Why is it that of all the "Islamic" organisations that there are, it is al-Qaida that has among the highest proportions of converts? Why is it that other young Muslims, whose fathers and forefathers were clean shaven and dressed in shirts and trousers, now opt instead to don robes and grow lengthy beards? It is often those who laugh last who laugh loudest. Along with phenomena such as "Mecca Cola" and "halal McDonalds", these are among the questions considered by the French scholar Olivier Roy in his recent book, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, which outlines what he perceives to be the divorce of religion from culture in faiths and across the globe.
At the turn of the last millennium, the Economist playfully published an obituary for God. Many used to believe that modernisation and industrialisation heralded the advance of rational thought, secularism and a decline of public interest in organised religion. Church attendance in many Anglican parishes has been declining for years, and many church buildings have been converted to serve other, more popular purposes. Given the option to pay a religious tax, in Spain thousands of Catholic households are year on year opting not to do so. In the US, the number of Catholics attending religious seminaries has plummeted. Among Muslims too, traditional Sufi observances have declined among many populations.
Yet these do not herald a decline in religiosity, but rather a shift in its emphases. "God is back," to use the terminology of the Economist, and just as China's development has proved that political liberalisation does not go hand in hand with economic liberalisation, so too does the Chinese model show that industrialisation does not necessarily bring with it the death of religion.
A more vocal, visible religiosity has in many ways replaced a thoughtful spirituality of old, and this applies across the faiths. The power of evangelism is proving stronger than that of sober scholasticism. Indeed, it is the charismatic and most vocal religious traditions that are proving to be the most successful when it comes to expanding the flock. The myth of a "Christian decline" corresponding to an "Islamic rise" is a product of political scaremongering: Christian Pentecostalism is growing fast around the world. In France, as Roy notes, there is an 80% overlap between a map of where mosques and where new evangelical churches can be found.
Both democracy and globalisation have enabled the spread of religion, but with it has come a deterritorialisation. Stores in the US sell out of halal turkeys at Thanksgiving time, and many Christians have developed an interest in meditation and Buddhist-style self-improvement techniques. The internet too brings interesting times for religiosity, as virtual connections enable what Roy terms "congregations of affinity rather than of proximity". However, in religious terms globalisation "has not eradicated the national 'markets', any more than in an economic sphere", and this explains protectionist laws designed to guard against imports of religious proselytism in countries such as Russia and Algeria.
"Secularisation and globalisation," Roy writes, "have forced religions to break away from culture, to think of themselves as autonomous and to reconstruct themselves in a space that is no longer territorial and is no longer subject to politics". However, I would challenge the idea of Salafism as "pure religion", as Roy terms it, divorced from culture, as well as the idea that revivalist religious trends should be thought of as "no longer subject to politics". Instead, deterritorialisation means that political meaning can differ with each context. For Salafists of the Arabian peninsula, their particular religious tradition is a product of their cultural milieu, and literalist constituencies often do play a highly influential political role.
Likewise, where Salafism has been exported and cut off from any previous religious tradition, such as among the men who today disavow any participation in formal politics in favour of physically emulating the lifestyle of a seventh-century man – when their ancestors never considered doing so – it should be partly understood through a very political lens. This is especially true when Salafism's rise in Muslim majority societies is viewed in the context of the ruling authoritarian regimes which deny their subjects the option of political engagement, or when its rise within migrant-origin minority communities in the west is viewed in the context of crises of identity that often take place.
As for the future? "Evangelicalism and Salafism are associated with the 60s generation," writes Roy, and the "discourse of born-again is also that of disillusionment". His perceptive and thoughtful book concludes on an appropriately thoughtful note. One wonders indeed, whether those "born from born-again parents" will carry quite the same enthusiasm. The zeal of converts likely has a lifespan, though revivalism is a cyclical phenomenon.
• Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways by Oliver Roy is published by Hurst & Co
