Olivier Roy: 'We understand nothing about the new religiosities'

Who is Olivier Roy?
When Olivier Roy talks about the central conflicts of our times, he does not speak about for him distant and foreign countries. In the nineties he worked in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and he has a background as a Persian culture and linguistic scientist. Until recently Olivier Roy was research director at the prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France. He wrote several books that are obligatory reading for all who is professionally involved with political Islam or international terrorism, among which are Globalized Islam and The Crescent and the Chaos. Roy is now an affiliate at the European University Institute in Torino and was recently invited to Brussels by the Belgian think tank on international relations Egmont. His talk at the occasion drew mainly on his newest book, La sainte ignorance. Le temps de la religion sans culture (Holy Ignorance. The Time of Religion without Culture). (gg)   

‘Moi, je suis Marocain,’ the taxi driver warns us when Olivier Roy talks about Moroccan converts during the drive to the South Station in Brussels. The topic of the conversation is Islamism, radical religions of the twenty-first century, and the European incomprehension of religion.
When Roy says that Morocco allows churches for foreigners but that Moroccans are taken to be Moslem, the taxi driver corrects Roy before he is able to finish his sentence that Moroccan Jews are also recognized by law. Just when it threatens to become an interview-à-trois, the taxi arrives at its destination.
From then on Roy’s voice is only drown out by announcements of delays and platform changes, though that kind of affairs cannot stop him, so engrossed he is in discoursing on religion and international affairs. Until he finds his ticket to be wrongly booked by his secretariat.    
In Suisse, a majority votes for a ban on minarets; in France and in Belgium, Islamic headscarves are heavily debated; in Italy crucifixes are under fire. Why do Europeans fear religious symbols so much?
Olivier Roy: What frightens us is not traditional religion and her symbols. No one is bothered if some old Moroccan or Turkish mother comes with a headscarf to the town hall, but one is shocked when religious symbols and cultural traditions are separated.
In France, the debate on headscarves started when in 1999 three young girls, perfectly integrated, the best students of their class, perfectly French speaking, appeared one day at school wearing a headscarf, stating: “My body is my business.” At such a moment we panic, and we want to trace back such behaviour to traditional cultures, explaining that it is their fathers, their older brothers, or patriarchy in general that forces these girls to wear a headscarf — even though all research shows that around ninety per cent of the girls wearing a headscarf do so of their own conviction.
Fundamentalism is not a return to tradition, you say?
Olivier Roy: Fundamentalism has never been the expression of traditional cultures, but precisely of religions turning their backs to the culture in which they are embedded. Such was the case in the fifteenth century with Savonarola, but also today with the Afghan Taliban.
The Taliban was not so much directed against the Western culture — they got on well with the Americans when they launched their movement in 1994 and when they took Kabul in 1996 — but against traditional Afghan culture.
It is no coincidence that they forbid traditional Afghan sports like animal fights, while they were enthusiast amateur footballers and volleyball players — wearing long trousers and a beard, of course. Blowing up the Buddha statues in Bamyan too showed that the Taliban turn against almost two thousand years of Afghan tradition. The salafist movements on the rise today are not medieval phenomena but products of globalization.
But their interpretation of modernity differs from what is generally assumed in Europe?
Olivier Roy: Al Qaeda is in any case not a traditional Islamic organisation, much to the contrary. It is an extremely modern, political organisation. It is no coincidence that Al Qaeda, more than any other Islamic organisation, has converts in its ranks. In the West this amounts to 25 to 30 per cent.
Almost half of the members of the Hofstadgroup, of whom the murdered of Theo Van Gogh was a part, were converts; they did not experience a traditional Muslim culture.
These are movements originating in a break with the past, with the culture of origin, with the society in which one lives. The model used by radical Islamists has much less to do with traditional Islam as it has to do with the tradition of Western anarchism or the extreme left. Propaganda through violence, sensibilization of the people through direct action: that is the matrix the radical Islamists borrowed from the European extreme left.
The fact that Al Qaeda uses this “modern” approach explains the success of that movement in the contemorary world. Besides, a similar phenomenon shows up in the Christian tradition. The Pentecostal churches approach the different cultures in which they find themselves in the same way as the salafists: they warn the faithful for their pagan culture and environment. And that brings them loads of converts.
How do you explain this success?
Olivier Roy: People find themselves in a global market of ideas, where religions too have to fight for attention and followers. Social pressure to keep people from straying from their faith is crumbling everywhere. This means that, when one turns to religion today, one feels a personal need, and not so much the pressure of conforming to tradition or society.
People can choose, even in repressive countries. In Morocco Protestant churches spring up, even though Moroccan converts officially do not exist and every Moroccan is Muslim or, as the case may be, Jewish. The magazine TelQuel found in an investigation that some are converted by relatives, others by —mostly American— missionaries, but almost half by watching religious satellite broadcasters.
For instance, at Al Hayat (“Life”), the classic format of public, preacher, and personal witnesses is enacted in Arabic, but no attempt at all is made to inculturate it in traditional Arabic culture. And it works. At the same time, the traditional Christian communities in the Middle East are in crisis, precisely because they base themselves much more on national identities.
Often one explains the new religiou

