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Yesterday On Point did an interview with Maya Frost, author of The New Global Student, a book advising teenagers to quit high school and go abroad, where they can pick up college credits, foreign languages, and global skills. I bought her book and had finished it by the time the program re-aired in the evening.

I followed a path similar to the one she recommends and I agree with most of what she says (although how she says it sometimes grates — more on that below). When I was fifteen I studied abroad in Germany, but not on any formal exchange program. I just moved in with my grandparents and enrolled directly in the local public high school. That same year an American girlfriend moved in with my aunt and uncle, also living in Germany, and their daughter went to live with my friend's parents in California. Arranging these exchanges is pretty straightforward if you know someone — or know someone who knows someone who knows someone — willing to swap children for a few months. It makes no sense to pay an agency $10,000 or more to go to the trouble for you, and Frost's book provides several tips on setting something up in a country even if you have no contacts (yet). She rightly calls most of these agencies a waste of money, with the notable exception of organizations like Rotary that provide scholarship funding.

She argues that students shouldn't wait until college (or later) to do this. Young brains are still flexible, she says, and the impact of living in another culture will do more for a teenager than it will for someone over twenty. Adolescence is a period of intensity. Teenagers notice everything around them; they are not even capable of shutting that part of their brain off, of getting stuck in a rut, of saying "but we always do things this way…" That intensity is inevitably going to go somewhere, and it's better to direct at something real, like foreign travel, than to stifle it in the world of shopping, malls, prom queens, and video games. Young people also pick up languages faster. Exposing the teenage brain to another culture will pay off for a student's entire life in ways that travel when s/he's older will not.

Most teens who come back from such an experience will have different priorities about their future. This, she argues, is a feature, not a bug, although it's often the thing that scares parents most. The tiny world of high school seems so limited after you've spent a year managing on your own in another country, in another language. It was in Germany that I decided I wanted to graduate early; when I came back home I heaped on the correspondence classes in order to make that happen. Apparently I'm not alone. Her book is filled with stories from other high school exchange students who've had the same experience of wanting to get high school over and done with as soon as possible — or who simply decided not to come home at all. This possibility terrifies most parents, but again she argues it's a positive. The world needs global citizens, and the flexibility and language skills acquired abroad are more useful in the long run than staying on the regular high school track would be. She advises teens not to worry about having the typical four-year college experience and to just pick up as many college credits as they can through a combination of CLEP tests, community college and correspondence courses, and foreign language programs abroad. Transfer the whole lot to any affordable college, spend a year or two there, and you'll have a BA by the time you're twenty or so. It doesn't matter if it's a name-brand university; what matters is that you're fluent in Spanish or Swahili, you have no debt, you're young, and that you know how to travel the world.

Predictably, most of the criticism she's gotten focuses on class. "This is a rich white kid thing," she's told. She (and her husband, who seems to be the primary breadwinner) argue that actually it's cheaper than the regular high school-to-college track. A Rotary program might cost a couple thousand dollars, which is cheaper than having your sixteen-year-old live with you in your own home for a year; after all, they're being fed by some family in Paris. And colleges abroad are usually cheaper than their American counterparts, since most countries subsidize higher education.

I feel strongly both ways. Frost's audience is the suburban family for whom college is a non-optional expectation. She tells them to get out of the rat race and quit worrying about AP classes and SAT scores, to not be so overprotective of their children, and to teach them the virtue of getting by on less. She's clearly not thinking about the kids who know all about getting by on less, who live in dangerous neighborhoods where children being "overprotected" is the least of their parents' worries, who don't stress about AP classes because their school doesn't offer any, who will have to fight to get a high school diploma at all because the teaching they receive is so ineffective, or who have disabilities that can't or wouldn't be managed by an unrelated family in a foreign country. When she says parents can save tens of thousands of dollars on their children's educations she's assuming they have college savings or will be contributing to their kids' educations out of pocket, but five or ten thousand dollars isn't "cheap" if your starting expectation was zero. And when she says it's less expensive to send your child abroad than to have him/her live at home, she's assuming your child doesn't contribute anything to the household, like income from a part-time job that goes towards the utility bill, or unpaid care for younger siblings. Most of all she's assuming that duh, of course your kid is going to college somewhere: it's just a question of where and how. The better part of her book is about dealing with criticism from people who will think you're crazy for sending your kids abroad and letting them miss rites of passage like prom. But for a lot of families, that's the least of their worries.

