Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

Olivier Roy The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, Hurst and Company, London 2007, trans. Ros Schwartz, ISBN 978-1-85065-894-8 paperback, pp 159+index
Six years after 9/11 French sociologist Olivier Roy produced a collection of essays to explain what went wrong with American policy in the Middle East. Building on a long career spent studying, analysing and interpreting religious and political trends in parts of the Muslim world and Europe, Roy’s recent book builds on complex but lucid theoretical position and sound methodological skills, both enable him to carve for himself a  sound academic niche and emerge as an authority on current social, political and religious developments that are today not confined to specific countries or regions but are themselves globalised.

Roy’s The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East  is a short collection of essays that captures a long scholarly engagement with Islamism, social movements, globalisation, and political development. Unlike some of the French academic literature on the Muslim world that has emerged since the 1970s, most of which has been grounded in dogmatic secularism  and  revulsion towards  the new Islamist social movements, Roy offers a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of  sociological and political trends that are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

After ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and now in Pakistan, and possibly in Somalia and Yemen in the near future, the world that America imagined would move towards democracy, stability, prosperity, and security is still far from materialising. In fact, it seems that the neo-conservative vision of the Great Middle East had stumbled in many regions and resulted in what Roy describes as chaos. The rationale behind Bush’s military strategy summed up as ‘whole sale and rapid annihilation of the enemy’ failed miserably to deliver the desired outcome.

 The book starts with a critical essay that subjects the American neo-conservative vision towards the region to scrutiny. Roy sums up this vision as ‘a democratic society based not on the state but on enterprising individual citizens removed from the web of nepotistic, tribalist, and ethnic networks, operating within the framework of a market economy and practising religion as the expression of personal faith and not in allegiance to a community’ (pp. 33-34). Such a  vision that was so misguided in its arrogance and understanding of the societies of the Middle East was bound not only to fail but backfire.


Roy cannot be described as an anti-American as his criticism  of American instigated chaos aspires to explain rather than simply condemn, a trend that has become an easy trap for those who opposed America on ideological rather than on practical grounds supported by empirical observation. An evaluation of the development thinking that inspired America’s military intervention is coherently put forward to account for the shift from supporting authoritarian regimes and dictators in the Middle East to toppling them, thus paving the way for the unrealistic creation of  American copies in regions far removed from the original blueprint.  The neo-conservative vision blurred the boundaries between the old colonialists and the new left, thus fostering a reaction that materialised at the level of both the intellectuals of the left and the social actors of the Middle East. America’s failure in the region is so obvious even to the weak states, that, according to Roy, are now sending  a clear and blunt message  to America: attack me if you dare…not because I will defeat you but because destroying me will make things worse for you. Both Syria and Iran seem to have adopted this stance, knowing that America is capable only of swift military strikes that so far failed to deal with terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan but has spread to other new countries where al-Qaida has succeeded in establishing strong cells, for example in Yemen in 2009-10.

This short collection of four essays is not only an attempt to understand ‘what went wrong’ but also a fierce critique of both the rationale and strategies behind the vigorous American military interventions.  Policing the world after the end of the Cold World may have appeared as an easy adventure in the absence of competition from other aspiring world powers, yet American performance and achievements in the first decade of the twenty first century have been thwarted by misguided understanding of the Muslim world,  unrealistic  ideological dogma, and inappropriate military might.

While many scholars offered explanations for America’s interventions ranging from the quest for oil or revenge, Roy moves away from such clichés and provides a systematic and convincing deconstruction of the many myths about America’s motivation. The US administration of George Bush was not interested in securing control over oil production, but with a deep faith in markets. This faith in markets rather than production is symptomatic of the neo-conservative general ideological orientation. In addition to markets, Roy lists the obsession with civil society that has absorbed millions of American and other donors’ dollars. Clearly and rightly Roy does not subscribe to the euphoric discourse on civil society  and its democratising potential. On the contrary, he regards the surge in civil society organisations, especially those driven by foreign agendas and theoretical underpinnings, are more likely to upset local microcosms. He cites the case of bilingual  taxi drivers in Afghanistan and Pakistan who earn more money than university lecturers as a result of acting as brokers and mediators between NGOs and local communities. This leads many intellectuals and academics  to abandon their interests and seek jobs as Taxi drivers. A similar pattern has been observed in places like Iraq and Egypt where academics abandon universities to work as development consultants who aspire to move out of their countries and work for their NGO abroad, thus contributing to a brain drain, driven by the market economy created under the guise of encouraging civil society. On privatisation, Roy offers a critique that demonstrates the chaos and disintegration of state institutions that have been subjected to the logic of the neo-conservative drive towards the minimalist state. The collapse of state institutions and the rise in corruption in Iraq following the American invasion and the privatisation campaign by local and international entrepreneurs is an indication of the scale that Roy documents in his short book.  

