Books by Olivier Roy

In this book-length interview, Olivier Roy, a leading expert on political Islam, tells the story of how his many adventures and discoveries have shaped his understanding of the Islamic world. In Search of the Lost Orient is both a significant intellectual autobiography and a compelling travelogue.

Everything you need to know about how Islamic State attracts new followers, by a world-renowned sociologist of Islam.

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 "e;true believer."e; 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 "e;Muslim community"e; 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 "e;Islamic threat."e; 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.

Instead of freeing the world from religion, secularization has encouraged a kind of holy ignorance to take root. This book explores the options available to powers that hope to integrate or control these groups; and whether marginalization or homogenization will further divide believers from their culture.

Investigates the emergence of a militant deterritorialized Islam that has fewer links to any particular country and/or culture. This book argues that mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world have become Islamo-nationalist, recasting their political action within a national framework (e.g. the Hamas of Palestine, the Hezbullah of Lebanon).

Argues that Islamic revival, or "re-Islamization," results from the efforts of westernized Muslims to assert their identity in a non-Muslim context. This book provides a comparison of several transnational movements, whether peaceful, like Tablighi Jama'at and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda.