Olivier Roy is Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and the author of Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan.

Is theocracy really the future of the world’s one billion Muslims? Or should it be? …Never has the question been as brilliantly argued as in Olivier Roy’s L’echec de l’Islam politique, now available in a superb English translation as The Failure of Political Islam. His closely reasoned, original and unsentimental conclusion is that political Islam has already failed—that ‘Islamism’ has already atrophied into a sterile, hypocritical—and very Western—neofundamentalism… The Failure of Political Islam addresses the history, sociology, economy and ‘geostrategy’ of political Islam, with excellent case studies of Iran and Afghanistan… [A] daring exploration… This book is a corrective of stunning power.