The Paradoxes of the Re-Islamization of Muslim Societies ? Religion ...

From Olivier Roy, The Immanent Flame

This essay is one of nearly three dozen original contributions included in?10 Years After September 11, a digital collection launched today by the Social Science Research Council.?In the days immediately following 9/11/01, the SSRC invited a wide range of leading social scientists to write short essays for an?online forum. Ten years later, these same contributors have been asked?to reflect on?what has changed and what remains the same. The result is an extraordinary collection of new essays, with contributions from Rajeev Bhargava, Mary Kaldor, Barbara D. Metcalf, Saskia Sassen, Veena Das, Richard Falk, and many others.?ed.

The 9/11 debate was centered on a single issue: Islam. Osama Bin Laden was taken at his own words by the West: Al-Qaeda, even if its methods were supposedly not approved by most Muslims, was seen as the vanguard or at least a symptom of ?Muslim wrath? against the West, fueled by the fate of the Palestinians and by Western encroachments in the Middle East; and if this wrath, which has pervaded the contemporary history of the Middle East, has been cast in Islamic terms, it is because Islam is allegedly the main, if not the only, reference that has shaped Muslim minds and societies since the Prophet. This vertical genealogy obscured all the transversal connections (the fact, for instance, that Al-Qaeda systematized a concept of terrorism that was first developed by the Western European ultra-left of the seventies or the fact that most Al-Qaeda terrorists do not come from traditional Muslim societies but are recruited from among global, uprooted youth, with a huge proportion of converts).

The consequence was that the struggle against terrorism was systematically associated with a religious perspective based on the theory of a clash of civilizations: Islam was at the core of Middle East politics, culture, and identity. This led to two possibilities: either acknowledge the ?clash of civilizations? and head toward a global confrontation between the West and Islam or try to mend fences through a ?dialogue of civilizations,? enhancing multiculturalism and religious pluralism. Both attitudes shared the same premises: Islam is both a religion and a culture and is at the core of the Arab identity. They differed on one essential point: for the ?clashists,? there is no ?moderate? Islam; for the ?dialogists,? one should favor and support ?moderate? Islam, with the recurring question, what is a good Muslim?

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Source: http://religioninsociety.com/2011/09/16/the-paradoxes-of-the-re-islamization-of-muslim-societies/

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