The spread of Islam around the globe has blurred the connection between a religion, a specific society, and a territory. One-third of the world's Muslims now live as members of a minority. At the heart of this development is, on the one hand, the voluntary settlement of Muslims in Western societies and, on the other, the pervasiveness and influence of Western cultural models and social norms. The revival of Islam among Muslim populations in the last twenty years is often wrongly perceived as a backlash against westernization rather than as one of its consequences. Neofundamentalism has been gaining ground among a rootless Muslim youth -- particularly among the second- and third-generation migrants in the West -- and this phenomenon is feeding new forms of radicalism, ranging from support for Al Qaeda to the outright rejection of integration into Western society.

In this brilliant exegesis of the movement of Islam beyond traditional borders and its unwitting westernization, Olivier Roy argues that Islamic revival, or "re-Islamization," results from the efforts of westernized Muslims to assert their identity in a non-Muslim context. A schism has emerged between mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world -- including Hamas of Palestine and Hezbollah of Lebanon -- and the uprooted militants who strive to establish an imaginary ummah, or Muslim community, not embedded in any particular society or territory. Roy provides a detailed comparison of these transnational movements, whether peaceful, like Tablighi Jama'at and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda. He shows how neofundamentalism acknowledges without nostalgia the loss of pristine cultures, constructing instead a universal religious identity that transcends the very notion of culture. Thus contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is not a single-note reaction against westernization but a product and an agent of the complex forces of globalization.

Olivier Roy is a professor at EHESS, the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. Among his books are The Failure of Political Islam, The New Central Asia, and (with Mariam Abou Zahab) Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (Columbia, 2004).

Preface1. Introduction: Islam: A Passage to the West
The failure of political Islam: and what?
Islam as a minority
Acculturation and 'objectification' of Islam
Recasting identities, westernising religiosity
Where are the Muslim reformers?
Crisis of authority and self-enunciation
Religion as identity
The triumph of the self
Secularisation through religion?
Is jihad closer to Marx than to the Koran?
What is Bin Laden's stategy?2. Post-Islamism
The failure of political Islam revisited
From Islamism to nationalism
States without nation, brothers and state
The crisis of diasporas
Islam is never a stretegic factor as such
The political integratoin of Islamists
From utopia to conservatism
The elusive 'Muslim vote'
Democracy without democrats
The Iranian Islamic revolution: how politics defines religion
Islamisation as a factor secularisation
Conservative re-Islamisation
Post-Islamism: the privatisation of religion3. Muslims in the West
How to live as a sateless Muslim minority
Historical paradigms of Muslims as a minority
Acculturation and identity reconstruction4. The Triumph of hte Religios Self
The loss of religious authority and the 'objectification' of Islam
Immigration and reformulation of Islam
The crisis of authority and religious knowledge
The religious market and the sociology of Islamic actors
Individualisation of enunciation and propaganda
Faith and self
Humanism, ethical Islam and salvation
Enunciation of the self
Recommunitarisation and construction of identity5. Islam in the West or the Westernisation of Islam
The building of Muslim 'churches'
Neo-brohterhoos and New Age religiosity6. The Modernity of an Archaic Way of Thinking: Neofundamentalism
Sources and actors of neofundamentalism
The basic tenets of neofundamentalism
Neofundamentalists and Islamists
Neofundamentalists and radical violence
Why is neofundamentalism successful?
The new frontier of the imagined ummah7. On the Path to War: Bin Laden and Others
Al Qaeda and the new terrorists
Deterritorialisation
Re-islamisation in the West
Uprooting and acculturation
The peripheral jihad
The Western-born or second-generation Muslims
The converts and the 'protest conversion'
The subcontractors
The future of Al Qaeda8. Remapping the World: Civilisation, Religion and Strategy
Culture, religion and civilisations: the conundrum of clash and dialogue
The debate on values
Military strategy on abstract territoriesIndex