As Europe wrangles over questions of national identity, nativism and immigration, Olivier Roy interrogates the place of Christianity, foundation of Western identity. Do secularism and Islam really pose threats to the continent's 'Christian values'? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe? Rather than repeating the familiar narrative of decline, Roy challenges the significance of secularized Western nations' reduction of Christianity to a purely cultural force- relegated to issues such as abortion, euthanasia and equal marriage. He illustrates that, globally, quite the opposite has occurred: Christianity is now universalized, and detached from national identity. Not only has it taken hold in the Global South, generally in a more socially conservative form than in the West, but it has also 'returned' to Europe, following immigration from former colonies. Despite attempts within Europe to nationalize or even racialize it, Christianity's future is global, non-European and immigrant-as the continent's Churches well know. This short but bracing book confirms Roy's reputation as one of the most acute observers of our times. It represents a persuasive and novel vision of religion's place in national life today.

Is Europe Christian?

History

Roy, Olivier

Schoch, Cynthia

World

Oxford University Press

How has Islamic State been able to muster support far beyond its initial constituency in the Arab world and attract tens of thousands of foreign volunteers, including converts to Islam, and seemingly countless supporters online? In this compelling intervention into the debate about Islamic State's origins and future prospects, the renowned French political scientist, Olivier Roy, argues that while terrorism and jihadism are familiar phenomena, the group's deliberate pursuit of death has produced a new kind of radical violence. In other words, we're facing not a radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism. Indeed, Roy argues, young European Muslims drawn to IS are attracted to the organization's violent means rather than utopian dreams of a caliphate. He places IS in the context of other radical millenialist groups such as China's Red Guards, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, and Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. In doing so, he shows that violence, not religious fundamentalism, is the central thread connecting young people who are drawn to radical groups. Jihad and Death is a concise dissection of the highly sophisticated narrative mobilized by IS: the myth of the caliphate recast into a modern story of heroism and nihilism.

Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State

The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms

Politics & Social Sciences

Selous, Trista

Sociology

Olivier Roy argues that the unintended and unforeseen consequences of the "war on terror" have artificially conflated conflicts in the Middle East such that they appear to be the expression of a widespread "Muslim anger" against the West. In this new book he seeks to restore the individual logic and dynamics of each of these conflicts, the better to understand the widespread political discontent that sustains them. Instead of two opposed sides, an "us" and a "them," he warns that the West faces an array of "reverse alliances": in Pakistan the West backs General Musharraf, whose military intelligence services support the Taliban; in Iraq the United States shores up a government that has close links to its arch-enemy, Iran; the Iraqi Kurds, allies of the Americans, give sanctuary to an adversary (the PKK) of a fellow NATO member, Turkey; while the Saudis support the Iraqi Sunnis who are fighting Coalition forces. If these issues were not enough to contend with, the Shia-Sunni divide has emerged as one of the leading strategic factors in the Middle East. But the "war on terror" is not merely the geopolitical blunder of a lunatic neo-conservative fringe in Washington; it is also deeply rooted in Western perceptions of the Middle East. Chief among these is the belief that Islam, rather than politics, is the overarching factor in all such conflicts, which in turn explains the West's support for either would be secular democrats or more or less benign dictators. Roy concludes by arguing that the West has no alternative but to engage in a dialogue with the political forces that count, namely the Islamo-nationalists of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (Ceri Series in Comparative Politics)

Social Sciences

Al Qaida was unable to realize its lethal potential until it found sanctuary in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden fled after being expelled from Sudan. But why was the network's sanctuary not attacked before September 2001, especially after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998? Abou Zahab and Roy argue that the Taliban was part of a much wider radical Islamist network in the region, whose true center was Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Al Qaida, the Taliban, the Pakistani Deobandis -- all of these groups are based in Pakistan, which continues to serve as the regional hub for Islamist movements and their terrorist offshoots. 
This indispensable book investigates and explains the almost twenty-five-year gestation of these interlinked radical Islamist networks of Pakistan, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, out of which Al Qaida emerged. Taking into account the networks'divergent histories and doctrinal rifts, the authors lay bare the political contingencies that enabled these disparate Islamist movements to coordinate with the aim of attacking what became their common adversary: the United States.

Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (The CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies)

Abou Zahab, Mariam

Asia

Columbia University Press

Al Qaida was unable to realize its lethal potential until it found sanctuary in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden fled after being expelled from Sudan. But why was the network's sanctuary not attacked before September 2001, especially after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998? Abou Zahab and Roy argue that the Taliban was part of a much wider radical Islamist network in the region, whose true center was Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Al Qaida, the Taliban, the Pakistani Deobandis―all of these groups are based in Pakistan, which continues to serve as the regional hub for Islamist movements and their terrorist offshoots. This indispensable book investigates and explains the almost twenty-five-year gestation of these interlinked radical Islamist networks of Pakistan, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, out of which Al Qaida emerged. Taking into account the networks'divergent histories and doctrinal rifts, the authors lay bare the political contingencies that enabled these disparate Islamist movements to coordinate with the aim of attacking what became their common adversary: the United States.

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.

Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies)

Middle East

Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies (Paperback))

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 the identity of a "true believer." They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society. Western society is unable to recognize this process, Roy argues, because of a cultural bias that assumes religious practice is embedded within a specific, traditional culture that must be either erased entirely or forced to coexist in a neutral, multicultural space. Instead, Roy shows that new forms of religiosity, such as Islamic fundamentalism and Christian evangelicalism, have come to thrive in post-traditional, secular contexts precisely because they remain detached from any cultural background. In recognizing this, Roy recasts the debate concerning Islam and democracy. Analyzing the French case in particular, in which the tension between Islam and the conception of Western secularism is exacerbated, Roy makes important distinctions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, hegemony and tolerance, and the role of the umma and the sharia in Muslim religious life. He pits Muslim religious revivalism against similar movements in the West, such as evangelical Protestantism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and refutes the myth of a single "Muslim community" by detailing different groups and their inability to overcome their differences. 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 brilliantly 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.

Secularism Confronts Islam

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roy, Olivier. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Roy, Olivier

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roy, Olivier. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Is Europe Christian?

Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State

The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms

Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (Ceri Series in Comparative Politics)

Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (The CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies)

Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (The CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies)

Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies)

Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies (Paperback))

Secularism Confronts Islam

Secularism Confronts Islam