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Globalized Islam is an important new book about a topic that still receives surprisingly little attention from scholars of Islam--how the dynamics and experiences that define contemporary globalization have impacted the Muslim world. Although focusing primarily on globalization's political and cultural impact, with largely superficial discussions of its economic dynamics, the richness of analysis and breadth of data make it a pioneering contribution to the literature on globalization and Islam.
Roy considers globalized Islam to be the result of the complex interrelationship of globalization, Westernization, and the increasingly important phenomenon of Muslims living as minorities in Europe and the United States. These experiences must be explored in a context where existing norms of religious expression and guidance have lost their authority, which has led to significant changes in the way Muslims engage their faith.
The most important aspect of the globalization of Islam is the evolution of what Roy terms "neofundamentalism": a response to the "failure of political Islam" to offer a viable blueprint for establishing and administering an Islamic state. What makes neofundamentalism specifically "new" is, first, that its ideologues see globalization as "an opportunity, not a loss" to create a "universal religious identity" delinked from any specific culture. Second, neofundamentalism is most often a phenomenon of rootless and deterritorialized Muslim youth, especially second- or even third-generation residents of Western countries.
We see the evidence of this phenomenon from the growing popularity of lay Muslim preachers across various Muslim societies to, more negatively, the multiculturalism of groups such as al-Qa[hamza ]ida. The phenomenon is a result of two crucial processes: first, the permanent migration of millions of Muslims outside the dar al-islam ; second, the "unhomeliness" brought on by the often unwelcome penetration of Western cultural symbols associated with globalization since the era of high imperialism.
This larger process has spelled the death knell for the Islamist politics of the past two generations. What has emerged in its place is the first post-Islamist generation, in which politics predominates over the religious (even if at first glance it seems to be the reverse) based on a kind of anti-intellectualism that often refuses to engage non-Salafi ideas yet offers a sometimes sophisticated critique of neoliberalism.
Paradoxically, neofundamentalism can also signify the "privatization of re-Islamization" (p. 97),...