Whatever Happened to the Islamists?

In 1992, the French political scientist Olivier Roy published his well-known book, The Failure of Political Islam. As the title indicates, the author argued in that book that “Political Islam” had reached a dead end, entangled as it was in its own contradictions and losing its relevance, its appeal as well as its capacity to become a geopolitical threat. If that was the case, another volume on the same subject, two decades later, would appear to be redundant. Why write in 2012 about a phenomenon that should have died and been buried in the early 1990s? In his contribution to this volume, co-edited with Amel Boubekeur, Roy uses several strategies to justify his earlier diagnosis against apparently overwhelming evidence. At one level, he argues that the notion of “failure” has been accepted by many within the Islamist camp itself, and has become ‘part of the debate inside Islamism’. At a second level, he narrows the definition of Islamism to cover only groups that espouse ‘the explicit casting of Islam as a political ideology… and stress the need to build and control an “Islamic state”’. This rules out “neo-fundamentalists” who include Salafis, the Taliban and jihadi groups. At a third level, Roy adopts Asef Bayat’s notion of “postIslamism” to refer to “Islamist” groups which can no longer be considered Islamist, such as AKP in Turkey, Wasat party in Egypt, etc. Thus, the claim that Islamism has failed is maintained by claiming that most “Islamists” are in fact no longer Islamists.