She also assumes that your kids will be competing with other monolingual white American kids, and won't they be lucky to have this global advantage? Absent are the kids who are already bilingual, by virtue of growing up in an immigrant family. She constructs many hypothetical situations in which your global child is favored in a job interview over Jessie and Steve, who've only been to England, but in my experience the real competition is Noriko, who speaks Japanese without an accent. On the surface this may seem like an argument for pushing a global view even harder — after all, other countries have much greater facility with giving their students a multilingual education, and the world is increasingly transnational — but underneath it there needs to be a discussion of white/American-born privilege. If Ben who spent two years in France is getting a job over Emmanuel whose family is from Haiti, well, what's going on with that? Did Ben really get his job because he's "a global citizen," or is there a little bit more to it? Would Emmanuel's summer working on a farm abroad really look the same on a college application as Ben's summer doing the same? Are we allowed to talk about that? Or are we just supposed to celebrate Ben's ability to order a meal in a Romance language?

All that said, I appreciate that she's taking a machete to the view that traveling abroad is reserved for the children of the elite. Although more than half of graduating high school seniors say they plan to study abroad, very few of them actually do, because they look at the price tag for these programs and assume they're out of the question. One of the things she hammers home is that "official" study abroad programs are far more expensive than organizing one's own travel — what she calls "indie" programs — because when you go with a study abroad program you are paying the university fees at your home institution, too. She advises students to enroll directly in foreign schools.

This is what I did as a college junior at The American University in Cairo, and I was shocked to learn that some American students had spent an extra ten or twenty thousand dollars for the exact same credits I was earning. I also learned that there were even cheaper options I hadn't known about. Later, in grad school, I went back to Egypt and arranged independent study credit for research I was doing and for taking Arabic language classes at a private language school. This cost even less than AUC, which was already cheaper than most American colleges. And Egypt, like most countries, had a lower cost of living compared to the United States. Here she is absolutely correct: getting most or all of one's college education in another country is potentially far cheaper than entering the American system of higher education, where even public universities charge tuition.

Unfortunately, Frost's book is mainly concerned with convincing you that this is a viable option. That's great, but what would have been more helpful would have been lists, lists, and more lists of universities abroad, high school correspondence options, short-term study options, foreign language schools, work abroad programs, Peace Corps alternatives, and tips for funding it all. Luckily this information is available online for the dedicated student who is willing to search for it, but it'll be nice when it moves into the realm of common knowledge, when parents, teachers, and guidance counselors stop telling kids there is only one — monolingual, monocultural — path into adulthood. Frost's book is a start.

Check out these kids' books online. Voweled texts!

A BBC reporter referred to Persepolis as a "non-fiction cartoon."

1. I finally saw Out of Africa, 22 years after it came out. In the past, this was one of the few movies guaranteed to put me to sleep. I've tried to watch it at least three times and could never stay awake. This time I soldiered on because it came on tv, coincidentally, just as I was finishing the book.

The book was published in 1937 and is as racist and colonialist as one would expect. There is much talk of the Natives, and their charming Native habits, etc. What it wasn't, though, was sexist, and watching the movie I was up in arms at little things I wouldn't even have noticed had I not read the book (for the first time) and watched the movie (for the first time) both in the same week.

I am not one of those people who needs a perfect match between the book and the screenplay, and even if I were, Out of Africa wouldn't be one of the darlings I felt obligated to protect. I also realize that a movie is dependent on dialogue in a way a book is not, and having Meryl Streep sitting alone in her kitchen saying "I am observing something about the Maasai…" just wouldn't work.

