Olivier Roy is presently Professor at the European University Institute (Florence): he is the scientific adviser of the Middle East Directions programme at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and headed the ReligioWest research project . Prof. Roy has been a Senior Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (since 1985), professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales(since 2003), and visiting professor at Berkeley University (2008/2009). He is the author of, among other books, “The failure of political Islam” (Harvard University Press, 1994), “Globalized Islam” (Columbia University Press, 2004), “Holy Ignorance” (Hurst/ Oxford University Press, 2010), “Jihad and Death”, (Hurst/OUP 2017), “In search of the Lost Orient”, (Columbia UP, 2017) and “Is Europe Christian?” (Hurst/ OUP, 2019).