In Search of the Lost Orient: An Interview

by Olivier Roy, Jean-Louis Schlegel (Foreword), Olivier Mongin (Foreword)

Olivier Roy is one of the world's leading experts on political Islam. But he is not only a scholar--he is also a traveler. Roy's keen and iconoclastic insights emerge from a lifetime of study combined with intrepid exploration through Afghanistan and Central Asia. In this book-length interview, Roy tells the lively and colorful story of his many adventures and discoveries in a variety of social and political settings and how they have come to shape his understanding of the Islamic world and its complex recent history. In Search of the Lost Orient is a candid, personal account of the experiences that led Roy to challenge his youthful ideas of an untouched, romanticized East and build a new intellectual framework to better understand and cohabit with the religions, politics, and cultures of the East, West, North, and South.

In conversation with Jean-Louis Schlegel of the magazine Esprit, Roy offers insight into the key themes of his career. Roy's immersion in the complexities of many Central Asian territories started him on his critique of the idea of an essentialized Islam. Alongside tales of backpacking from Paris to Kabul, his Afghan decade during the Soviet invasion, and official travel to post-Soviet Central Asia in the 1990s, Roy reflects on the nature of political and humanitarian engagement in this part of the world. He recounts his formative years, education, developing political commitments, and his evolving place within France's shifting intellectual and religious cultures. This book outlines Roy's lifelong practice--a combination of deliberate research goals and chance encounters--that examines Islam, immigration, and, more broadly, the future of cultures, religions, and secularism in the face of globalization. Both a significant intellectual autobiography and a compelling travelogue through some of the world's pivotal places, In Search of the Lost Orient offers a striking live testimony to the many facets of an exceptional thinker.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Middle East

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

A professor at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy); he was previously a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a lecturer for both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (IEP).

From 1984 to 2008, he has acted as a consultant to the French Foreign Ministry.

In 1988, Roy served as a United Nations Office for Coordinating Relief in Afghanistan (UNOCA) consultant.

Beginning in August 1993, Roy served as special OSCE representative to Tajikistan until February 1994, at which time he was selected as head of the OSCE mission to Tajikistan, a position he held until October 1994.

Roy received an "Agrégation" in Philosophy and a Master's in Persian language and civilization in 1972 from the French Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales.

In 1996, he received his PhD in Political Science from the IEP.

Roy is the author of numerous books on subjects including Iran, Islam, Asian politics. These works include Globalized Islam: The search for a new ummah, Today's Turkey: A European State? and The Illusions of September 11.

He also serves on the editorial board of the academic journal Central Asian Survey.

His best-known book, L'Echec de l'Islam politique; The Failure of Political Islam. It is a standard text for students of political Islam.

Roy wrote widely on the subject of the 2005 civil unrest in France saying they should not be seen as religiously inspired as some commentators said.

His most recent work is Secularism Confronts Islam (Columbia, 2007). The book offers a perspective on the place of Islam in secular society and looks at the diverse experiences of Muslim immigrants in the West. Roy examines how Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "true believer."

Reviews

[Hakan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ünlü Fransız düşünce adamı, Afganistan, Orta Asya ve Siyasal İslam uzmanı Olivier Roy ile yapılan bu nehir söyleşisini, bu konulara meraklıysanız keyifle ve önünüze yeni ufuklar açılarak okuyabilirsiniz. Roy, anlattıklarıyla saha bilgisinin incelenen her konuda ne kadar önemli olduğunu, masa başı akademisyen veya uzmanların yanılgılarına da ışık tutarak ortaya koyuyor. Gençlik dönemindeki maceracılığa varan cesareti, Fransız devletinin de böyle şahsiyetlerden usulünce yararlanmasını biraz hayretle, biraz da gıptayla okuyorsunuz. Fransa’daki entellektüel çevreler, akademik yapılar/düşünce kuruluşları içindeki/arasındaki dinamiklere değinilen bölümler belki biraz bizler için fazla ayrıntı gelebilir. Kitabın genelinde çok hoş anekdotlar var. Roy’un, özel hayatına (ikinci eşi de Türkiye göçmeni bir Süryani vatandaşımızın kızıymış bu arada) dair gayet açık konuşması da kitabın renkli (magazin anlamında değil tabii) unsurlarından. Siyasal İslamın ötesinde, Hristiyanlık dahil dinin toplumdaki yeri, aşırıcılığın sebepleri hakkındaki analizleri hayli dikkate değer. Sosyal Bilimlere ilgi duyan herkese tavsiye ederim.

[Abdulrahman · Rating 4 out of 5]

رحلات غريبة عجيبة حتى أحسست أنه يكذب في بعض المواضع من غرابة المواقف.
هي جمع لمقابلة طويلة، بعضها في السيرة الذاتية، وبعضها في التحليل السياسي الاجتماعي.
لكن ما لا يُشكك في الكاتب في أنه مطّلع ومتخصص في الشؤون الأفغانية، وليس كغيره ممن كتبوا عن الإرهاب والإسلام والجوانب الاجتماعية للإرهاب كحركة اجتماعية سياسية ممزوجة بالدين أو ما شابه..

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mine is a hard-covered edition, Columbia UP, 2017.

Constructed as a series of interviews, In Search tells the tale of an independent, "boots-on-the-ground" researcher from the time he left France for Afghanistan right out of the lycée until forty-plus years later as chair of the Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and Social and Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence.

In those years, he mixed with a wide variety of actors in the fight against the Russians, religious figures including the Taliban, politicians, theorists, natives, using all of his experiences to develop and enrich his own studies in globalized Islam, Islam and secularism, and the separation of religion from culture among others.

