In Search of the Lost Orient: An Interview

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, and developing political commitments and speaks to 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 testimony to the many facets of an exceptional thinker.

Table of Contents:
Foreword, by Olivier Mongin and Jean-Louis Schlegel Part I. Preamble 1. Hitchhiking from Paris to Kabul: A Look Back at a Departure Part II. From Louis-le-Grand to Dreux Via Afghanistan 2. Louis-le-Grand, the May 1968 Revolution, and Learning Persian 3. Louis-le-Grand, Normale sup’, and the Crisis of the Humanities 4. Oriental Scents: From Yemen to China 5. Return to the Fold 6. Postcards and American Pool 7. Professor at Dreux: Leftist, Away from Paris, and Happy 8. Out of School Part III. The Afghan Decade 9. Once Again, and for Real, Afghanistan 10. On Foot, on Horseback, and Wearing a Burka in Wartime Afghanistan 11. Blue Helmets and Russian Bombs 12. The Failure of Political Islam 13. War Experience: Prisoners and Bandits 14. Jihad 15. The Afghan Circus Part IV. The Central Asia Decade 16. A Soviet Invitation to Central Asia 17. A Diplomatic Passport 18. The Expert and the Politician 19. Marriage: The Orient Lost and Found Part V. Cultures and the Universally Human: Toward Holy Ignorance 20. The Crisis of Cultures and the Universal 21. What Was Good About Orientalism 22. Against the Secularists’ Essentialism 23. The Decade 2000–2010: Where Were You on September 11, 2001? Part VI. The Importance of a Religious Genealogy 24. Portrait of a Young Protestant in the 1950s and ’60s 25. Can One Think One’s Own Life? Epilogue: A Story to End All Stories Notes

About the Author :
Olivier Roy is joint chair of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and Social and Political Sciences Department at the European University Institute in Florence, where he heads the Mediterranean program. His books include Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (Columbia, 2004), Secularism Confronts Islam (Columbia, 2007), and Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (2010).

Review :
Olivier Roy is one of the most important analysts of political Islam working today, arguably the single most insightful voice in a vast field. In Search of the Lost Orient provides a complete intellectual life story and argues that empirical research and a focus on concrete social practices must be the basis by which Islam and its intersection with politics must be understood. An engagingly written, impressive book that provides a rare and unique view of political Islam and one of its major thinkers. -- Benjamin Brower, University of Texas at Austin