Interesting op-ed by Olivier Roy on Obama's plan to convene a conference of Muslim Leaders
How To Win Islam Over
DURING the presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would convene a conference of Muslim leaders from around the world within his first year in office. Recently aides have said he may give a speech from a Muslim capital in his first 100 days. His hope, he has said, is to “make clear that we are not at war with Islam,” to describe to Muslims “what our values and our interests are” and to “insist that they need to help us to defeat the terrorist threats that are there.”
This idea of trying to reconcile Islam and the West is well intentioned, of course. But the premise is wrong.
Such an initiative would reinforce the all-too-accepted but false notion that “Islam” and “the West” are distinct entities with utterly different values. Those who want to promote dialogue and peace between “civilizations” or “cultures” concede at least one crucial point to those who, like Osama bin Laden, promote a clash of civilizations: that separate civilizations do exist. They seek to reverse the polarity, replacing hostility with sympathy, but they are still following Osama bin Laden’s narrative.
Read rest of Op-Ed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21roy.html?_r=1
DURING the presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would convene a conference of Muslim leaders from around the world within his first year in office. Recently aides have said he may give a speech from a Muslim capital in his first 100 days. His hope, he has said, is to “make clear that we are not at war with Islam,” to describe to Muslims “what our values and our interests are” and to “insist that they need to help us to defeat the terrorist threats that are there.”
This idea of trying to reconcile Islam and the West is well intentioned, of course. But the premise is wrong.
Such an initiative would reinforce the all-too-accepted but false notion that “Islam” and “the West” are distinct entities with utterly different values. Those who want to promote dialogue and peace between “civilizations” or “cultures” concede at least one crucial point to those who, like Osama bin Laden, promote a clash of civilizations: that separate civilizations do exist. They seek to reverse the polarity, replacing hostility with sympathy, but they are still following Osama bin Laden’s narrative.
Read rest of Op-Ed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21roy.html?_r=1
Comment
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Comment by Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen on December 22, 2008 at 3:31am -
Here are some of Roy's books in English translation:
1.
The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (Columbia/Hurst) by Olivier Roy (Hardcover - Mar 1, 2008)
2.
Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies) by Olivier Roy (Paperback - Feb 24, 2006)
3.
Secularism Confronts Islam by Olivier Roy and George, Jr. Holoch (Hardcover - Jun 13, 2007)
4.
The Failure of Political Islam by Olivier Roy and Carol Volk (Paperback - Aug 19, 1998)
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Comment by Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen on December 22, 2008 at 3:26am
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Salam. Yes, I read this, too, and found it quite interesting. There is a lot of discussion of "Western values" by which is meant the values that have become current in modern liberal Western societies, not quite the values of the French revolution (liberty, equality and fraternity), but primarily "life-style" freedoms, civil and human rights, and individualism. These are contrasted with Islamic values, which are seen as inflexible and outmoded: piety, chastity, and the Aristotelian cardinal virtues. Interesting too, is the way that traditional Christian and traditional Islamic values match up with one another much more than they do with the modern liberal list, yet no one sees a Christian resurgence as threatening modern Western values.
Anyway, I agree with the authors that it would be a bad idea to convene a conference of "Muslim leaders", if for no other reason because of the problems of how to pick them. There is no way representatives of the full spectrum of Muslim views would be represented, and so, those picked would be seen as representing the tamed and collaborating Muslims.
Oliver Roy studied philosophy, the Persian language and culture and political science in Paris, at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), and other institutions. Since 1984 he has been active as a consultant to the French foreign ministry. He has advised the UN's reconstruction project in Afghanistan in 1988. In 1993 he represented the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Tajikistan, and in 1994 he led its mission there. He is the research director of the National Research center in Paris. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and at the Institut d’études politiques (IEP) in Paris. He has authored numerous books on Islam and Central Asia, especially Afghanistan. He has argued that political Islam has run its course, and has been criticized severely for this view by those who fear that neofundamentalism is gaining strength in the Muslim world.
As for Justin Vaïsse, here is what I found on the French wikipedia:
Agrégé et docteur en histoire, ancien élève de l'École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud et de l'Institut d'études politiques de Paris, Justin Vaïsse a été chercheur au Département d'histoire de Harvard (1996-1997). Entre 1998-1999, il a assuré la rédaction des discours au cabinet du ministre de la Défense.
Spécialiste d'histoire américaine, il enseigne actuellement à l'IEP de Paris. Il a pour thèmes de recherche le néoconservatisme, la politique étrangère américaine, les relations transatlantiques et franco-américaines ou encore l'anti-américanisme. Il est membre de l'Observatoire sur les États-Unis de la Chaire Raoul-Dandurand en études stratégiques et diplomatiques.
Il est le fils de l'historien Maurice Vaïsse.
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