The Failure of Political Islam

Rating:
Summary: A Necessary European & Francophone perspective
Review: Contrary to several previous "reviewers" Oliver Roy's conclusions strike home quite convincingly....While also a Muslim, more importantly for this review, I am also a social scientist. Too much about "political Islam" has been written in English by Anglo-American scholars and journalists, who represent that particular cultural perspective, irrespective of differing approaches. French scholarship differs greatly as the Franco-Muslim world relationship runs much deeper and has more complexity than that of the Americans, who generally present a rather stereotyped view...more out of a naive and ideological narrowness than any "hidden agenda". Here, I would add a note from Amin Malouf's brilliant study of the Crusades from an Arab historical view...one can see the failure of Turko-Arab political rule from the 10th century on in its inability to change and adapt to a process of less totalitarian and oppressive form of domination over their own --remembering that Turks ruled most of the Arab world for the past 1000 years. Thus, as Roy finds, the "reds" of the 1970's have become the "greens (Islamists) of the 1990's, which corroborates Abdullah Laroui's premise in the "Crisis of the Arab Intellectual" -- that there is a totalizing cultural predeliction to blindly follow A or B shifting this way and that without critical, analytic, and compartive thought.. So too, most critical thinking Muslim social scientists, like Mohammed Arkoun, are emigres & refugees in Europe, France in particular, as they have had to face oppression & death in their own countries.Thus one must read Roy in the light of a tradition of Franco-Arab scholarship that differs epistemologically from that of the Anglo-American world, thereby referring to and a host of French Islamists, including Jaque Berque, Braudel, Rodinson, and Francophone Muslim scholars, who continue to be at the cutting edge of analytical interpretation.

Rating:
Summary: A Necessary European & Francophone perspective
Review: Contrary to several previous "reviewers" Oliver Roy's conclusions strike home quite convincingly....While also a Muslim, more importantly for this review, I am also a social scientist. Too much about "political Islam" has been written in English by Anglo-American scholars and journalists, who represent that particular cultural perspective, irrespective of differing approaches. French scholarship differs greatly as the Franco-Muslim world relationship runs much deeper and has more complexity than that of the Americans, who generally present a rather stereotyped view...more out of a naive and ideological narrowness than any "hidden agenda". Here, I would add a note from Amin Malouf's brilliant study of the Crusades from an Arab historical view...one can see the failure of Turko-Arab political rule from the 10th century on in its inability to change and adapt to a process of less totalitarian and oppressive form of domination over their own --remembering that Turks ruled most of the Arab world for the past 1000 years. Thus, as Roy finds, the "reds" of the 1970's have become the "greens (Islamists) of the 1990's, which corroborates Abdullah Laroui's premise in the "Crisis of the Arab Intellectual" -- that there is a totalizing cultural predeliction to blindly follow A or B shifting this way and that without critical, analytic, and compartive thought.. So too, most critical thinking Muslim social scientists, like Mohammed Arkoun, are emigres & refugees in Europe, France in particular, as they have had to face oppression & death in their own countries.Thus one must read Roy in the light of a tradition of Franco-Arab scholarship that differs epistemologically from that of the Anglo-American world, thereby referring to and a host of French Islamists, including Jaque Berque, Braudel, Rodinson, and Francophone Muslim scholars, who continue to be at the cutting edge of analytical interpretation.

Rating:
Summary: Small on Content, Big on Hype
Review: Olivier Roy is basically the founder of the francophone position that Islamism is basically a failure and its nastier incarnations are the result of this failures rather than its successes. Mostly, however, this work is a poorly written book with a novel thesis that has been adapted and put in a much more rigorous scholarly study by Gilles Kepel.

Admittedly, there is something `catchy' about his writing. Roy assures us that the inner contradictions of this movement will collapse in on itself and inadvertently cause the secularism that all of the bourgeoisies have come to enjoy.

