Chapter 1 – Introduction – Islam: A Passage to the West
The failure of political Islam: and what?
In the book ‘Failure of Political Islam’ Olivier Roy argued that the conceptual framework of Islamist
parties was unable to provide an effective blueprint for an Islamic state. He concluded that Islamist
movements were running out of steam as a revolutionary force and had reached a crossroads:
• They could either opt for political normalisation within the framework of the modern nation-
state, or
• Evolve towards what he termed neofundamentalism, a closed, scripturalist and conservative
view of Islam that rejects the national and statist dimension in favour of the ummah, the
universal community of all Muslims, based on sharia (Islamic law).
At first glance neofundamentalism is less politically minded than Islamist movements — being more
concerned with implementing sharia than with defining what a true Islamic state should be. The
evolution of Algeria's FIS, Turkey's Refah Partisi (Welfare Party), Tunisia's Nahda party and the
liberals in Iran towards if not democratic, then at least parliamentarian movements — advocating
elections, political coalitions, democracy and the defence of ‘civil society’ in the face of authoritarian
secular states or conservative religious leaders — is evidence enough that many Islamist groups have
become ‘normal’ national parties, and that the principal obstacle to democracy is not the Islamists per
se, but the Muslim world's more or less secular authoritarian states, supported by the West.
Notwithstanding its internal dynamic, Islamism (the building of an Islamic state) has little appeal for
many Muslims who have no desire to be involved in such a project because they are uprooted, migrants
and/or living in a minority. These Muslims experience the deterritorialization of Islam. When they
turn to religious revivalism, other paths, including neofundamentalism, appeal most strongly to them.
Neofundamentalism has gained ground among rootless Muslim youth, particularly among second- and
third-generation migrants in the West. Even if only a small minority is involved, the phenomenon
feeds new forms of radicalisation, but also a new sectarian communitarian discourse, advocating
multiculturalism as a means of rejecting integration into Western society. These Muslims do not
identify with any given nation-state, and are more concerned with imposing Islamic norms among
Muslim societies and minorities and fighting to reconstruct a universal Muslim community, or ummah.
Thus, they occasionally resort to the sort of internationalist and jihadist militancy directed against the
Western world that was previously the Islamist trademark. The spread of a radical and militant
neofundamentalism has developed in parallel with two growing trends:
• The burgeoning throughout the Muslim world of networks of more or less private madrasas
(religious schools), and;
• The deterritorialization through migration of a huge proportion of the Muslim population.
The two main issues Roy addresses are post-Islamism and globalised Islam, both revolving around
the concept of deterritorialization.
A post-Islamist society is one in which the Islamist parenthesis (in the sense of a temporary
experiment) has profoundly altered relationships between Islam and politics by giving the political
precedence over the religious in the name of religion itself. The paradoxical result of the
overpoliticisation of religion by Islamism is that Muslim religious sentiment is seeking, beyond or
beneath politics, autonomous spaces and means of expression, feeding contradictory and burgeoning
forms of religiosity, from a call for wider implementation of sharia to the revival of Sufism. The
contemporary religious revival in Islam is targeting society more than the state and calling to the
individual's spiritual needs. Post-Islamism does not go hand in hand with a decline of religion; rather
it expresses the crisis of the relationship between religion and politics and between religion and the
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,state, as well as a trend towards a fragmentation of religious identity and authority. This is coupled with
a reinforcement of 'imagined identities', from religious communities to invented neo-ethnic, or even
racial, denominations. Post-Islamism does not imply the emergence of a secular society as such. It is
primarily the reaffirmation of the autonomy of the political, of the struggle for power, of the logic of
national or ethnic interests, of the precedence of politics over religion. It means that even in an Islamic
state like Iran the role and status of religion are decided by the political.
Contrary to the situation in Europe, where secularisation sprang from the rejection of the overwhelming
ideological domination of religion, what we are witnessing in the Muslim world is the process by which
a religion, which almost everybody considers to be pre dominant, is trying to live up to its de facto
political marginalisation.
The cliché which states that in Islam there is no difference between politics (or state, dawlat) and
religion (din) is used to justify the claim that the difficulty of separating state from religion in Islam
militates in favour of the prevalence of religion in the social and political realms. On the contrary, Roy
argues that the exact reverse is true: it works in favour of the political, in the broad sense. The
contemporary wave of re-Islamisation is, even unconsciously, a quest for the autonomy of the religious
in an already secularised society.