On the US vision of the role Israel plays in the Middle East, Roy asserts that the US failed to pressurise Israel and in fact allowed it a freehand to deal with the Palestinian crisis as it wished. No shuttle diplomacy or signs of the urgency to solve this long problem were given by the Bush administration. To depict the conflict in Palestine as a conflict between a secular PLO and an Islamist Hamas is not accurate according to Roy. This dichotomy, often misguidedly repeated in Western media, is nothing but a projection of American and European anxieties rather than an accurate description of the struggles in the Middle East. Roy extends his analysis to examine the diversity of Islamism that includes the mainstream movements that cannot be lumped together with neo-fundamentalists in both the quietist and Jihadi versions. If there is any prospect for regulating the chaos of the Middle East, this future lies in the mainstream movements endorsing the Turkish model of Islamism and developing in the direction of the Christian political parties in Europe. No democracy without the integration of those willing to endorse the Turkish model will be possible. However, the development of the Turkish model in places like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan may not be so straightforward, although there are indications that suggest the transformation of many local nationalist Islamist movements and the adoption of inclusive, participatory, and tolerant discourses. Those who have entered the phase that is now referred to as post-Islamism (Asef Bayat’s terminology) may have a better chance of leading their societies towards adopting some aspects of democratic politics.  He convincingly argues that ‘Shia-Sunni antagonism is not structural at the geostrategic level. It only comes into play when an actor (an Empire or state) decides to play the faith card in order to delegitimise its adversaries of the moment’ (pp. 101). This observation challenges those who seek explanations in old theological  and historical realities and think of the Middle East as if eternally locked in old sectarian disputes and conflicts. Focusing on the contemporary moment and the big power holders promises a better understanding of current struggles. To situate contemporary conflicts in  ancient  historical realities is a short sighted academic strategy that fails to explain new phenomena and trends.  Also this misguided approach echoes that of those who reiterate and reproduce local taxonomies to justify long lasting struggles, competition and conflicts between groups in the Middle East. If such conflicts have persisted, it is because the political conditions and structures of domination that produced them in the first place are still present.    

Roy stops at the contemporary schism between the Sunnis and Shia in the Middle East, especially after the occupation of Iraq in 2003. He recognises that the old historical divide was political rather than theological. While one cannot ignore the old debates and conflicts  within Islam that resulted in the emergence of the Sunni-Shia schism, it is even doubtful whether the early historical period was a reflection of theology. More accurately, both old and contemporary sectarian tensions were political conflicts over leadership, entitlement, and hegemony that continue to plague the Middle East until the present day. The current state of authoritarian rule and post-colonial  exclusivist states have only perpetuated and sometimes fuelled conflicts of the kind that threatened the lives of many Iraqis since 2003.  

Globalisation and migration produce  deterritorialised and decultured Muslims and it is among those and peripheral tribal groups undergoing rapid social change that we find the  radical Jihadi message strengthening its hold on the imagination of young Muslims. Roy emphasises that those who join al-Qaida are ‘breaking away’ from family, their environment, their country of origin, or their host country. This group becomes a fringe without a fixed social profile or class. While many explanations have surfaced among experts in the terrorism industry regarding the profile of the terrorists, their social psychology, economic deprivation, and alienation, Roy resorts to old sociological explanations that have stood against the passage of time. He observes a phenomenon that is global and if there is a common trait shared among the al-Qaida activists and terrorists, it is their deterritorialisation and deculturation at an historical period characterised by increasing interconnection, globalisation and transnational connections. Al-Qaida does not  function as a centralised hierarchical  Leninist organisation, it moves along the highways of globalisation both real and virtual. In his analysis of the al-Qaida modus operandi, Roy does not give sufficient attention to a factor often glossed in Western social science analysis, namely the importance of religion as an independent variable.  Many sociologists privilege underlying conditions and structures whether political, economic or social but they tend to de-emphasise the role faith and community play in the lives of people. This position leads Roy to marginalise the religious dimension of al-Qaida, which is not only a political-terrorist platform but has also become a way of life and an identity combining religion, politics, international relations, and personal commitment in one basket. As al-Qaida is global, its supporters are seeking a  global, ironically, cosmopolitan identity in which faith remains central.  This is why a reservation should be registered regarding Roy’s claim that three or four decades ago al-Qaida recruits would have joined radical leftist organisations.

The book explores many aspects of the chaos of the Middle East starting with the American policies that have contributed to its perpetuation. America’s failure is attributed to the quest to conquer territories when the enemy is deterritorialised. While its soldiers kill and are killed in the pursuit of an American faith, i.e. the development theory of the neo-conservatives, al-Qaida suicide bombers kill themselves for personal ambition, not for a shared vision (pp. 158). Roy warns his reader not to see the world through the prism of al-Qaida as this would actually announce the success of al-Qaida, who failed at all other fronts, for example rallying the Muslim world behind it, emerging as a social movement, or toppling the blasphemous regimes that it claims to fight.


This short book summarises Roy’s thinking about current affairs, sociological and political development of a Middle East that is still in the process of being defined and redefined not only by the superpower but also by the actors and social movements  that are no longer a local phenomenon but are themselves as globalised as the superpower that claims to have the power to shape their future. The persistent ‘chaos’ of the Middle East is a cumulative process that is still far from being resolved. The English translation of the book is very good, which makes it an easy and enjoyable read not only for students of the Middle East but also for policy makers, journalists, and those who seek a better understanding of this region. It is a succinct summary of Roy’s long sociological engagement with Islam and Muslims, American policy and the forces of globalisation.