Olivier Roy is one of the most distinguished
analysts of and commentators on political Islam in the Muslim
Middle East and Central Asia. He is Professor at the European
University Institute in Florence.
"Olivier Roy, the outstanding scholar of contemporary religions,
has written a book of startling clarity and wisdom. Illuminating
trends, issues and movements that had before appeared bizarre or
simply antipathetic, he provides us with tools for the
comprehension of matters as diverse as coverage of the war on
terror to the common individual confusion over one's own beliefs
and scepticisms."--Financial Times
"[A] perceptive and thoughtful book."--Richard Phelps, The
Guardian
"The book is an intriguing examination of contemporary religion
outside of the usual secularization debate."--Religion
Watch
"A highly complex book that critically examines the relationship
between religion, culture, and globalization, Holy
Ignorance provides theoretical keys to unlocking the riddle of
the religious imagination and the 'deculturation' of religious
movements in the modern world. Few scholars of religion are as
qualified as Olivier Roy to write such erudite work on religious
and cultural trends, to contextualize them and to make sense of
them."--Fawaz A. Gerges, London School of Economics
"With Holy Ignorance, Olivier Roy moves beyond his established
perch as one of contemporary Islam's foremost scholars to train his
formidable analytical skills on the question of globalization's
broader impact on religion. The result is a tour de force of
comparative religious sociology and represents required
reading for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between
faith, culture, and the market."--Peter Mandaville, George Mason
University, author of Global Political Islam
"An erudite account of intricate relationships between religion and
other markers of identity, including nationality, socially defined
race, language, class, political ideology, generation, gender and
sexual orientation."--Times Literary Supplement
"Holy Ignorance is in a way a synthesis of all Roy's previous
work on the sociology of religion. It formulates forcefully the
thesis that has been taking shape throughout his previous works: in
a globalised world, religion thrives to the extent that it has
severed its ties with culture. This de-culturation of religions
explains their revival, and much of our difficulties in
understanding them. It is certainly an important book that is
written in an easy, accessible language fit for a wide
audience--Roy's erudition is simply flabbergasting, and it has the
merit of making his book very concrete, very vivid."--Nicholas
Guilhot, New York University
"Roy's central theses about the way religion is going in today's
world (a breathtakingly ambitious exercise to be sure) could, and
deserve to, reset debates about secularization and secularism, and
give birth to creative new departures in theory and
research."--David Lehmann, Cambridge University
"An intriguing thesis slithers through this impressively profuse
and promiscuous garden of sociohistorical erudition. Religion is
not experiencing a comeback, the renowned scholar of political
Islam argues, but a significant transformation brought about by the
secularization intended to marginalize and diminish it." -- Michael
P. Kramer, Common Knowledge
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