The Failure of Political Islam
In this work, Roy (Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1986) analyzes the types of people who are attracted to Islamist (the author's word) movements and the ideologies and goals of these groups. The Islamist cadres are young intellectuals from an urban background who have Western-style educations. The Islamist masses are the new urban arrivals, the peasants who have tripled the population of Muslim cities over the last 20 years. Because the Islamists, on the whole, have not studied the traditional Islamic curriculum, they have only a superficial understanding of Islamic institutions and idealize an Islamic past. Roy perceptively argues that the attempt to create one universal Islamist state is doomed to failure because of the conflicts between Sunni and Shia forms and other ethnic differences in the Islamic world. His is a keen, timely study; highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.Robert Andrews, Duluth P.L., Minn.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.