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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.

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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

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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).

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