Custom and practice

Olivier Roy provides a valuable snapshot of the Islamic world in Globalised Islam, says Jonathan Steele
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Jonathan Steele

Globalised Islam by Olivier Roy Fear is often based on simplifying or even inventing the dangers that surround the frightened. Working from this premise, Olivier Roy's career as one of the west's most knowledgeable scholars of "Islam in practice" has been devoted to combating its demonisation. By laying out the multiplicity of different forms of Muslim behaviour he has always aimed to show there is no single Islam just as there is no single Christianity. In The Failure of Political Islam he argued provocatively in the early 1990s that Islamist movements were running out of revolutionary steam. They would either become normal political parties, as has subsequently happened in Jordan and Turkey, or they would lead to a kind of individual neo-fundamentalism. Islamists would drop out of the political arena, preferring to become "bornagain Muslims" and concentrate on social, ethical, and lifestyle issues rather than on political change or the creation of an Islamic state. His new book provides one of the best and most detailed snapshots of "real existing Islam" currently available. In it he takes his earlier argument forward by focusing on what he calls post-Islamism or "globalised Islam". Thanks to emigration one third of the world's Muslims now live as members of a minority, many of them in western countries. This has produced a deterritorialisation of Islam. Trying to create an Islamic state makes no sense for groups who are minorities and will remain minorities for decades to come.

Coupled with the inevitable clash between different generations of immigrants as children rebel or move away intellectually from their parents, he sees a crisis in the social authority of Islam everywhere. Some abandon it altogether. For others the path leads to a shift towards religiosity rather than religion, as they increasingly look for their own interpretations of what constitutes correct behaviour and belief. There is a kind of privatisation of faith. This change equally affects Muslims in Muslim countries. The onward march of westernisation affects their societies, too, and even when there has been a backlash against the trend, the usual aim is not to return to some golden pre-modern age. Instead, the goal is how to "Islamise modernity". A journalist as much as an academic, Roy's insights are refreshingly based on concrete data. He lives in a small French town where a third of the population is Muslim. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Islamic trends around the world, and is right up to the minute in relentlessly searching for evidence and ideas from the growing number of Islamic websites and chatrooms. In one typical example he writes of the complex religiosity of a Tunisian who sells wine in a Parisian corner-shop, attends a mosque, donates money to a fundamentalist organisation, and votes for the Front National because he's upset about crime. He writes of French Muslims who let their children attend Christmas parties at school, or joined the communist-led union in the car plants that employed them - which led in exchange to the union pushing for prayer-rooms at the workplace. Roy knocks the idea that the problems of the contemporary Muslim world can be explained in terms of Islam. He is amused by the soaring sales of the Koran in the west after 9/11, as non-Muslims rushed to find out what it said

about this or that. "The key question is not what the Koran really says, but what Muslims say the Koran says", he writes. "Not surprisingly, they disagree while all stressing that the Koran is clear-cut. The issue here is not Islam as a theological corpus, but the discourses and practice of Muslims". Pointing out that most of the world's Muslims are not Arabs, he suggests that the main reason for the political backwardness of the Arab world may be Arab culture rather than Islam. Nor is it true that secularisation leads to democracy. In the Middle East secularisation is associated with dictatorship, whether you take the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, President Ben Ali in Tunisia, or the cancellation of Algeria's parliamentary elections in 1992 on the grounds that the Islamists would have won. The issue is not whether democracy is on the move, Roy argues. What is under way is sociological modernisation. Although the Islamic republic of Iran lowered the legal age of marriage for women to nine, the real average age of marriage has gone on rising in Iran and reached 22 by 1996. Literacy rates among Iranian women rose from 28% to 80% between 1976 and 1996. Another of Roy's fascinating points is that Muslims in the west are no longer foreigners. This does not mean they have been assimilated in the French sense or integrated in the Anglo-Saxon sense as a component of a new multicultural society. Like anyone else, every individual Muslim embraces a variety of potential identities which they can highlight at any given moment according to choice. They cannot be typecast any more. One result of deterritorialisation is that Middle Eastern students who graduate in the west may never go home. An Egyptian- born member of the Muslim Brotherhood may teach in Kuala Lumpur before moving to Florida or Berlin. In either case they form part of an uprooted and cosmopolitan Muslim intelligentsia (whose common language may be English rather than Arabic) which cannot be defined as a diaspora because it is increasingly

remote from a country of origin - "an Iraqi Kurd in exile can decide whether he is first an Iraqi, a Kurd, or a Muslim". Once you realise that religion and culture have been decoupled, then the "clash of civilisations" debate loses all relevance. Roy concludes that globalisation and westernisation have become unstoppable, both among Muslims living in the west and those who still inhabit Muslim societies. Its central component is a new focus on the individual. For some people this may mean a shift to fundmentalism, a revival of Islam or a re-Islamisation. "There is a stress on the self, a quest for personal real isation and an individual reconstruction of attitudes towards religion. Faith is more important than dogma", Roy argues. This new kind of religion appeals to young, often well-educated but frustrated young people. It often contains a large dose of anti-intellectualism and leads to a more emotional, belief-based religiosity. It provides Muslims with an identity as well as solidarity with other people who regularly "practise" their religion. But true to his general principle of trying to demystify Islam, Roy points out that the same factors are present in the revival of Protestant fundamentalism. We may deplore the relative absence of liberal reformist thinkers in Islam, but that is also a problem with global Protestantism. And the good news, as Roy sees it, is that secularisation is the majority trend.