Globalised Islam’ by Olivier Roy is a study to understand Islam in a Western perspective. It primarily focuses how globalisation and Westernisation have affected the lives of Muslims living as a minority in the occident. One may disagree with his findings nonetheless these are important for the Muslims in figuring out how the Western intelligentsia perceives Islam as a practising ideology.
He thinks that the crises in the Middle East particularly in Palestine and Iraq are not the causes of Islamic radicalisation. Even Al-Qaeda’s violence for an elusive ideal world seems to him to have generated from the Western tradition of an individual’s revolt than the Quranic conception of martyrdom. Its targets have been the modern symbols of imperialism such as the World Trade Centre, Pentagon, etc. In fact, the West currently faces two radical challenging international movements: anti-globalisation and radical Islam. The radicals don’t care about nation and state because the May 2002 killing of French engineers working in Karachi for Pakistan navy shows a clear rejection of patriotism in favour of an ideological ‘jehad’. An interesting inference drawn by the author in this regard is the reverse trend in the export of radical Islam from West to East since the 1990s. Presently, there are more ‘jehadi’ websites in the West.
‘Jehad’ is another moot-point in the book. He states that in classical Islam ‘jehad’ is a collective duty (fard kifaya) and not one of the five pillars of Islam but radicals like Syed Qutb and Mohammad Farrag consider it a permanent and individual duty (fard ‘ayn). Osama holds it as a personal duty and issued a fatwa in 1998 stating ‘to kill Americans is a personal duty for all Muslims’. In a way defensive and offensive ‘jehad’ is the dividing line between mainstream Islamists and radicals. Abdullah Azzam (the precursor of Al-Qaeda), Sheikh Qaradawi (an Egyptian scholar in Qatar), etc. stress on defensive whereas Osama and his likes insist on offensive ‘jehad’. The author highlights that the suicide attacks are not found in traditional Islam and rejects the ‘reward in paradise’ explanation by arguing that why did the Muslims discover only in 1983 that suicide attacks are a good way to enter paradise. He contends that a reference made to ‘Hashshashin’ in this regard actually proves that suicide attacks are not linked with mainstream Islam but with sects at the fringe of heterodoxy. He quotes Sheikh-al-Albani, who outrightly rejects the idea of asking individuals from all over the world to fight in different places and emphasizes his point by a reference to Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), who started his message not with ‘jehad’ but with ‘da’wa’. Most of the Wahabbi ulama, the Tablighi Jamat and Hizb-ut-Tahrir support ‘jehad’ only for defense.
Roy has taken a lot of pain to differentiate Islamists, fundamentalists and neo-fundamentalists from one another. In his opinion, Islamists view Islam not merely as a religion but as a political ideology to reshape all aspects of society through the establishment of an Islamic state by means of political action. He considers Hassan al-Banna, Syed Abul Ala Maududi, Baqr al-Sadr, Ali Shariati and Imam Khomeini as the intellectual founding fathers of the Islamist movement. The Islamists wish to set up an Islamic state in order to unite the Muslim ummah and re-create the pristine glory of early Islam superseding tribal, ethnic and national divides. The Islamists may not be democratic by definition but they are also not necessarily violent. This list of Islamist movements include Jamat-i-Islami, Hizbullah, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, FIS in Algeria, NIF in Sudan, Islah in Yemen, Nahda in Tunis, Refah Partisi in Turkey, etc.
Roy contends that Islamic fundamentalism is both a product and agent of globalisation because the fundamentalists want to establish pristine Islam by delinking it from the local cultures which they think have corrupted Islam. The fundamentalists do not want to be Pakistanis or British but Muslims first. In the West, the fundamentalists face a challenge from Muslim brotherhoods such as Haqqaniya, Samania, Ahbash, etc. who present themselves as a bridge between East and West by propagating Islam as a moderate religion.
Another category identified by the author is of neo-fundamentalists, who reject philosophy, literature, sufism, etc. and emphasise on the scripturalist approach to the Quran and the Sunnah nullifying centuries of interpretation and debates. The glut of fatwas is also their innovation. Often the fatwa-issuing individuals lack religious training and therefore, delegitimise the religious establishment. They reject all schools of thought and consider themselves as the only true Muslims. The writer states that neo-fundamentalism is not a structured organisation or a precise school of thought but is more of a trend or a state of mind. The most-used nomenclature for them is ‘Salafis’. The ‘Salafi’ family includes most of the militant groups such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ahle Hadith, Jaish-i-Mohammad and Sipah-i-Sahaba in Pakistan, Al Qaida and GIA in Algeria. The more prominent neo-fundamentalist preachers include Abu Hamza al-Masri and Omar Bakri Muhammad in London.