BUT, the way they chose to handle this was to turn the movie into a romance between Streep and Robert Redford, and put the author's words into his mouth. That's right, he explaaains Kenya to her, in his rugged, been-there-done-that way, and she, the sheltered woman, nods sagely at his wisdom, with just enough intelligence (this being Streep, not Paris Hilton) for the viewer to think, "my, what a good, almost-equal partner she makes! he's so independent, but she's smart enough to appreciate him! what a well-matched couple!" — when in reality the things he's explaaaining, about Gikuyu history and big game hunting, are taken almost verbatim from the book, i.e. stolen from the female narrator. Those should have been Streep's lines, with Redford, if he had to be there at all, being the one to do all the intent listening, all the thoughtful nodding.

Moreover! Because they made it into a romance above all else, the movie was actually more racist than the book was, even though it was made 50 years later. Because they'd turned Streep into a woman who primarily pined for her man, alone out on the sweeping African hills (how poetic!), the myriad relationships Isak Dinesen had with Kenyans were written out. It's true she did have this lover who would come and stay with her every now and then, and I'm sure that was hot and everything, but most of her energy was spent trying to make her farm work and on interacting with people who weren't out on safari ten months a year. Although her relationships with Kenyans were deeply problematic in a colonial context, at least those relationships _existed_, and took up a good portion of her attention and thus a good portion of her ink.

In the movie, however, she's got a couple of African servants or something, whatever — cut to a shot of her on her porch! wind in her hair! wishing her white boyfriend would come home and kiss her on the mouth. Both of them are portrayed as outsiders among the other colonials, which was true in the memoir as well, but making Redford the leading man (as opposed to occasional visitor) forces whatever knowledge he's acquired of the culture and the landscape to be packaged as evidence of his rugged independence, rather than evidence of things he's learned from the Kenyans, and because Streep's the girl and can't out-independent him, her relationships are even more superficial. There's no room for African characters in that set-up, at least none with any background, history, complexity, or expertise in anything that would outshine Redford. So they mostly plant coffee and sweep floors and do things in large mobs.

2. I also saw World Trade Center. From the trailer, I thought it would be a sappy sentimental ode to cops and firefighters, and how surprising would that be, because that's not anything I've heard before in relation to 9/11. Instead it was a disaster movie about some heavy stuff that fell on these two guys.

I plan to buy this book, though I'm a little disturbed that anyone would consider this analysis radical or new. By some people must, right? or, well, the world would be different.

Fundamentalism begins at home
A French author argues that new forms of Islam owe more to Western identity politics than to the Koran.
by Josie Appleton

After 9/11 the Koran became a bestseller in the West, as readers scoured the text for phrases that might explain the hijackers' actions. Some argued that violence is inherent in Islam; others said that Islam means peace. The 'understanding Islam' industry boomed, with debates, books and pamphlets professing to unearth the mysterious depths of Islamic culture, politics and history.

In Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, the French sociologist Olivier Roy criticises this 'confused' and 'sterile' debate. 'It is based on an essentialist view', he tells me, 'the idea that Islam is this or that. But you can find anything in Islam. The problem is not what is in the Koran, but what people think is in the Koran'. His concern is to look at the lived reality of Islam, rather than its canonical or historical background. For example, in the book he argues that the idea that Islamic suicide attacks are an attempt to win virgins in paradise is 'not very helpful. Why should Muslims have discovered only in 1983 that suicide attacks are a good way to enter paradise?'.

In a decade of research for the book, Roy travelled throughout the Middle East, searched Islamic websites on the internet, and studied Muslim immigrants in France. Far from having roots in the seventh century, he found that new religious forms are a response to Westernisation – to the modernisation of Muslim societies, and the migration of increasing numbers of Muslims to the West.

Roy deals with everything from the nihilism of al-Qaeda to the French schoolgirls determined to wear veils; from personal Islamic webpages to Pakistan's madrasas (religious schools). What new breeds of Islam have in common is their focus on the fulfilment of the self, rather than on community obligations. In these terms, re-Islamicisation is the recourse of isolated, Westernised individuals seeking to find a spiritual pattern and meaning for their lives.

