Secularism Confronts Islam Olivier Roy The denunciation of fundamentalism in France, embodied in the law against the evil and the deportation of imams, has shifted into a systematic attack on all Muslims and Islam. This hostility is rooted in the belief that Islam cannot be integrated into French – and, consequently, secular and liberal – society. However, as Olivier Roy makes clear in this book, Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live concretely in a secularized world while maintaining their identities as "true believers". They have formulated a language that recognizes two spaces: that of religion and that of secular society. Western society is unable to recognize this process, Roy argues, because of a cultural bias that assumes religious practice is embedded within a specific, traditional culture that must be either erased entirely or forced to coexist in a neutral, multicultural space. Instead, Roy shows that new forms of religiosity, such as Islamic fundamentalism and Christian evangelicalism, have come to thrive in post-traditional, secular contexts precisely because they remain detached from any cultural background. In recognizing this, Roy recasts the debate concerning Islam and democracy. Analyzing the French case in particular, in which the tension between Islam and the conception of Western secularism is exacerbated, Roy makes important distinctions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, hegemony and tolerance, and the role of the umma and the sharia in Muslim religious life. He pits Muslim religious revivalism against similar movements in the West, such as evangelical Protestantism and Jehovah's Witnesses, and refutes the myth of single "Muslim community" by detailing different groups and their inability to overcome their differences.[…] Olivier Roy is a professor at l'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris and a research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. A world authority on Islam and politics, Roy's books are The Failure of Political Islam, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations, Globalized Islam: the Search for a New Ummah and, with Mariam Abou Zahab, Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection