Olivier Roy is one of France's most distinguished scholars of Islam, and author of, among many other books, Globalized Islam, Holy Ignorance, and The Failure of Political Islam. Joint-chair of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and Political and Social Sciences department at the European University Institute in Florence, Roy has lately been involved in a lively debate with his colleague Gilles Kepel, another major French scholar, concerning the relationship between Islam and radicalism. In short, Kepel takes the position that Islam has been radicalized by the Islamic State and other extremist groups and figures. Roy, who was a political activist in his youth, including a stint with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, looks at the long tradition of European political violence and argues rather that ISIS and others have Islamized radicalism.
Roy's latest book has just come out in French and is due to be published in English in winter 2017 as Jihad and Death, his account of what motivates young Europeans to travel to Syria to fight for the Islamic State, wage terrorist attacks in Europe, or both.
Earlier this week we met for lunch in the Florence suburbs, high in the Tuscan hills. The grounds of the EUI overlook Florence Cathedral, Filippo Brunelleschi's masterpiece, and one of the landmarks of the European civilization that many now believe is threatened by Islamic extremism. Roy disagrees.
Contrary to the popular wisdom holding that Muslims just don't fit into Western civilization, Roy points to numbers that show how Muslims are indeed integrated into the fabric of Europe.
"A colleague who teaches Greek and Latin told me that half of the students in the curriculum are from very traditional French backgrounds, and the other half are young women from Arab backgrounds, some of them veiled," he tells me. More significantly, Roy points to one of France's key national institutions: "Ten percent of the French military is Muslim."
I'm surprised by what seems like a very high number for a population believed to be at war with France. "We know this because this is one of the few places in France where statistics are kept on religious belief," says Roy. 'The army needs to know how to bury you if you die."
Roy explains that his colleague Elyamine Settoul's research shows that there are three reasons Muslims join the army. "The first category is patriots," says Roy, citing his colleague's work. "People who love France and are part of a military tradition and want to fight and die for it. The second category is the people who are looking for an opportunity, a career, and this is what the army offers. The third category is those people who are looking for some sort of brotherhood, some sort of connection to others. Many of these people in this last category are losers and get rejected because of their psychological profiles or their criminal histories. Mohamed Merah, for instance, was rejected by the army."
Roy is referring to the 23-year-old petty criminal of Algerian descent who, in March 2012, killed three French-Muslim soldiers, and some days later targeted a Jewish school where he killed a rabbi and three children. The first attacks seem to bear out Roy's thesis—if three of the victims were Muslims who were willing to fight and die for France, the issue is not integration.
"It's about a generational nihilism," says Roy. "It's similar to Columbine in this way. These people are anti-heroes, and the apocalyptic element is very important."
If counterterrorism experts in Europe and the United States believe that the rationale for Islamic extremism is to be found in the Koran, Roy thinks this is a mistake. "Yes, the Islamic State coalesces around a number of different things, including a Muslim identity, and they're fighting for a global movement, but what's the goal? They're not fighting for a just society. It's a movement that is supposed to end in an apocalypse. It's explicitly apocalyptic."
That is to say, there is indeed a religious element, but it is less about Islam and more about young men (and increasingly women) searching for some sort of relationship to a larger world outside themselves. "Twenty-five percent of ISIS are converts," says Roy. "Forty-five percent of the hundreds of Americans who have been caught trying to go to Syria are converts."
The appeal isn't Islam as such, but the way ISIS has packaged the total experience—a kind of Death Tourism that invariably ends in the pilgrim's own death. "They flock to the new jihad playground in Syria and they all know they're going to be used as suicide bombers," says Roy.
And if they come back from the jihad playground, he continues, it's not certain they'll come back more radicalized. "They might come back just more disappointed. And as for the concern that they're getting advanced training abroad, look at Nice. That was a truck. What kind of training do you need for that?"
Roy believes it's also a mistake to look for explanations in how the West ostensibly mistreats its Muslim populations. "They're not responding to Islamophobia," says Roy. "None of them complain about the headscarf in France, for instance."
The solutions, then, are not to be found in unpacking the Koran for clues to who might become a terrorist. "In France, the 'see anything, say anything' principle is ridiculous. Mothers call up hot lines to express concern that their daughters have stopped eating pork."
Nor is it to tiptoe around Muslim sensibilities, lest they erupt in paroxysms of terror. From Roy's perspective, it's not really a Muslim issue but rather a function of an ongoing crisis in the West. Thus his future work, he says, will focus less on Islam and more on spirituality and religion in the West. People are scared of religion, period, Islam or Christianity. "To pray," says Roy, "is suspicious."
He relates a story where a colleague saw a young nun, a beautiful young woman dressed in her habit walking through downtown Paris and how she drew stares. "How odd," people thought. "And then someone explained she was a transgender person walking to an LGBT Pride parade and everyone was relieved."
If, as Roy says, the important research that needs to be done on political violence is about the psychology and sociology of the terrorists, then the information gathered is unlikely to lead to easy solutions. Or, what policy is able to address a crisis of faith that may not be as modern as we think, but may instead be as old as the civilization of the West, the foundations of which are built on faith?