Together with Gilles Kepel and John Esposito, Olivier Roy completes the holy trinity of western Islamo-sages.

This is a book befitting that status. His engaging style, common to many French essayists, is nicely conveyed by Ros Schwartz, his translator. Roy ranges far and wide in search of examples, from the ancient world to the forgotten corners of the present, setting them all to the music of his crowning argument: that religion is becoming 'deculturated', separated from culture. This is a beautiful generalisation embracing much of what has excited sociologists of religion in recent years. The surge of Pentecostalism, Mormonism and other proselytising creeds; the rise of fundamentalism; the shift in Christianity's centre of gravity to the global South; the fading of traditional religion; and the growing ethnic diversity of many newer movements. Consider secularism and fundamentalism. For Roy, secularisation separates mass culture from religion. Religion realises it is not coterminous with the surrounding culture and moves to define itself apart from it. Red lines are drawn which reinforce fundamental doctrines and abjure leniency. Society, now separated from its religious backcloth, repays the favour by defining what 'religion' is, contributing to the notion that ambiguity between the secular and the religious is impossible. This, too, pushes toward a strict definition of religion that favours fundamentalism. Nominal believers, social attenders and others in the spiritual interstices find themselves in the same predicament as closet homosexuals who are forced into the open, compelled to take one side or the other. Globalisation has a similar effect. Migration uproots religious growths from their cultural atmosphere and transplants them into foreign soil. Global communications permits decultured creeds to leap across national boundaries. These universalists peel away the layers of saints, icons and shrines that encrust the supposedly 'pure' core of religious truth. Spirit often counts for more than culture: for many Pentecostalists, even language is unimportant - one merely has to grunt enthusiastically for the Lord 'in tongues'. Once again, culture is separated from religion, with occasionally explosive results. A great strength of Roy's work lies in his impressive breadth of knowledge - not only of Islam, but all major religions. His examples furnish an embarrassment of riches. One moment we touch the bewildering religious tapestry of the contemporary Near East. The next finds us fast-tracking through twists in Catholic doctrine since the Council of Chalcedon of 451. Who knew that Armenian Muslims and Syrian Christians in Turkey exist as distinct ethnic groups? Or that when the latter migrate to the Arab world they assimilate and lose their ethnicity? Religions can transform into ethnic groups such as the Malays, ethnic groups can universalise into religions and nationalism can be driven by both religious and anti-religious fervour. These points are not new, but few capture such a wide range of phenomena in their net. Sadly, Roy's encyclopaedic knowledge of religious oddities mutates from strength to weakness when he seizes on tiny exceptions to prove sweeping rules. The height of absurdity comes late in the book when he meditates on 'Torah

yoga' or the case of a Chinese girl in Massachusetts who is adopted into a Jewish family and balances both identities. This - and other strange but true stories that lend richness to the epic - are held to be 'typical'. But maybe such exceptions are just, well, exceptional. There is an inordinate amount of time spent on marginalia like the American soldier who converted to Wicca, Christian converts in North Africa and Catholic clerics who bathe in the soft tones of Buddhism. Surely one cannot generalise from this exotica. Nor can the idea of radical religious revival be sustained. In fact, New Age spirituality and Islam-Christian conversion are much rarer than Roy's book would have us believe. Even Pentecostalism and the Jehovahs Witnesses have been much less successful than secular apathy in the race for souls in the West. Are we really on the cusp of watching religion and culture part ways? Roy would have it so, but I am not so sure. The notion that a global free market in religion is emerging characterised by decultured products and choice mistakes the margins for the mainstream. And here is where Roy overreaches himself, stretching the concept of deculturation beyond what it can bear. Rather than acknowledge limits to his argument, Roy's Moloch of a thesis attempts to digest countercurrents into it such that all seems of a piece. The upsurge of Hindutva in India, deepening Islamisation of governments in the Muslim world or the advent of Orthodox nationalism in Greece and Russia are squares that cannot be forced into his circles. Yet all this is portrayed as if part of the same lan vital that is propelling transnational movements like Mormonism and Salafism. In reality, enculturation is not dead. It even pervades supposedly universal trends: in many contexts, new religions are gaining strength by associating with minority nationalism, as with indigenous pentecostalism in Latin America or Indochina. The reluctance to admit where the theory fails reveals itself in the tension between syncretism and fundamentalism. Syncretic movements like Christian meditation, borrowed from Buddhism, or Jewish and Muslim Christmas-style cards, are resisted by fundamentalists. So is it the hybrids or the fundamentalists who are deculturating? Roy's answer: both are. In which case a powerful argument has just been reduced to something quite banal. Towards, the end, Roy speculates that closed, fast-breeding sects like the Amish may prove the only models for sustaining dogma into the second generation. Much more might have been said about this and the role of demography in religion in general. Still, a few off-key instruments do not mar an orchestra: this is a very important book which infuses a lifetime of scholarship into its two hundred lively pages.