According to Professor Olivier Roy—a world-renowned expert on French Muslims—there is actually an inverse relationship between Islamic religious piety and attraction to violent groups like ISIS. “This is not so much the radicalization of Islam as the Islamicization of radicalism,” Professor Roy once trenchantly observed about this phenomenon, according to the London Review of Books.

XREF: This challenges the common media narrative that religious radicalism drives terrorism, overturning a widely held assumption.

QUESTION: Roy's thesis reframes radicalization as 'Islamicization of radicalism' — worth investigating what drives the radical disposition that then gets Islamic framing. DEFINE: Distinguishes 'radicalization of Islam' from 'Islamicization of radicalism' — a key conceptual reframe of the radicalization debate.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 476