Past Read: Globalized Islam

Olivier Roy. Globalized Islam. (London: C Hurst, 2004)


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Olivier Roy's Globalized Islam (2004) is notable first and foremost because of Roy himself, a renowned and prolific scholar of Islam who works from L'École des hautes études en sciences socials in Paris. Roy (born 1949), is an expert in Islam, Persian, politics, and philosophy, and has worked for the U.N. as a special consultant on Afghanistan (1988) as well as OSCE representative to Tajikistan (1993-1994). In addition, he was one of the first Islamics scholars to write about Central Asia after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in his The New Central Asia: Geopolitics and the Birth of Nations (2007). His religious and political expertise, in addition to his ability to navigate the Persian-influenced languages of the newly independent nations of the Central Asian Steppe (including Tajik and Dari), make him uniquely qualified to analyze the ways in which Muslims are adapting to the current iteration of globalization. Roy is just as adept at analyzing the influence of Western-enculturated Islam as it pushes East as he is in assessing Muslims from the East and Middle East who are moving to and encountering Western values of separating church and state.