The weaknesses of this work as a piece of scholarship are many, but I'll the two principle ones. For one, it is methodologically contradictory. As is customary today in Mid East scholarship, he disavows Orientalist sins by claiming there is no such thing as a monolithic Islam only a plurality of Islams, then he goes on to state that political Islam is one of these "Islams". Oddly enough, though spanning multiple continents and a multitude of countries, he seems that he believes political Islam IS a monolith. By the end, the picture that results is that of monolithic, triumphant modernity mocking an impotent, fanatic, and frustrated nativist politics.

Secondly, any glance at the bibliography would reveal that Roy's work is more or less a hodge-podge of secondary source material-not even a wide spectrum of sources are used and many are journalistic in nature. A lack of knowledge of requisite languages is apparent as he makes the classic mistakes of doubling Arabic plurals, butchering Arabic phrases, and outright mis-translating words.

Though oddly famous, this work is mostly a waste of time. For francophone scholarship, there are much more worthwhile scholars such as François Burgat and Gilles Kepel.

Rating:
Summary: Small on Content, Big on Hype
Review: Olivier Roy is basically the founder of the francophone position that Islamism is basically a failure and its nastier incarnations are the result of this failures rather than its successes. Mostly, however, this work is a poorly written book with a novel thesis that has been adapted and put in a much more rigorous scholarly study by Gilles Kepel.

Admittedly, there is something 'catchy' about his writing. Roy assures us that the inner contradictions of this movement will collapse in on itself and inadvertently cause the secularism that all of the bourgeoisies have come to enjoy.

The weaknesses of this work as a piece of scholarship are many, but I'll the two principle ones. For one, it is methodologically contradictory. As is customary today in Mid East scholarship, he disavows Orientalist sins by claiming there is no such thing as a monolithic Islam only a plurality of Islams, then he goes on to state that political Islam is one of these "Islams". Oddly enough, though spanning multiple continents and a multitude of countries, he seems that he believes political Islam IS a monolith. By the end, the picture that results is that of monolithic, triumphant modernity mocking an impotent, fanatic, and frustrated nativist politics.

Secondly, any glance at the bibliography would reveal that Roy's work is more or less a hodge-podge of secondary source material-not even a wide spectrum of sources are used and many are journalistic in nature. A lack of knowledge of requisite languages is apparent as he makes the classic mistakes of doubling Arabic plurals, butchering Arabic phrases, and outright mis-translating words.

Though oddly famous, this work is mostly a waste of time. For francophone scholarship, there are much more worthwhile scholars such as François Burgat and Gilles Kepel.

Rating:
Summary: WHOSE FAILURE?
Review: Political Islam a failure? Roy, a very knowledgeable French analyst of Islam, knows developments in the Muslim world well, so "failure" in his vocabulary obviously refers to something other than conventional political power. In fact, he means by failure that the drive for political power (dubbed Islamism) is giving way to a less ambitious focusing on the family and the mosque (neofundamentalism). Tehran furthers Islamism, Riyadh sponsors neofundamentalism. Outside of Iran itself, he argues, Islamism has failed and the weaker cause of neofundamentalism has flourished. Roy grandly declares "the Islamic revolution is behind us," even in Iran: "[T]he Tehran of the mullahs," he asserts in an astonishing passage, "has a very American look." Fundamentalist Islam, accordingly, poses no great challenge to the West. "Today, any Islamist political victory in a Muslim country would produce only superficial changes in customs and law."

