The Future of Political Islam?

Dec. 26, 2004 — -- In the early 1990s, the Muslim world witnessed a bloody struggle between militant Islamists and local authoritarian regimes.

The radicals launched an all-out frontal attack to dismantle the secular political order andreplace it with an Islamist one. The fight was so brutal and prolonged that Western governments feared for the survival of their Arab and Muslim ruling allies -- particularly in such pivotal countries as Algeria and Egypt -- and prepared for the worst. Pundits warned that the Islamist revolution was unstoppable, on the march and likely to sweep away failedsocialist and nationalist experiments.

Not so fast, cautioned Olivier Roy, a French sociologist and an authority on Islamist movements. Challenging the prevalent conventional wisdom, in 1994 Roy published a sensational book, "The Failure of Political Islam," that made headlines the world over. He convincingly argued that the Islamist revolution was already a spent force and, more important, an intellectually and historically bankrupt one.

According to Roy, Islamist movements neither possessed a concrete political-economic program nor offered a new model of society. An Islamist slogan holds that "Islam is the solution" to Muslims' developmental crisis; in fact, the radicals' rhetoric about the Islamic revolution, the Islamic state, the Islamic economy and the Islamic society proved to beempty talk serving as a cheap drug for some of the masses.

Nowhere was the Islamists' failure more blatant than in their inability togo beyond Islam's founding texts, be self-critical and overcometraditional divisions and narrow sectarian loyalties.

Roy noted that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolutionary Iran, often celebrated as apioneering Islamist project, made two key mistakes. Rather than reachingout to the entire ummah, or Muslim community, it immediately locked itselfinto a Shiite "ghetto" by limiting its appeal to only fellow Shiites, andit quickly reverted to an ultraconservative social model that echoedSaudi Arabia's own brand of Sunni puritanism.

The only remnant of Khomeini's vision of a new pan-Islamism was the rhetoric. The radicals hoped to create a new regional order based on Islam, but the hard logic ofhistory, power, states, regimes and borders proved much more enduring thanIslamists acknowledge in their propaganda. Roy published these insightsat the peak of the Islamist revolutionary moment in 1994.