It makes no sense to hope that Muslim societies might undergo the same process of secularisation as
did the Christian societies of the West, because the everyday relationship between religion and politics
is different. The difference is not the overwhelming influence of religion on politics in Muslim
countries, but rather the predominance of political (and sociological) factors and actors (not necessarily
the state) that, because they have instrumentalised religion, are at ease with a conservative, inward-
looking and ossified religion. There is definitely a link between the growing deterritorialization of
Islam (namely the growing number of Muslims living in Western non-Muslim countries) and the
spread of specific forms of religiosity, from radical neofundamentalism to a renewal of spirituality or
an insistence on Islam as a system of values and ethics.
Re-Islamisation does not entail a re-examination of basic religious dogmas. The new forms of
religiosity under scrutiny have more to do with the transformation of religiosity that has been observed
in Christianity during the late twentieth century, or more precisely the predominance of religiosity (self-
formulation and self-expression of a personal faith) over religion (a coherent corpus of beliefs and
dogmas collectively managed by a body of legitimate holders of knowledge).
Neofundamentalism and radical violence are more linked with westernisation than with a return to
the Koran. In short, we are following a transversal approach to Islam, by means of a comparison with
the Western world, rather than a diachronic approach, looking to history to understand the roots of
‘Muslim anger’. Roy considers that at the roots of neofundamentalism, spiritualism and liberal Islam
have many points in common. The primary parallel is the shift of emphasis from religion to religiosity
— that is, the individualisation of religiosity and the crisis of the social authority of religion — leading
to the reconstruction of a purely religious community. Second, the many different Islams (liberal,
fundamentalist, conservative) with which we are familiar are more a construction than a reality,
especially if one looks not at ideas but at the life path of an individual.
Islam is seen as a discrete entity, a coherent and closed set of beliefs, values and anthropological patterns
embodied in a common society, history and territory, which allows us to use the term as an explanatory
concept for almost everything involving Muslims. To say that the Koran never promoted jihad as a
military campaign or to stress the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire is irrelevant in explaining current
events. Like many of his colleagues, Roy has been dismayed by the short-cutting innuendoes and ready-
made statements (often used by Islamic fundamentalists themselves, such as 'In Islam there is no
separation between religion and politics'), and by apologetic and boring conferences on Islam (Islam:
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,A Message of Peace', 'Human Rights in Islam') that preach only to the converted (and not even to all of
them).
Critics and ‘defenders’ of Islam remain locked in a culturalist approach. There is constant confusion
between Islam as a religion and ‘Muslim’ culture.
• Islam as a religion comprises the Koran, the Sunnah and the commentaries of the ulama;
• Muslim or Islamic culture includes literature, traditions, sciences, social relationships,
cuisine, historical and political paradigms, urban life, and so on.
A sacred book is not Napoleon's Civil Code or an insurance policy, where everything is put in
unequivocal terms. By definition it has various meanings and is subject to argument and interpretation.
If there is still a debate about what the Koran really says, it means that nobody really knows, or at least
that the people who think they know disagree among themselves — thus we find ourselves back at
square one. The key question is not what the Koran actually says, but what Muslims say the Koran says.
Not surprisingly they disagree, while all stressing that the Koran is unambiguous and clear-cut. The
issue here is not Islam as a theological corpus, but the discourses and practices of Muslims. The same
is true of Islam as 'a culture'.
The culturalist approach is based on one principle: culture does exist in itself, is transmitted from
generation to generation, and is the ultimate explanatory model of any society.
A religion is usually embedded in one or more cultures, but cannot be reduced to a single culture. One
can of course outline some correlations between a religion and a set of social practices, but it is difficult
to establish a causal relationship between them. Why did Muslim Turkey develop a modern state
system? Is it simply because its people are Turks and not Arabs? In that case, is not Arab culture the
main reason for the political backwardness of the Arab world, instead of Islam? But how does one
dissociate Arab culture from Islam? Just bring the two words together and you have the explanation!
To explain a society by a religion leads full circle.
The culturalist approach is reinforced by the confusion between Middle East and Islam. There is a
constant confusion between Muslims and Arabs. Most of the examples used to show that Islam has a
problem with modernity deal with the Arab Middle East, but not with Malaysia or Turkey. The role of
Islam in shaping contemporary societies has been overemphasised. Westernisation (or globalisation or
modernisation) is happening, whatever the official ideology of certain countries says to the contrary.
