Islam seen through French eyes

Abstract

A distinguished professor at the Ecole des hautes e'tudes en sciences sociales (EHESS), Olivier Roy is a student of political Islam whose previously published work has allowed him to exploit his vast knowledge of Islamist corpora collected through both print and non-print sources. Previously published in French, he now brings to English-speaking readers his original interpretation of Islam in today's world. Globalised Islam is not so much an informative work as it is a rich, socio-political backdrop for the current debate on Islam's role in a borderless world.' The book's eight chapters lead the reader from an understanding of 'pristine' Islamic culture and religion to an analysis of Westernized Islam through an exploration of various manifestations of Islamic identity in modern societies and the strategic socio-political issues affecting world civilization, religions and politics as impacted by the emergence of a 'new ummah' real or imagined. This intellectual journey also provides the reader with a clearer understanding of key phenomena: Islamism, islamization and secularization, Islamic religiosity, (neo-) fundamentalism, radicalization and terror as well as shared and conflicting values in the modern state. In his preface, Roy notes that the current work is 'not an exact translation' of L' Islam mondialise.2 He explains that he 'rewrote' the whole book in English, which begs the question as to whether this is indeed a translation or not. In fact, it truly is since a translation can well be a 'rewriting' of an original work adapted to the needs of readers using a language other than the source. Moreover, this is a 'self-translation' by someone whose self-avowedly 'poor quality ... English'3 required extensive revision and editing, neither of which has been able to guarantee seamless fluidity. At one point in his discussion of food and cuisine as an 'opposition between code and culture', Roy even 'warns' and 'reminds' the reader that he is French.4 The warning and reminder are worthy of note not only in this passage, but elsewhere in the 'translated' text, especially when it comes to Roy's explanation of a number of abstract concepts which are more accessible, culturally speaking, to his French-language readers, to wit communautarisation and lakiisation. As Peter Newmark pointed out in his classic essay on political language, any translation of this type of language is an 'abstraction of an abstraction' whose connotative meanings may not be the same even though two languages may use comparable cognates.5 This is a trap into which the self-proclaimed translator is likely to fall. So, Roy's non-translation truly is one, and he has also fallen into the abstraction trap. Although this makes for a less than fluid read, English-language readers, faced with a foreignized, resistive, opaque translation, must engage in a potentially mind-expanding