Foreign affairs: overview and key issues

¶ … Politics Book Review

Roy, Oliver. (2004) Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah -- the Ceri Series in Comparative Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.

One of the most perplexing questions for political analysts today is what is the most 'correct' rubric with which to view the emerging diversity of the Islamic world, without subsuming its many regional and religious questions and differences. For example, how to balance, in the emerging politics of post-war Iraq, the complex and long interrelationships between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as protect minority and ethnic religious groups such as the Kurds? Oliver Roy suggests that, rather than view Islam as a seamless ideology that political analysts must take a comparative perspective upon various Islamic movements in different national and regional concepts.

Oliver Roy states that, despite Islamic neo-fundamentalist rhetoric to the contrary, there never was, nor can there be one singular Islamic mindset. Although Islamic differences are often elided in the American public's imagination, as well as in the speeches of some radical Islamic leaders, the Islamic world has never stood as unified politically and religiously, except in glorified and unrealistic projected future dreams of some religious zealots. Roy writes to both Islamic scholars of the West and pan-Islamic ideologues when he states that the differences as well as the similarities between Islamic ideologies must be acknowledged.

Furthermore, Roy goes on to suggest that the Islamic neo-fundamentalist movement stand at a crossroads, and is in far more disarray than one might think. Either, it can either eschew the ideology of innate Islamic differences with the West in the form of the modern nation state, or embrace fundamentalism in a religious fashion and look inward -- however, it cannot go on ignoring the differences between a Muslim in Chechnya, Russia, in Bosnia, and Saudi Arabia, regardless of an apparent shared religious ideology, and assert that all three fundamentalists will share the same political concerns, regardless of social and economic needs, status and borders. National contextual needs and social perceptions will change the way different Muslims view their Islamic faith. In France, a North African, "is an Arab" if he is "under thirty and from a poor neighborhood," and of dark skin, while a Saudi Prince living in Paris as an exchange student is simply "a Saudi prince" (4)

Why has such a de facto ideological schism emerged between different Islamic groups and nationalities? Roy believes Islamism in the form of building a modern political Islamic state that protects minority rights and has a sense of national containment often has little appeal for Islamic individuals living "uprooted" or as migrants or who find themselves living as an ethnic as well as a religious minority. (1) in other words, the North African is more likely to become radicalized than the aforementioned prince in Paris, because of his socially marginal status and paradoxically, his permanent sense of being uprooted from his national culture and home, as well as Parisian society's hostility to his faith. Neo-fundamentalism's pan-Islamic ideology has a profound appeal only for such displaced Muslim ethnic groups, as is also evidenced in Palestinian radical mobilization in such groups as Hamas.

But for Algerian Muslims living happily in Algiers, in comparison, this is not often the case. In fact, the author points to the behavior of the Algerians during their last election, noting that many nationals were openly calling for greater democratization in the street. They did not see this as incompatible with an Islamic state, necessarily, because they were more secure in their fused national and Islamic identity, and did not need neo-fundamentalist Islam to be the main source of their status and identity. The more secure, nationalistic, and unified the Islamic populace, the less appeal neo-fundamentalism's pan-Islamic ideology has, while "deterritorialism" has produced the transformation of Islamic conservatism into terrorist, radical Islam united across borders, as migrant and alienated Islamic ethnicities strive for some coherent voice and identity. (2) Oliver Roy even goes so far as to call such political movements "post-Islamism" for often the political needs of the groups are subsumed to the religious expressions of Islam. Roy calls the old ideology of fused interests in the name of Islam a "myth," but sees the current neo-fundamentalist ideology as no less mythic in the way that it denies social and regional needs in a schematic polarization and politicization of the tenants of the religion.