HENT DE VRIESQaeda is also relevant for the present generation: even if these young men are from Mid-
dle Eastern or South Asian families, they are for the most part Westernized Muslims living
in or even born in Europe who turn to radical Islam.’’^26 Their imagination of belonging
to a worldwide community of believers finds its ground not in deeply ingrained participa-
tion in the daily life of traditional families, groups, or mosques in the West, let alone in
their countries and cultures of origin, but in their increasing alienation from both.
Roy compares their ‘‘dream of a virtual, universal ummah’’ not with Muslim history
in general (as historians such as Bernard Lewis had somewhat ominously suggested) but
rather with the fantasies of a ‘‘world proletariat’’ and ‘‘Revolution’’ that inspired the ter-
rorist movement of the ultra-left in the 1970s, notably the Baader-Meinhof Group in the
Federal Republic of Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Japanese Red Army.^27
Like the jihadists, these groups had no clear (or particularly effective) strategy other than
acting out what they perceived to be a universal—a global and near-cosmic—conflict,
to which their response was one of theatrical or almost ritual behavior (acting out or
‘‘performance violence’’). As Roy notes: ‘‘The real genesis of Al Qaeda violence has more
to do with a Western tradition of individual and pessimistic revolt for an elusive ideal
world than with the Koranic conception of martyrdom.’’^28 It is not even the case, he adds,
that ‘‘most present-day conflicts involve Muslims’’; rather, it would be more appropriate
to say that ‘‘most conflicts that are of interest to the West involve Muslims.... But clearly
few of these conflicts involve Islam as such, even if the reference to Islam contributes in
the aftermath to reshaping these conflicts in ideological terms.’’^29
Roy’s position is ultimately based upon the assumption that ‘‘politics’’ prevails over
the religious—as well as over its metaphysical understanding and inflection of ‘‘the politi-
cal’’—so that political Islam must necessarily fail. Roy calls this its ‘‘becoming common-
place,’’ ‘‘being integrated into politics,’’ and suggests that political Islam has ‘‘ ‘social-
democratized’ itself.’’ Indeed, in its very appeal to Muslim law orsharia, it does not invent
‘‘new political forms’’ but is ‘‘condemned to serving as a mere cover for a political logic
that eludes it—a logic in which we ultimately find the traditional ethnic, tribal, or com-
munal divisions, ever ready to change their discourse of legitimization, hidden beneath
the new social categories and regimes.’’^30 Roy goes so far as to claim that political Islam
or Islamism ‘‘is no longer a geostratic factor; it is at most a societal phenomenon.’’^31 The
‘‘illusion’’ of its supposed fundamentalism, that of a ‘‘return’’ to a purer origin, is, like
such movements in all religions, above all a reaction to the failure of other models. Roy
singles out three: secularism, Marxism, and nationalism, all of which reflect a broader
spectrum of ‘‘symptoms of state crises’’: ‘‘Islam is not a ‘cause.’ ’’^32 With the revolutionary
moment gone, Roy draws a sober conclusion: ‘‘Only the rhetoric remains.’’^33 Yet this
diminishedrole of religion in its ontological—or onto-theological—weight does not ex-
clude itscontinuedappeal as a semantic, axiological, figural, and, indeed, theologico-
political archive and resource. Roy sees in this circumstance the reduction of political
Islam to a culturalized and individualized—a marketed and mediatized—notion of religi-
PAGE 1212.................16224$ INTR 10-13-06 12:33:18 PS