Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

The Search for a New Ummah world–including Hamas of Palestine and Hezbollah of Lebanon – and the uprooted militants who strive to establish an imaginary ummah, or Muslim community, not attached to any particular society or territory. Roy provides a detailed comparison of these transnational movements, whether peaceful like Tablighi Jama’at and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda. He shows how neofundamentalism acknowledges without nostalgia the loss of pristine cultures, constructing instead a universal religious identity that transcends the very notion of culture. Thus contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is not a simple reaction against westernisation but a product and an agent of the complex forces of globalisation.