To give you a sense of the hard edge of his analysis, I'll point to a handful of his comments:

a) ". . . a question that I have never stopped asking: what is culture, and what is a or the culture? It is worth recalling that it was the right under de Gaulle that started cutting back on Latin in high schools [1961] . . . and a later education minister under Giscard . . .[who] implemented the same middle school curriculum for all, or 'college unique,' . . . some of the springs and gears of the historical process that could be called the disappearance of the humanities" (p 27);

b) ". . . the notions of minority rights and a people's right to self-determination based on its language and its culture[,] . . . the emergence of the idea of multiculturalism, where the 'people' were no longer the working class, but a cultural and linguistic ensemble--something . . . associated with thinking on the right" (p 36);

c) shifting from "cultural illusion," the postal card Orient, to reality in Turkey on being asked to join in a trip to a bordello, Roy notes, "True life was beginning. It would become a constant preoccupation of my research to avoid becoming a prisoner of cultural illusions and to better understand a society by paying attention to the banal" (p 47);

d) ". . . that we were all moving toward and intermingling of cultures, until after a while I realized that it was absurd to speak of syncretism--the real people on the ground don't live that way. It's just their life, period. . . . I didn't much like Edward Said's . . . deconstruction of Orientalism--so sure of having the last word, while the native had only revolt" (p 48);

e) "What disappeared in [the '80s] . . .was the learned intellectual, who got replaced by the expert. In the 1960s and '70s, all you had to do was publish an article in Les Temps modernes or Esprit to get the whole intellectual community talking about it" (p 60);

f) "the irruption of humanitarianism as a practice . . . and as an ideology coincides with the same turning point that saw the arrival of the new philosophers: value judgments replace political analysis. There is always a good and a bad, . . .the good . . . no longer that which goes in the direction of history--instead it's what answers to a system of values. The following decades shape and sharpen this new morality" (p 63);

g) political Islam "is doomed to fail as soon as it takes power, as the examples of Tunisia and Egypt demonstrate all too well. Put another way, the exercise of power marks the failure not only of the Islamist ideology but that of the very idea that religion offers a program for governing. The fact is, exercising power ends up secularizing the religion because . . . the politicians decide what place religion will have, and not the reverse, including and even especially in the case of so-called theocracies. . . . In Iran, the mullahs are the archetype of failure: it's the Islamic Revolution that's managed to produce the most secularized society in the entire Muslim world, where the practice of religion has constantly declined!" (pp 112-13);

h) "Iran illustrates my thesis on several levels. First, the state is secular because the very existence of the state has a secularizing effect, especially when it's a theocratic state, since, as I said, it's the state that decides on the place of the religious and not the reverse. Second, the transformation of religion into an official ideology empties it of all spirituality and displaces religiosity toward other forms of religious life . . . or away from religion entirely. Religion then builds itself outside, or even against the state" (p 114);

i) an extended analysis of the malfunction of the secret services, including the CIA, which ends with: "There are excellent writings on secret services, but they happen to all be in novels--from Graham Greene to John Le Carre . . . and one mustn't forget the wonderful works of Percy Kemp. These books should be read before one starts speaking of grand secret strategies!" ("The Afghan Circus," pp 141-42 ff.);

j) on attending a CIA-sponsored conference, Louis Dupree advised Roy: "There was only one golden rule that one need follow: speak with everyone and tell everyone the same thing, write and publish everything we think--in short, go public with one's opinion without looking to meet some standard of purity when it comes to the company one keeps. . . . And go all out. That simple rule has served as my compass throughout my career" (p 151).

I do hope that these citations (which bring us through just half of the book) pique your interest as there is much more (probably better) commentary that I might have noted. The basic theme, however, resides in the vital importance of gathering the facts of a situation, its reality, rather than build theoretical analyses which fit preconceptions and institutional dogma. Roy's life and work, as they come across in these interviews, are a testimony to that effort while the idiocy still raging in the "Middle East" suggests its limitations.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow, what an opportunist. After a brief flirtation with the French radical left, young Roy decides that the real prospect lies in collaborating with CIA and other Western intelligence agencies in Afghanistan.

You can see that he is less of a Cold War organic intellectual than a careerist who wants to be respected and listened. And they gave it to him in exchange for his insights about the war in Afghanistan. This interview is also enlightening in the sense that you can really smell the atmosphere of 1980s when the French intelligentsia began drifting towards the right-wing politics and sided with USA against the USSR.

There are many passages where you’ll want to swear at this reactionary intellectual, and you’ll be justified.

[Álvaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

La interesantísima vida de un orientalista.
Natural de La Rochelle, Olivier Roy estudió filosofía y lenguas y civilaciones orientales en su primera etapa universitaria. Ahí formó parte del movimiento maoísta de la izquierda proletaria y aprendió persa - farsi, que le sirvió para comunicarse con los iraníes y los afganos en sus primeros viajes a Irán y Afganistán. Más tarde participó en la guerra de Afganistán contra la URSS junto a los muyahidines y también tuvo encuentros con los talibán. A pesar de que nunca lo consideraron un igual, sino más bien un espía, siempre lo respetaron al hablar fluidamente su lengua nativa. Cuando acaba la guerra contra los soviéticos se instala en Asia central para estudiar Uzbekistán y Tayikistán, países en los que permanece cuando la URSS cae. Olivier es un intelectual y toda esta biografía está repleta de preguntas acerca de las culturas y las religiones, además de ser un ferviente defensor del derecho de ser religioso y de que en occidente no entendemos este concepto.

[Tamara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. I do not necessarily like interviews published as books, but Olivier Roy is a man of thousand stories so, not even an interview format can prevent him from shining through. His life story is a novel in itself. And he is so generous in sharing all of the stories, like the story-teller from the One thousand and one nights. I think I may have become a groupie.

[James B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some sections are really interesting. Others are not. Roy has had an interesting life and experience in Central Asia.