Roy's well-translated book is replete with fine insights and memorable epigrams. (My favorite: "There are happy Muslims; there are no happy Islamists.") But he is stunningly mistaken about fundamentalist Islam. Just because fundamentalists have not yet swept the Muslim world does not preclude them from doing so in the future. Indeed, Roy has already been proven wrong. The original French-language version of "The Failure of Political Islam" having appeared three years ago, the time lag exposes his complete misunderstanding of the situation in Algeria, where he expected a "watered down" Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) not to amount to much. FIS is yesterday's organization, surpassed by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). The GIA's activities alone-murdering the children of police officers, women without veils, unsympathetic journalists, and non-Muslim foreigners-repudiate Roy's prediction of fundamentalism's becoming tame.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1995

Rating:
Summary: Resisting the idea of the clash of civilizations
Review: This is an easy to read book that contains interesting ideas about the role of political islamic movements. However it puts advances different notions than most books on the subject that ahve been published in the aftermath (and before, if we think of Huntington). This book suggests that Islam is not necessarily heading for a major confrontation or clash with the West. Some have suggested and criticized that the WTC attack proves otherwise; however, the the full story on that event and its aftermath have yet to be written and despite its horror, the evnt has worked far more in favoring an attack from the West to Islam than the other way around.
Olivier Roy, in the tendency of another French scholar Gilles Kepel, challenges the clash of civilizations concept and suggests that Political islam has failed because it has proven itself incapable of bringing about desirable changes in the poltical and socio-economic spheres in the Islamic world. Indeed, the very fact it has to resort to violent means (after the many years that muslim politics have existed in one form or another) is a sign of its failure to make attract sufficient followers. More significantly, Roy points out the various divisions theological and sectarian (eg. Shi'a vs. Sunni)national that have impeded the succesful formation of a universal and monolythic Islam capable of challenging the supposed antagonistic civilization of the West. he provides examples from all over the Islamic World including Algeria, Afghanistan and Iran. Some of the comments made by the more critical reviewers here are also worth noting, notwithstanding the fact this booo remians an importnat book, perhaps more so today than at the time it was written.

Rating:
Summary: He Might Be Right In the Long Term
Review: Unlike Orientalists like Bernard Lewis, Olivier Roy's book sees Islamist movements as sharing only a spurious connection with traditional religious texts, law and culture. Instead of arising out of an Islamic religious specificity, for Roy, Islamist movements are direct products of the political sociology of the modern, nation-state era.

Other scholars, like Burgat, also make this argument, but Roy departs from Burgat's conclusions in one major area, which is his evaluation of the logic of the Islamists' mission, and its likely political fate. This evaluation forms the major argument of his book; the so-called "failure" of Islamism because of its necessary reliance on the very modernity that it seeks to counter. For Roy, Islamism will fail because it contains internal contradictions that will be the seeds of its own downfall. These contradictions are in the relationship of Islam to politics. Roy claims that Islamism rejects political philosophy, since it sees no separation between religion and politics (unlike traditional Islamic culture, he is careful to point out, differentiating himself from the Orientalists), it sees no role for institutions, and sees "virtue" as the only necessary leadership quality. Thus, Islamism, by self-definition, writes itself out of the very political arena it seeks to enter. "The magical appeal to virtue masks the impossibility of defining the Islamist political program in terms of the social reality" (71). In other words, there can be no Islamic state without virtuous Muslims, but there can be no virtuous Muslims without an Islamic state. Islamist ideas, because they do not match social reality, end up in self-negation, since the arise from and rely upon this social reality.

Empirically, Roy sees this social reality as mainly an urban one, which bears little or no resemblance to traditional Muslim village culture. Not only do Islamists come from urban, educated and non-traditional backgrounds, but they also seek to "construct a new urban space, in which relationships would no longer be mediated solely by family or guild bonds" (59). Thus, those who see Islamists as wanting to return to a medieval or traditional society are misreading the movement's program, which differs from traditional Muslim culture in many areas, such as the acceptance of social differentiation in society, including conceptions of political parties, and new roles for groups such as women and ulamas. However, Roy sees this acceptance of social differentiation as an internal contradiction in the logic of Islamism, since the ideal of Islamist movements is a wholly egalitarian society, without classes or political parties.

