For many Westerners, ours seems to be the era of the" Islamic threat," with radical Muslims
everywhere on the rise and on the march, remaking societies and altering the landscape of
contemporary politics. In a powerful corrective to this view, the French political philosopher
Olivier Roy presents an entirely different verdict: political Islam is a failure. Even if Islamic
fundamentalists take power in countries like Algeria, they will be unable to reshape
economics and politics and, in the name of" Islamic universalism," will express no more than�…

Islamic theocracy is now firmly established in fundamentalist Iran, and waves of
fundamentalism are sweeping the entire Islamic world, and its diaspora. This book examines
the claim of those Islamists who contend that, as a belief system and a way of life, Islam
carries with it a theory of politics and the state which should be applied unquestioningly.
Ayubi traces both the intellectual sources and the socio-economic bases of Political Islam,
arguing that it is a modern phenomenon, dating back only to the inter-war period. He�…