The obvious manifestations of re-Islamisation in terms of personal behaviour (hijab, or veil; beards)
and a growth in religious practices and even state legislation (from Algeria to Iran) did not prompt a
reversion to traditional patterns of family life (such as polygamy and the extended family with numerous
children); on the contrary, it accompanied a process of westernisation. We tend to overemphasise the
Islamic factor in the very process of Islamisation, and miss all the others. Relationships between
Islamisation and globalisation must be scrutinised more closely, therefore. But the process of
westernisation is not confined to purely sociological factors. It also includes ethics and religiosity (with
the stress on values, professional success and personal achievement.
The perception of the opposition between the West and Islam in terms of a debate on ‘values’ is biased
because Western values are seen in the West as being consensual, which is nonsense. Dialogue between
pro-lifers and pro-choicers, patriots and human-rightists, statists and free-marketeers and so on, shows
that in the West there is a debate on values, which could cross-cut the same debate in Muslim countries.
Most culturalist approaches fail because they see a culture as a fairly homogeneous set of values,
downplaying a centuries-old history of civil wars, Kulturkampf and ideological conflicts. The
dominant and final consensus in the West is about institutions, not values. Once again, the real
explanation is at the political level, not that of cultural factors, which are elusive and difficult to prove.
Historical and cultural paradigms are misleading to the extent that they do not help us to understand
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, what is new. Roy suggests not that we have to look beyond Islam, but that we should take Islamisation
as a contemporary phenomenon that expresses the globalisation and westernisation of the Muslim
world. The drawback of the 'secularisation' of Middle Eastern studies is that it misses the permanence
of the religious dimension, and, as a reverse effect, it reinforces identification of Islam with the Middle
East by reducing the religious dimension of a socio-political approach to Middle Eastern societies. The
idea that there are 'different' Islams is also an old one, but it usually sees an Arab-centred Islamology,
as opposed to other geocultural identities: African Islam, Indonesian Islam, and why not European
Islam?
The culturalist approach has also been given new life by immigration: the presence of religious
minorities in the West has usually been dealt with under the concept of ‘multiculturalism’, which
contributes to the restoration of the idea of distinctive 'cultures'. In fact, the multiculturalist approach
works both on the side of:
• The conservative Western Right and;
▪ For them there is a Western civilisation based on Christianity, whose identity is
revitalised because the ‘other’ belongs to a symmetrical religion, which helped in
history to build a minor identity between Islam and Christendom.
• Among progressive intellectuals and social workers.
▪ For them the assumption of different cultures in the West is a way to demote
Christianity from its dominant position.
But for Roy both approaches tend to subsume the diversity and creativity of the individual approaches
inside each of the 'cultures', and to ignore the transversal patterns common to these 'cultures'. Since
the Iranian revolution of 1979, the collapse of the USSR and the 9/11 attacks, Islam has been seen by
many observers as the main threat confronting the West. Many, if not most, of the conflicts where
Western interests are concerned involve Muslim countries. The most active radical organisations of the
past twenty years have been Islamic. Moreover, an important Muslim population has recently been
established in the West, mainly in Western Europe, while the Muslim question has resurfaced in Eastern
Europe with the creation of two new ‘Muslim’ countries, Bosnia and Kosovo, even if the latter is
nominally part of Serbia.
In Europe the issue of immigration is also largely linked with the issue of Islam (which is not the case
in the United States. There is, in Europe, a conjunction between Islam, colonial history, a territorial
frontier with the south, immigration, and the contemporary spaces of social exclusion. This conjunction,
which shapes the European perception of Islam, makes no sense to Americans, whose short-lived
colonial history never involved a Muslim. Ostensible religiosity is part of US social and political life,
while it always comes under some suspicion in Europe.
• European Christian churchgoers share the same reluctance as secularists towards the
inscription of Muslim religious practices in the public sphere; in fact, they would like to have
more secular Muslims, while;
• In the United States the debate is not about public expression of religiosity but about sharing
common values, in religious and ethical terms.
Under such circumstances, one might have expected a more flexible approach from the United States
on the ‘Muslim issue’. But this is not the case. Since 9/11 the same clichés regarding Islam have been
at work in the intellectual debate on both sides of the Atlantic. In this sense, despite the differences in
the historical backgrounds of the United States and Western Europe, and in the sociological composition
of the Muslim population in those regions, now we can speak of a common Western approach to Islam.
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