INTRODUCTIONosity. But other interpretations might be possible. Might religion, precisely in its minimal
remainder—despite or thanks to being elusive, erratic, volatile, and virulent—be all the
more able to produce maximal effect? And to do so for good and for ill, as historical
circumstance, fate, and luck allow?
Political Islam shares its ‘‘failure’’—in a sense, due to the success of its accommoda-
tion—with other claims to political authority, indeed, with the theologico-political con-
cept of sovereignty as such. Wherever it engages in down-to-earth concerns of governance
and policy, law and order, it cannot but secularize—that is to say, ultimately render
profane—its ways. The ways of politics are the ways of the world. One cannot but beof
this world, that is, come to belongto this world, as soon or as long as one isin this world,
in other words, as soon or as long as history and human finitude follow their course.The
Economist’s special report gives a concrete example:
In the municipal politics of Britain and the Netherlands, some radical Muslims quite
often find themselves doing political business with other anti-establishment groups
on the secular left, to the dismay of older immigrants. During a recent contest in east
London, the candidate for the new Respect party—a young Muslim lawyer—was
chided by his co-religionists for sharing a platform with homosexuals. But Abdurah-
man Jafar held his ground: ‘‘We want equality for Muslims and we would seem
insincere if we didn’t stand together with other minorities who face discrimination.’’
The rhetoric that emerges from this sort of politics in a variety of European countries
is not always attractive to American ears, since one of the few common denominators
between angry Muslims and secular leftists is hostility to America. But, given a choice
between pious self-segregation and plunging into public affairs, many European
Muslims are choosing the latter.... A process of political assimilation is, hesitantly
but visibly, taking place. This will change the politics of Europe. It may affect Eu-
rope’s relations with the outside world. But, in the process, Muslims also change—
and perhaps settle into their homelands as comfortably as most American Muslims
have done.^34In also assuming this general trend, Roy approaches Gauchet, who, inThe Disen-
chantment of the World, albeit from a different genealogical and a more philosophically
based perspective, claims that the role played by religion proper (in Roy’s formulation,
‘‘Islam as such’’) is, in the modern world, basically over.^35 While Christianity, for Gauchet,
is instrumental in its own demise—being ‘‘the religion of the end of religion’’—Islam, or
at least political Islam, undermines its own stature the more successful, that is to say, the
more globalized and mediatized, it becomes.
Roy draws another conclusion, which seems at once to exculpateandto implicate
religion (and hence the theologico-political) as a determining factor. He takes his observa-
tion to imply that ‘‘the key to understanding the contemporary ‘territorial’ struggle is
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