The Failure of Political Islam [Paperback]

Olivier Roy (Author), Carol Volk (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 19, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0674291417 | ISBN-13: 978-0674291416

For many Westerners, the 1990s may seem the era of Islamic fundamentalism with radical Muslims everywhere on the march, remaking societies and altering the landscape of contemporary politics. Offering a corrective to such a view, the French political philosopher Olivier Roy depicts an entirely different spectacle - political Islam is a failure. Save for Iran, it has not won power in the states of the Muslim world. He asserts that despite its incantation about an "Islamic way", with a specifically Islamic economy and Islamic state, the realities of the Muslim world remain fundamentally unchanged. This text argues that the political regimes of the 1990s are no different from those of the last decade; and the Islamism of the 1980s is still the Third Worldism of the 1960s, that is, populist politics and mixed economies of laissez-faire for the rich, and subsidies for the poor. Roy asserts that the "reds" of yesterday are the Muslim "greens" of today, and there is little prospect that the newcomers will succeed where their predecessors failed. This argument reassesses radical Islam and the set of ideas and assumptions at its core.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In this work, Roy (Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1986) analyzes the types of people who are attracted to Islamist (the author's word) movements and the ideologies and goals of these groups. The Islamist cadres are young intellectuals from an urban background who have Western-style educations. The Islamist masses are the new urban arrivals, the peasants who have tripled the population of Muslim cities over the last 20 years. Because the Islamists, on the whole, have not studied the traditional Islamic curriculum, they have only a superficial understanding of Islamic institutions and idealize an Islamic past. Roy perceptively argues that the attempt to create one universal Islamist state is doomed to failure because of the conflicts between Sunni and Shia forms and other ethnic differences in the Islamic world. His is a keen, timely study; highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
Robert Andrews, Duluth P.L., Minn.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

A view of Islam as a religion of political extremism, containing the seeds of its own politicization in a manner inherently incompatible with much of the Western world, has gradually become well entrenched in Western policy circles...In this erudite and powerful book, Olivier Roy persuasively challenges such ahistoricism. Roy...uses his wide-ranging and detailed knowledge of the Muslim world to present a reading of contemporary Islamic movements that provides an important corrective to such gross simplifications. The argument is all the more pertinent at a time when well-known American political scientists see global politics reduced to a 'clash of civilizations.'...[This] is a forceful work--an eloquent contribution to an important current debate by a scholar with long experience in the world of political Islam.
--Leonardo A. Villalón (American Political Science Review )

Is theocracy really the future of the world's one billion Muslims? Or should it be?...Never has the question been as brilliantly argued as in Olivier Roy's L'echec de l'Islam politique, now available in a superb English translation as The Failure of Political Islam. His closely reasoned, original and unsentimental conclusion is that political Islam has already failed--that 'Islamism' has already atrophied into a sterile, hypocritical--and very Western--neofundamentalism...The Failure of Political Islam addresses the history, sociology, economy and 'geostrategy' of political Islam, with excellent case studies of Iran and Afghanistan...[A] daring exploration...This book is a corrective of stunning power.
--Peter Theroux (Boston Book Review )

Olivier Roy's examination of 'political Islam' has already had an important impact on the study of Islamism. His analysis is carefully defined and clearly presented...Roy's conclusions are...sophisticated and nuanced. He argues that a particular type of Islamist program has failed and been replaced, not by a non-Islamic mode of thought, but by a different Islamic approach...This book is essential reading for all interested in the late 20th century evolution of movements of religious activism and revival...The issues that [Roy] raises--regarding the nature of Islamist movements and their relationships with modern institutions and concepts, must be dealt with.
--John O. Voll (Middle East Journal )

If you read only one book on political Islam, this should be it. Olivier Roy...has turned his attention to the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism with remarkable results. On practically every page one finds an interpretation or observation that is provocative and insightful.
--William B. Quandt (Foreign Affairs )

The Failure of Political Islam acts as both a keystone and a launchpad to understanding the political ferment in the Arab world today. In the same way we learned that our perception of Communism as a monolithic force was in error, Olivier Roy exposes the political implications of diversity and weakness within Islam.
--Princeton Borough (Times [UK] )

Roy perceptively argues that the attempt to create a universal Islamist state is doomed to failure because of the conflicts between Sunni and Shia forms and other ethnic differences in the Islamic world. His is a keen, timely study; highly recommended. (Library Journal )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (August 19, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674291417
• ISBN-13: 978-0674291416
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #917,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't misunderstand the book's title, May 20, 2003

By 

"tintin7" (Monterey, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Failure of Political Islam (Paperback)

[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.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars He Might Be Right In the Long Term, September 17, 2003

By 

ChairmanLuedtke "SchumpeterWasRight" (Princeton, NJ, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Failure of Political Islam (Hardcover)

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.

27 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Necessary European & Francophone perspective, June 2, 2000

By 

Jamil Brownson (Istanbul, Turkey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Failure of Political Islam (Paperback)

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.