Politically, Islamists depart from their own traditions in replacing the concept of the caliph (a religious ruler, of the tribe of the Prophet) with that of the amir, who can of course spring from a new (modern) social elite. This provides evidence against a traditionalist, orientalist reading of the Islamist program, since the amir is elevated to a position above even the ulamas, who are religiously sanctioned interpreters of the holy text. Thus, if the Islamic religion were the causal factor, then we might see the ulama or a neo-caliph touted as leader, instead of an amir that can be adapted to modernity. In fact, Roy claims that Islamists compromise with modernity by departing from the positions of the ulama on three issues: political revolution (they favor it), the role of sharia (they favor it less than the ulama does, and want to go beyond its limited reach), and the role of women (they are more emancipatory).

More generally, Roy argues that there has historically been a de facto autonomous public space in the Muslim world, a separation between religion and politics, with the ulama and the sharia on one side, and the ruler on the other. This goes against cultural arguments that see "despotism" as inherent to Islam throughout history. But the paradox, for modern Islamists, is that in seeking a Muslim state, they break this tradition. By concerning themselves with politics, they reject the autonomous space of politics that the ulama accepted, "specifically, the possibility for the state to elaborate a positive law to legislate in areas not covered by the sharia" (64). Thus, they revive politics even as they seek to negate it. For Roy, "no matter what the actors say, any political action amounts to the automatic creation of a secular space or a return to traditional segmentation" (23). In order to destroy secular space, the Islamists are required to create it.

There are many different ways to phrase these contradictions and paradoxes, which show that Roy has identified some inherent tensions in the logic of political Islam. However, the most pressing critique that can be made of his book is that logical inconsistencies in the ideas of a political movement do not automatically translate into a death sentence for that movement's practice, as Roy seems to want us to believe. One only need think of the contradictions inherent in democracy, i.e. between liberty and equality, or between majoritarianism and minority rights. Would democracy be called a failure because it contains these contradictions? No. Political movements are pragmatic and synthetic, and they often endure despite problematic ideational underpinnings. Followers make compromises and adapt to social realities, while attempting to stay in touch with ideational inspirations as well. Roy seems to hold Islamists to unrealistically high standards, chastising them for failing to rapidly create new societies and states, and even to redraw world borders. If the bar were set lower, Roy might acknowledge that Islamists have achieved substantial political change despite their supposedly contradictory relationship with modernity and the realm of politics.

Rating:
Summary: He Might Be Right In the Long Term
Review: Unlike Orientalists like Bernard Lewis, Olivier Roy's book sees Islamist movements as sharing only a spurious connection with traditional religious texts, law and culture. Instead of arising out of an Islamic religious specificity, for Roy, Islamist movements are direct products of the political sociology of the modern, nation-state era.

Other scholars, like Burgat, also make this argument, but Roy departs from Burgat's conclusions in one major area, which is his evaluation of the logic of the Islamists' mission, and its likely political fate. This evaluation forms the major argument of his book; the so-called "failure" of Islamism because of its necessary reliance on the very modernity that it seeks to counter. For Roy, Islamism will fail because it contains internal contradictions that will be the seeds of its own downfall. These contradictions are in the relationship of Islam to politics. Roy claims that Islamism rejects political philosophy, since it sees no separation between religion and politics (unlike traditional Islamic culture, he is careful to point out, differentiating himself from the Orientalists), it sees no role for institutions, and sees "virtue" as the only necessary leadership quality. Thus, Islamism, by self-definition, writes itself out of the very political arena it seeks to enter. "The magical appeal to virtue masks the impossibility of defining the Islamist political program in terms of the social reality" (71). In other words, there can be no Islamic state without virtuous Muslims, but there can be no virtuous Muslims without an Islamic state. Islamist ideas, because they do not match social reality, end up in self-negation, since the arise from and rely upon this social reality.

