Wednesday, November 10th, 2010, h. 14.00-16:00
Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Sala del Dipartimento di Ricerche Filosofiche, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Via Columbia 1, piano I
Olivier Roy (1949) is full-time professor at the European University Institute Florence and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies since 2009. He is a Senior Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (since 1985) and a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (since 2003). He headed the OSCE’s Mission for Tajikistan (1993-94) and was a Consultant for the UN Office of the Coordinator for Afghanistan (1988). His field works include Political Islam, Middle East, Islam in the West and comparative religions. Prof. Roy received an “Agrégation de Philosophie” and a Ph.D. in Political Sciences. He is the author of “Globalized Islam” (Chicago University Press), 2004, and more recently of “La Sainte Ignorance” (“The Holy Ignorance”, Seuil 2008). In 2008-209 he has been a visiting Professor at Berkeley University.
Prof. Roy’s lecture will treat the subject of his latest book “Holy Ignorance. When Religion and Culture Part Ways” (Columbia University Press, 2010). Olivier Roy, world renowned authority on Islam and politics, finds in the modern disconnection between faith communities and sociocultural identities a fertile space for fundamentalism to grow. Instead of freeing the world from religion, secularization has encouraged a kind of holy ignorance to take root, an anti-intellectualism that promises immediate, emotional access to the sacred and positions itself in direct opposition to contemporary pagan culture.