This document presents a review of the book Globalized Islam. The Search for a New Ummah written by Oliver Roy. With this book, Olivier Roy sums up the logical consequence of a long consideration of Islam and political modernity that had begun in 1985 in Afghanistan and continued with the failure of political Islam. The book also covers the events in Central Asia as well. The main thesis of the book is to demonstrate how radical Islam in the 1990s was in fact forged from the West due to a dual process of failure of Political Islam in the Middle East and Muslim immigration in Europe.
[...] Therefore, it is not a movement, but rather a movement that is found in contexts far ahead of the times The neo-fundamentalist part of globalization The author seeks to demonstrate that the neo-fundamentalists participate effectively in the globalization in terms of conception of Islam and in its practical methods. Regarding his view of Islam, neo-fundamentalism is aimed at the direction of globalization and acculturation resulting from immigration to the West. Indeed, the desire to define a universal Islam that is adaptable regardless of cultural context provides a response in terms of religious deculturation. [...]
[...] The origins of Salafism date back to the late 19th century and is based on the idea that that to purify a religious tradition and political system alienated by colonialism, one should return to religious and social model existent in the time of Prophet. However, beyond this definition it is very difficult to define Salafism, which also resembles the Saudi Wahhabism. Therefore, the author prefers to speak of neo-fundamentalism, a term already used in The Failure of Political Islam. This idea is based both on a literal reading of the Koran and an anti-Western culture. [...]
[...] Olivier Roy has described what is known as the emergence of a new order of "neo-ethnicity", i.e. a category of ethnic types who "do not correspond to a translation in the West of a given culture but a reconstruction of a group from markers selected by the logic of the host country that separates religion from other symbolic spheres.“ This confusion between culture and religion, suggests, inter alia, that all people of Muslim origin have a single Muslim culture, regardless of the culture of their country of origin. [...]
[...] Paradoxically, this racial difference made from a matrix West is largely taken up by neo-fundamentalists who are the first to speak of a "Muslim culture". Drawing on numerous examples, Oliver Roy, here applied to demonstrate the irrelevance of this concept, insisting that what is perceived as a cultural trait is actually a religious marker that may restrict incarnations in different cultures without defining a culture in itself. The new identity is then based mainly on a value system and not on a social and cultural context. [...]
[...] Indeed, traditional religious institutions have suffered the repercussions of the nationalization of Islam and have been largely recovered by regimes in search of religious legitimacy. Therefore, the Islamic revival has assumed the diversification of religious production, including the development of networks of madrasas - religious schools - financed by the Saudi monarchy. Additionally, we witness a true globalization of religious knowledge and its dissemination, particularly via the Internet. However, the abundance of religious texts also means their loss in quality. [...]
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