On the Middle East

The Failure of Political Islam
By Olivier Roy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 238 pp., $15.95, paper.

Islam has become, almost by default, the next great threat for many former cold war strategists who were trained to look for ideological enemies deadly, devious, and diabolical enough to be considered a global menace. The warnings of these strategists have found a receptive audience in the West and especially in the United States, which has little or no understanding of Islam and can only comprehend it as an undifferentiated mass connected with terrorist bombings and hostage taking. For the West, Islam is a made-to-order Other onto which fears can be ascribed, domestic focuses diverted, and defense budgets aimed.

Granted, the attack on the World Trade Center, the killing of tourists in Egypt and foreigners in Algeria, and the Taliban's well-publicized culture krieg in Kabul were the work of men who call themselves Muslim. But they are Muslims with a particular, politicized vision of Islam, an Islam that is as insular, ideological, and decentralized as was the West's last enemy, communism.

It is with a comparison to communism that Olivier Roy begins his valuable study of political Islam. His is not, however, a comparison that the unreconstructed strategists would find useful. Roy, who spent many years as an observer of Afghanistan--and who was among the first to note that the mujahideen "freedom fighters" were not taking their political cues from the Federalist Papers--argues forcefully that Islamism is based on two preexisting tendencies. One is the fundamentalist call for a return to sharia, or Islamic law, albeit an ahistorical return that leaves no room for the secular. The other "is that of anticolonialism, of anti-imperialism, which today has simply become anti-Westernism--from Cairo to Teheran, the crowds that in the 1950s demonstrated under the red or national flag now march beneath the green banner. The targets are the same: foreign banks, night clubs, local governments accused of complacency toward the West. The continuity is apparent not only in these targets but also in the participants: the same individuals who followed Nasser or Marx in the 1960s are Islamists today."

Having placed the Islamists squarely inside the North-South debate, Roy also notes that the Islamists who protest Westernization, or more accurately, the trappings of modernity, are themselves the products of the West. Often the militants are not mullahs but are instead graduates of modern educational systems, usually with degrees in the sciences. They are the children of recently urbanized families who received "their political education not in religious schools but on college and university campuses, where they rubbed shoulders with militant Marxists, whose concepts they often borrowed. . ." Appropriating the language and strategies of modern politics, the militants want to use Islam to return society to a past that never was in an effort to excise the socioeconomic ills that afflict so many countries in the Middle East.

Roy exposes the contradictions of political Islam--its rejection of modernity and its simultaneous use of it, its politicization of the religious--to establish the movement's failure as both a political force and a geostrategic factor: "aside from the Iranian revolution, Islamism has not significantly altered the political landscape of the Middle East." This does not mean, however, that it will disappear. Population growth, economic inequity, urbanization--the forces that created the socioeconomic symptoms that Islamism hopes to cure--are still very real, and Islamists will no doubt ride to power where they have captured public resentment.

Yet, Roy argues, the Islamists will not cure these social ills, nor will they invent a new society (Iran and Afghanistan, he notes, are still awaiting transformation). The structural aspects of the state will remain in place, with Islamism molding itself into that structure. "For the rich the Islamic model is Saudi Arabia (revenue plus sharia); for the poor it is Pakistan, Sudan, and, tomorrow, Algeria: unemployment plus sharia." The belief that the moral order created by sharia will bring forth a new life uncontaminated by the social and economic dislocations of modernity will prove to be a lie.

William W. Finan, Jr.