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Homesick Everywhere subscriber-only content

Lawrence Rosen

  • Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah by Olivier Roy  Buy this book
  • The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West by Gilles Kepel, translated by Pascale Ghazaleh  Buy this book

True or false? 1. Suicide bombers suffer not from a sense of having lost their place in a community but from a sense that they have failed in their quest to find a new, Westernised form of individuality. 2. Muslim fundamentalists – and born-again Muslims in families living in the West – owe their new-found religiosity more to the process of Western secularisation than to the culture they inherited from their parents. 3. What is developing among Western Muslims is not an attachment to Islam as a religion but a highly personal religiosity so dissociated from any particular country that political Islam has no collective reality.

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Lawrence Rosen teaches anthropology at Princeton and law at Columbia Law School. A Carnegie Scholar, he is the author of The Culture of Islam and Law as Culture: An Invitation.

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