In traditional Islamic societies, religion is tied up with culture: with the food people eat, the mosques at which they pray, their social and political networks. Modernisation has led to a weakening of family and community ties and the undermining of religious authorities. Increasingly Islam is becoming detached from Middle Eastern culture, and the Koran is being seen through the spectrum of individual needs and desires – in his book, Roy notes that cyberspace is full of people that could be 'Mr Anybody' pronouncing on what 'Islam means…'.

These more individualised forms of Islam are linked to fundamentalist violence. 'Dutch public opinion is blaming foreign culture for the murder of Theo van Gogh', Roy tells me, 'but if you look at the background of the guy who did that, he is fluent in Dutch, he is a Dutch citizen, and you even have two converts from an American father and a Dutch mother who played a big role in the plot. Clearly the more radical violence is linked to the deterritorialisation and globalisation of Islam'.

Most of the 9/11 ringleaders were 'born again' Muslims, who went to secular schools, had spent time in the West, and had cut themselves off from their families and communities. Judging by the documents they left behind, they had invented a bizarre set of religious prescriptions for themselves – instructions for the attacks included to 'wear tight socks' and 'blow your breath on yourself and on your belongings' (1). Such nihilistic violence cannot be understood in conventional religious or political terms – instead, it seems to be an individual's demonstration of the strength of their faith.

Roy cuts through the mystical veil of religion

Neofundamentalists act in the name of a global ummah (community), but this is entirely an invention of their imagination. Roy writes that: 'Neofundamentalism provides an alternative group identity that does not impinge upon the individual life of the believer, precisely because such a community is imagined and has no real social basis.' Islamic militants tend to see both politics and community ties as a bit grubby, a distraction from the pure religious project of developing the self. The fact that radicals have made no attempt to win adherents at Mecca, Roy argues in his book, shows that they have 'no interest in the real ummah'.

At the other pole we've seen the rise of Islam as a consumerist lifestyle choice. One American Muslim quoted in Globalised Islam says that 'Muslim preachers are salespeople, smiling and sweet-talking salespersons. If salespersons fight and argue with the customer, do you think people will buy the product'[?]. And there seems to be little to distinguish the customers of Islam from other customers. On internet chatrooms, Western Muslims ask whether 'body piercing is permissible in Islam' or whether they should marry their lover, a variation on advice columns in lifestyle magazines. As with crystals or yoga, Islam is presented as the cure for the ills of modern life: there are publications on 'Modern stress and its cure from Qur'an', 'Health and fitness in Islam', even on prayers as a breathing technique for better health.

While the French press sees headscarves as the symbol of a foreign and patriarchal culture, the girls themselves put it in terms of personal choice: 'this is my right', or 'nobody can tell me what to wear'. If young Western Muslims use traditional greetings, wear traditional clothes or eat Halal food this is more the result of identity politics than a pristine cultural survival.

When I recently attended a November meeting held by the Dialogue with Islam Forum in Whitechapel, London, many of the young Muslims in the audience – even recent converts – prefaced their comments with the greeting 'assalamu alaikum' (peace be upon you). Speaking from the panel, David Goodhart, editor of the British political monthly Prospect, argued that enduring Muslim identities showed the difficulty of social integration, which he put down in part to the 'low social class' of many Muslim immigrants. Yet the audience – educated, integrated and religious – refuted his theory. Roy gives a different view. 'To say assalamu alaikum in Afghan Persian is vernacular', he writes, 'but to use it when speaking French [or English] is to display an ostentatious, quite exotic and even provocative religious belonging'. This is about the projection of a confrontational identity against mainstream society, little different from gay/black/anti-globalisationist identities chosen by other young people.