The Pentecostal churches approach the different cultures in which they find themselves in the same way as the salafists: they warn the faithful for their pagan culture and environment. And that brings them loads of converts.

eal by pointing to poverty and exclusion related to globalisation and migration.
Olivier Roy:  Much too often one still considers religion to be some form of social alienation, much too often one is convinced that a society in which everything is weel taken care of will be a society without religion. But that is incorrect.
It is a fatal mistake to think that people go to their evangelical church because they are badly integrated or because they are unemployed. In our democratic nation-states religion has been pushed back to the private sphere or one tried to create some minimal civic religion.
But the converts of today aren’t interested in some consensual religion or in acceptable forms; they choose a radical faith. They do not accept that their faith has to be limited to the private domain — not because they have a political agenda, but because they want to be seen and accepted as faithful. Hence the tendency with catholic seminarians to manifest themselves explicitly again as such, with all the sartorial signs that go with that.
Does this public assertivity make for a renewed combativeness against religion?
Olivier Roy: Until recently one could detect grosso modo two currents in the political attitude vis-à-vis religion: a right-wing, Christian identitarian approach and a left-wing, free-thinking approach. Today that map is redrawn, with on the one hand a hardening of the old anti-clerical position in a rejection of all that is religious — these people would ban the sounding of the bells on Sunday morning as happily as they would ban the headscarf — while other free-thinkers come much closer to the old Christian position.
They maintain that European culture is essentially a Christian culture, and hence that everything Islamic is problematic and alien for Europe. In other words, at a moment when hardly anyone still goes to church, traditional Christendom is suddenly brought back on stage as a cultural barrier to exclude newcomers with their new religion.
The foundation of the rejection of Islam is the idea of the clash of civilizations, which states that every religion is part of a culture and that every culture has a religious foundation — which is, by the way, the exact same point of departure as the famous dialogue between civilizations. But the reality is that we live in a period in which religion separates itself from culture and in which religious symbols are less than ever cultural symbols.
To prove the difference between Europe and “Islam”, commentators often point to equal rights for women and gays.
Olivier Roy: Those equal rights for women and gays are only very recent acquirements in Europe. Feminism has had to break through the classical attitude of the Church — which, just as the average mullah, holds that women find their dignity in their difference with men, not in their equal rights —, and this breakthrough did not happen in a soft and gradual way.
The idea that we can and should emancipate women against their own society is a great illusion. That became clear when in 2001 the Taliban were driven from power and Afghanistan and western media expected that women would en masse throw off their blue burkas. Wich, of course, did not materialise.
Homosexual behaviour too was, until the sixties, criminalised in Western law. When Egypt and Uganda contemplate such laws today, everyone in Europe cries foul, as if it belongs to our unchangeable nature to give everybody equal rights.
More important is the finding that the conflict bears less and less a territorial or cultural character. Everything gets globalized, the conflict against the universal character of human rights too. In Europe, for instance, you see that Muslims take the line of evangelical Protestants, for instance in connection to abortion — which was never an important topic in Islam.
In France, fundamentalist Muslims, conservative Catholics, evangelical Protestants and conservative Jews find themselves together in the common cause against gay marriage and abortion.
The biggest campaign against Darwin in Europe is being conducted by a Turkish Muslim, on the basis of translations of books written by evangelical Americans. There is then a convergence of values and norms, but also of the manner in which those religions translate their convictions into political action and intervention. The task of the contemporary political world is to find a way of dealing with this drifting, deculturalized and globalized religion.
Do you have any suggestions?
Olivier Roy: It is in any case quite useless to want to discuss the relation with Islam in a meeting between the EU and the Arabic League. You won’t find there the most dynamic forces at the table. Rome does not represent dynamic Christianity. It is a real understatement to say that the leaders of the Islamic countries do not represent the dynamics of contemporary Islam.
We will have to adapt our laws about religion and freedom of religion. But at this time the state — because of the division between Church and state — cannot act as a lawmaker in the religious sphere.
For this new conflict no simple political answer exists; we have to see this as a process. Because just as society has to adapt to the new religiosity, the new religions will have to adapt to the dominant discourse, for they want to be recognized by society.
Today we see the ‘parochialization’ of the mosque, which is an answer of Muslims to our need to recognize them as a religion. What Muslims want is to be treated as equals, and thus to get what is provided for for other religions. Army chaplains, for instance, which never before existed in the Islamic tradition.
Those girls wearing a headscarf, demand not to be discriminated for it on the labour market. Individuality, right to work: those are after all modern values for women, no? Only they want to make the transition of traditional culture to modern society with a clear religious sign, the headscarf.
When young born again Muslims start a restaurant, it will seldom be a traditional Islamic restaurant, but rather a halal fast food — preferably with an English name. Most often this is seen as a paradox, but it is actually the perfect expression of what is happening: Muslims do not so much bring a new culture to our society; on the contrary, they are adapting themselves to the dominant discourse organizing our societies.
They do not adapt their convictions, but they change the way they give expression to that conviction in the public space. Society, for her part, will have to accept their visibility.