Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah » (1st Edition)

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).

A schism has emerged between mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world (e.g. Hamas of Palestine and Hezbullah 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 Tabligh Jamaat and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda. Neofundamentalism, he argues, is both a product and an agent of globalization.

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 ofIslam
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