The spread of Islam around the globe has blurred the connection
between a religion, a specific society, and a territory. One-third
of the world's Muslims now live as members of a minority. At the
heart of this development is, on the one hand, the voluntary
settlement of Muslims in Western societies and, on the other, the
pervasiveness and influence of Western cultural models and social
norms. The revival of Islam among Muslim populations in the last
twenty years is often wrongly perceived as a backlash against
westernization rather than as one of its consequences.
Neofundamentalism has been gaining ground among a rootless Muslim
youth -- particularly among the second- and third-generation
migrants in the West -- and this phenomenon is feeding new forms of
radicalism, ranging from support for Al Qaeda to the outright
rejection of integration into Western society.
In this brilliant exegesis of the movement of Islam beyond
traditional borders and its unwitting westernization, Olivier Roy
argues that Islamic revival, or "re-Islamization," results from the
efforts of westernized Muslims to assert their identity in a
non-Muslim context. A schism has emerged between mainstream
Islamist movements in the Muslim world -- including Hamas of
Palestine and Hezbollah 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 Tablighi Jama'at and the Islamic brotherhoods, or
violent, like Al Qaeda. He shows how neofundamentalism acknowledges
without nostalgia the loss of pristine cultures, constructing
instead a universal religious identity that transcends the very
notion of culture. Thus contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is not
a single-note reaction against westernization but a product and an
agent of the complex forces of globalization.
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