners, ours seems to be the era of the "Islamic threat," with radical Muslims everywhere on the rise and on the march, remaking societies and altering the landscape of contemporary politics. In a powerful corrective to this view, the French political philosopher Olivier Roy presents an entirely different verdict: political Islam is a failure. Even if Islamic fundamentalists take power in countries like Algeria, they will be unable to reshape economics and politics and, in the name of "Islamic universalism," will express no more than nationalism or an even narrower agenda. Despite all the rhetoric about an "Islamic way," an "Islamic economy," and an "Islamic state," the realities of the Muslim world remain essentially unchanged. . Roy demonstrates that the Islamism of today is still the Third Worldism of the 1960s: populist politics and mixed economies of laissez-faire for the rich and subsidies for the poor. In Roy's striking formulation, those marching today beneath Islam's green banners are the same as the "reds" of yesterday, with similarly dim prospects of success. Roy has much to say about the sociology of radical Islam, about the set of ideas and assumptions at its core. He explains lucidly why Iran, for all the sound and fury of its revolution, has been unable to launch "sister republics" beyond its borders, and why the dream of establishing Islam as a "third force" in international relations remains a futile one. Richly informed, powerfully argued, and clearly written, this is a book that no one trying to understand Islamic fundamentalism can afford to overlook.

Collection of declassified documents and memoirs of former Soviet officials examining Soviet policymaking, military operations, and lessons learned from the last war in Afghanistan.

Western democracies are experiencing a new wave of right-wing populism that seeks to mobilize religion for its own ends. With chapters on the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland and Israel, Saving the People asks how populist movements have used religion for their own ends and how Church leaders react to them. The authors contend that religion is more about belonging than belief for populists, with religious identities and traditions being deployed to define who can and cannot be part of "the people." This in turn helps many populists to claim that native Christian communities are being threatend by a creeping and highly aggressive process of Islamization, with Muslims becoming a key "enemy of the people." While Church elites generally condemn this instrumental use of religions, populists take little heed, presenting themselves as the true saviors of the people. The policy implications of this phenomenon are significant, which makes this book all the more timely and relevant to current debate.