Changes in Islam parallel changes in other religions. 'We are in an age of fundamentalism', Roy tells me. 'In Christian religious revival we find the same basic tenants as in Islam – individualisation, the generational gap, "born again", bypassing religious authority.' Evangelicals also emphasise personal religious experience rather than community ties, and promise to mitigate people's dissatisfaction with modern life.

New-style Islam can be seen everywhere from Turkish cities to Pakistani madrasas, but it is strongest among Muslim immigrants living in Western cities. In fact, far from fundamentalist Islam being a Middle Eastern import into the West, it is increasingly the other way around. Most of the jihadi websites, Roy reports, are based in the West. Omar Saeed Sheikh (of Wanstead, London) and Raed Hijazi (who studied business at Sacramento University, California) were arrested for fundamentalist attacks in Pakistan and Jordan respectively. The Islamic fundamentalist organisation Hizb-ut-Tahrir spread to Central Asia, Pakistan and the Middle East from its London hub. In April 2002, three Britons were arrested in Egypt accused of propagandising for Hizb-ut-Tahrir – none had any connection with Egypt, and two were converts.

Roy cuts through the mystical veil of religion, and shows how new forms of religion relate to social changes. In this, he is heir to the classical sociologists of religion – Emile Durkheim's studies of primitive religion, and Max Weber and RH Tawney's work on Protestantism. But the task, Roy tells me, is more tricky today. 'We have a problem with using traditional sociological categories. We are in societies that are less socially integrated, so the social categories are not so strong.' While Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism showed Puritanism to be the religion of the rising bourgeoisie, things aren't so clear-cut with contemporary Islam. 'In today's societies people can build identities outside of socio-economic milieu', says Roy. 'There are more spaces to build imaginary and virtual communities. The problem is what to do with the traditional requirements of sociology, to assign a place in society for the people we are speaking about?'

The West tends to see Islam as exotic and foreign

Fundamentalist networks are often composed of a ragbag of individuals. For example, one included an Algerian married to a Frenchwoman, a football player and petty drug dealer, a computing student, and four converts. Contemporary Islam doesn't seem to be concentrated in a specific social class, or have a particular functional role. In fact, it seems that rather than representing a social group or interest, religion expresses the breakdown of social ties. It is prompted by individuals' experience of dislocation – their search for a community and rules by which to live their life – which is something that seems to exist across society.

So why is modern Islam viewed as an exotic, historical throwback? 'It is a way to defend an imaginary Western identity', Roy tells me. 'We are using Islam as the Other to avoid discussing the present crisis of identity in the West. Specifically in Europe, there is a crisis of the nation state, because of globalisation and European integration. What does it mean now to be Dutch, French or British? We are confronted with the crisis of national identity, and we tend to blame Islam.'

These are points that could have been developed more in his book. By focusing almost exclusively on Islam, Globalised Islam neglects to analyse the important changes in the nature of Westernisation. At times, Roy risks implying that modernisation is always alienating and disorienting, and that it is natural for Muslims to want to hang on to their religion, to 'express [Islam] in a Western context'. But new forms of Islam were only really seen in the late twentieth century. Prior to that, the modernisation of Muslim societies had gone hand-in-hand with the adoption of Western ideologies, such as Marxism or nationalism, while Muslim immigrants to the West often joined left-wing movements or identified with national institutions.

The new breeds of Islam are really just the shadows cast by the changing shapes of the West. Today, with the old political frameworks gone, the West is unable to furnish the ideologies to go along with the process of Westernisation. Islam is reached for as an age-old gel, to hold things together in a dislocated world. Iran is modernising in reality – the age of marriage is on the rise, as are female literacy rates – but in ideology it is going backwards, with the lowering of the legal marriage age to nine. Educated, well-off young men, with degrees and laptops, imagine that their box-cutters are the equivalent of seventh-century swords.

The West tends to see Islam as exotic and foreign to assuage itself from blame, to avoid asking hard questions. Globalised Islam gets under the skin of today's quintessentially modern forms of Islam, and points the debate in a new direction.

Globalised Islam, by Olivier Roy, is published by C Hurst and Co, 2004 (first published, Paris 2002).