Religion and Culture, Conflict or Co-existence? A Critical Discourse Analysis on the Book “Holy Ignorance, When Religion and Culture Part Ways”

The main purpose of this article was to critically investigate the book "Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways” written by Olivier Roy. Specifically, this research tried to examine the conflict or coexistence of religion and culture through the analyses of the author of the book, and discover the impact of ideological positions on the text. To this end, using the critical discourse analysis method by Fairclough (1989), this research analyzed and criticized the content of this book within three stages of description, interpretation and explanation. The findings showed that the key idea of ​​this work is to introduce religious fundamentalism in the world as a result of the disconnection of the links between cultural and religious signs. However, the book goes wrong in identifying and explaining the relationship between religion and culture and has proposed the convergence of these two based on evidences which are on the contrary, at least in the case of Islam. Moreover, the author's interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism is vague and insufficient and implies a false justification of the political identity of Islam in the contemporary era.