Moreover, they reject ‘asabiya’ (identification with a tribe, nation and ethnic group) and ‘hizbiya (joining a political party, even an Islamic one). They discard the modern state and don’t believe in dialogue with the West, the Christians and the Jews. The neo-fundos also condemn the concepts of democracy, human rights and freedom whereas the Islamists defend that Islam represents the best form of democracy and ensures the best protection of human rights.
Neo-fundos’ conception of religion is based on strict adherence to ‘sharia’, ‘fiqh’, hadith and ‘ibadat’ (rituals of worship). Their main targets in the West are the well-educated but frustrated youth. They attract the second-generation Muslims, who have broken with the pristine religion and do not feel integrated into the Western society. They, also wish to establish an ‘ummah’ beyond race, culture and language and not limited to a specific territory. They forbid Muslims’ participation in non-Muslim religious ceremonies and Sheikh Omar Bakri even declared the civil marriage as ‘haram’.
They think that ‘ummah’ can be built either by ‘dawa’ or ‘jehad’. Roy holds that the neo-fundos confront a paradox because the imagined ‘ummah’ can be expressed historically in terms of Ottoman Empire, politically in terms of Khilafat, legally in terms of ‘Darul Harb’/ ‘Darul Islam’ and in modern sense in terms of anti-imperialism but the ummah never fits with a given territory. The author quotes a liberal scholar Sheikh Taha Jabir Alalwani from US who believes that ‘ummah’ means community which can be built around certain values: “For example, the founders of this country (the United States) left Europe and came here with certain values. They did not find room to implement those values in Europe… This is an ummah, and not a nation, because nation is built around a piece of land, and not, values”. The writer believes that the ‘jehad’ in Afghanistan was aimed to set up the vanguard of the Muslim ‘ummah’ and not an Islamic state.
His findings as to how globalisation has affected Islam and the Muslims are quite interesting. After 9/11, the Quran has become a bestseller in the West. He asserts that the argument that Islam is shaping the contemporary societies is being over emphasised because modernisation and globalisation are happening at their own pace irrespective of the official Islamic ideology of certain states. He supports his point of view by arguing that certain manifestations of re-Islamisation in terms of personal behaviour (hijab, beards, etc.) or a growth in religious practices or state’s Islamic legislation from Algeria to Iran have not reversed the traditional patterns of living; on the contrary people have gone along the process of Westernisation. For example, while the Islamic government in Iran lowered the legal age of marriage for women to 9 but the real average age of marriage for women rose to 22 in 1996.
Globalisation is uprooting the Muslims from their native countries by means of migration and consequently one-third of the Muslims now live as a minority. The author contends that the social authority of Islam is also fading away as more and more Muslims are confronted with ways of life, images, films, cultural models, educational systems, consumer habits, etc. which are heavily influenced by a secular and Western world. The divide between ‘alim’ and intellectual is also blurring because the new Islamic thinkers and the preachers (except for the Saudis or Yeminis) are rarely graduates of religious universities or madrasas, e.g. Abu Hamza from London is an engineer and Jamal Badawi is a professor of management in Canada.
Young Muslims have innovated non-traditional forms of socialisation such as ‘halal dating’ under which young men and hijab-wearing girls spend time talking over phone or on the internet or even go on dates with a clear commitment to marry each other and avoid sexual promiscuity.
Like most Western scholars, Roy has also failed to lay bare the causes behind the surge of radical Islam. This painstaking research describes the emerging trends among the European Muslims but it doesn’t explain why these peace loving Muslims have become assertive about their religious identity. Like most intellectuals, he lost himself in the complex maize of Islamism, fundamentalism, neofundamentalism etc. but didn’t unearth the root causes behind so many violent facets of an otherwise peaceful religion. Either the Western intellectuals fully understand this phenomenon but are not honest in their explanations or are pure simpletons to fathom it.