Secularism Confronts Islam By Olivier Roy, trans. George Holoch (New York and Chichester, UK: Columbia University Press, 2007, 128 pages.)

Abstract

This work by a leading French Islamicist is both an analysis of Islam, secularism,
and society in Europe, as well as a prescription for its leaders on how
to “correct” their wrongheaded policies with regard to their Muslim minorities
based on this analysis. This might seem unduly arrogant on Olivier
Roy’s part, but his past landmark books do seem to commend the perspicacity
of his views on the subject, and most of all, The Failure of Political Islam
(Harvard University Press: 1994) and Globalized Islam: The Search for the
New Umma (Hurst: 2004).
On one level, Roy is focused on France: how one might begin to mitigate
the polarization of the French elites in the wake of forbidding the veil in public
places and the violence of the 2005 riots in the poorest – mostly Muslim
– suburbs of Paris. Indeed, the first chapter is devoted to the historical roots
of France’s virulent version of state-enforced secularism (laïcité). But on
another level, this is a work rich in theoretical analysis, widening its insights
to Britain and the United States and their “common law” version of laïcité, as
well as providing a new theory to the sociology of religion.
The intensity of the French debate raises important questions. “The campaign
of Islamophobia we are witnessing today is involved in the reshaping
of the French political and intellectual landscape” (p. 2). How so? The Christian
Right and the Extreme Right’s suspicion of Islam is now shared by a sizable
portion of the Left, which has reacted with fear to the French Muslim
community’s new and outspoken rhetoric. School girls want to wear the veil
out of pride. And this new Islamic discourse has been promoted both by the
“bearded Salafist preacher” and the suave intellectual embodied by Tariq
Ramadan ...