Empirically, Roy sees this social reality as mainly an urban one, which bears little or no resemblance to traditional Muslim village culture. Not only do Islamists come from urban, educated and non-traditional backgrounds, but they also seek to "construct a new urban space, in which relationships would no longer be mediated solely by family or guild bonds" (59). Thus, those who see Islamists as wanting to return to a medieval or traditional society are misreading the movement's program, which differs from traditional Muslim culture in many areas, such as the acceptance of social differentiation in society, including conceptions of political parties, and new roles for groups such as women and ulamas. However, Roy sees this acceptance of social differentiation as an internal contradiction in the logic of Islamism, since the ideal of Islamist movements is a wholly egalitarian society, without classes or political parties.

Politically, Islamists depart from their own traditions in replacing the concept of the caliph (a religious ruler, of the tribe of the Prophet) with that of the amir, who can of course spring from a new (modern) social elite. This provides evidence against a traditionalist, orientalist reading of the Islamist program, since the amir is elevated to a position above even the ulamas, who are religiously sanctioned interpreters of the holy text. Thus, if the Islamic religion were the causal factor, then we might see the ulama or a neo-caliph touted as leader, instead of an amir that can be adapted to modernity. In fact, Roy claims that Islamists compromise with modernity by departing from the positions of the ulama on three issues: political revolution (they favor it), the role of sharia (they favor it less than the ulama does, and want to go beyond its limited reach), and the role of women (they are more emancipatory).

More generally, Roy argues that there has historically been a de facto autonomous public space in the Muslim world, a separation between religion and politics, with the ulama and the sharia on one side, and the ruler on the other. This goes against cultural arguments that see "despotism" as inherent to Islam throughout history. But the paradox, for modern Islamists, is that in seeking a Muslim state, they break this tradition. By concerning themselves with politics, they reject the autonomous space of politics that the ulama accepted, "specifically, the possibility for the state to elaborate a positive law to legislate in areas not covered by the sharia" (64). Thus, they revive politics even as they seek to negate it. For Roy, "no matter what the actors say, any political action amounts to the automatic creation of a secular space or a return to traditional segmentation" (23). In order to destroy secular space, the Islamists are required to create it.

There are many different ways to phrase these contradictions and paradoxes, which show that Roy has identified some inherent tensions in the logic of political Islam. However, the most pressing critique that can be made of his book is that logical inconsistencies in the ideas of a political movement do not automatically translate into a death sentence for that movement's practice, as Roy seems to want us to believe. One only need think of the contradictions inherent in democracy, i.e. between liberty and equality, or between majoritarianism and minority rights. Would democracy be called a failure because it contains these contradictions? No. Political movements are pragmatic and synthetic, and they often endure despite problematic ideational underpinnings. Followers make compromises and adapt to social realities, while attempting to stay in touch with ideational inspirations as well. Roy seems to hold Islamists to unrealistically high standards, chastising them for failing to rapidly create new societies and states, and even to redraw world borders. If the bar were set lower, Roy might acknowledge that Islamists have achieved substantial political change despite their supposedly contradictory relationship with modernity and the realm of politics.

Rating:
Summary: Don't misunderstand the book's title
Review: [many people] seem to have latched on to the book's title and misinterpreted his thesis. They have declared Roy completely wrong because political Islam is still with us and often manifests itself violently. (By the way, "Fundamentalist" Islam is a misnomer. Roy explains why. "Islamism" or "political Islam" is more accurate to say.)

Roy is not saying political Islam is "dead;" he is saying it has "failed." Failed to deliver on its promise of a just government. Failed to provide a prosperous society. Failed to foster a flourishing culture. In this sense, it has failed. Not in the sense that those who believed in it have abandoned it. On the contrary, of course. (There are remarkable parallels to Communism's failure here. I wonder if anyone has written a good comparison...)

In the wake of a failed ideology, we are left with murderous extremists who will not be convinced the failure was internal, despite Roy's excellent piece of scholarship... Every killing in the name of Allah and Sharia is further proof Roy was right.