YOLANDE JANSENwhere Islam has become a minoritarian religion and has thus been brought to recognize
a secular realm ‘‘outside’’ religion. Moreover, in globalized neo-fundamentalist Islam, all
ties to specific cultures (and states) are deliberately cut in the search for a ‘‘pure,’’ univer-
sal religious community, theummah.^32 Second- and third-generation migrants, in partic-
ular, feel attracted to this form of Islam, because they can use it as an apology for the
‘‘deculturation’’ and ‘‘uprootedness’’ that have resulted from migration.^33 Global Islam is
thus linked to the individualization processes demanded of individuals living in the West.
New global media such as the Internet fit this new, deterritorialized religion perfectly.
Being a Muslim, like being a believer in other religions, has become a matter of choice,
and those who choose to make it a crucial element of their identities should be considered
born-againMuslims rather than Muslims in any cultural (ethnic) sense.
Roy considers the results of viewing contemporary Islam through either the frame-
work oflaı ̈cite ́of that of multiculturalism equally disastrous.Laı ̈cite ́squeezes this neo-
religion into the old frame of a religion aspiring to state power, when the level of the state
is preciselynotrelevant to this Islam. The emphasis onlaı ̈cite ́creates fears of an Islamic
communautarismeby majorities, analogous to those in the nineteenth century of the
classes dangereuses—when in actuality these ‘‘communities’’ hardly exist. Only very weak
forms occur. These develop at the level of neighborhoods or in even weaker, more imagi-
nary, forms at the global level—but not, however, at the level of the nation-state. More-
over, laı ̈cists tend to create a divide between ‘‘good’’ (liberal and secular) and ‘‘bad’’
(fundamentalist) Muslims, thus excluding from dialogue those that should be included
(andge ́re ́s[‘‘dealt with’’]).^34 Multiculturalism, by contrast, addresses conservative elites as
representative of predefined ethno-religious groups. These elites can acquire political
power over nonbelievers and over those who consider themselves secular Muslims by
claiming the right to protect these ethno-religiously defined communities from pressures
to assimilate. Policies based on a better understanding of neo-fundamentalist Islam would
avoid creating or imagining more extensive communities than there actually are. They
would exclude no religious groups from dialogue and would not interfere with other
people’s dogmas, but, at the same time, they would never consider the spokesmen of
religious groups to be the representatives of entire ethno-religious communities.
Although I think Roy’s criticism of the frameworks oflaı ̈cite ́and of a top-down,
conservative multiculturalism is welcome, I find problematic the interrelated use of the
concepts of culture, multiculturalism, and secularization in his understanding of global-
ized Islam, which he deems necessary in order to be able to present his critique. To
talk of the ‘‘deculturation’’ of second-generation immigrants and endorse the theoretical
possibility of a strict separation of religion from (ethnic) culture is to assume an essential-
ist notion of culture that links it to an ethnic particularity and immediate belonging,
which members of the second generation lose or can even actively reject. But what about
the relation of neo-Islam to a more general concept of culture, which encompasses prac-
tices, beliefs, and ways of doing, seeing, and thinking, as well as ways of negotiating with
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