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Religious fundamentalism in our times  

The rise of religious fundamentalism is a central concern for many people in Asia today.  Christian fundamentalists, usually referred to as evangelicals, represent what is probably the fastest growing religious movement in the world today and are often engaged in aggressive proselytizing among Christians followers of other religions.   Jewish fundamentalists in Israel put constant pressure on their government to take a hard line against the Palestinian struggles for justice and peace, and their extremist fringe has been responsible for murders and massacres, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.  Perhaps the most violent movement of religious fundamentalism in the world in recent years is found among Hindus, long known for their reputation for tolerance and non-violence, but in recent years carrying out violent terrorist policies against non-Hindus in northern India.

Our concern here, however, will focus mainly on emerging religious extremism among Muslims.  Some aspects of the phenomenon can be seen by viewing the similarities and differences between Muslim and Christian fundamentalists.  The similarities of outlook between Muslim revivalists and Christian fundamentalists are most apparent in their understanding of Scriptural inspiration and authority and in their social critique.  The correspondence is most acute in their common rejection of secular humanism, although the Muslim critique has its own history, emphases and concerns.

The concept of Islamic fundamentalism is more problematic than its Christian counterpart.  Fundamentalism is a part of Christian history with roots in Protestant churches in the U.S.A.  The term “fundamentalism” was coined by conservative Christian groups who called themselves fundamentalists and regarded the term as an apt description of their views.  By contrast, when one speaks of fundamentalism among Muslims, one is using a term that has no proper history within the Islamic tradition, but a pejorative applied by others.  Moreover, it is not careful scholars who refer to Muslims as fundamentalists, but rather journalists, politicians, and casual observers.  Thus, the term Islamic fundamentalism does not have the same precision, but is rather a catch-all for many diverse and often contradictory Muslim movements and interpretations of Islam.

Islamic fundamentalists

Muslims and others often use the term fundamentalism to indicate movements based on the principle of salafiyya (i.e., to follow the interpretations of the earliest generations of Muslims) or usûliyya (to purify Islam according to its original principles.)  These terms indicate a different emphasis from that of Christian fundamentalists.  The emphasis of Muslim revivalists is on beginnings, return and purifying religion.  The basic supposition is that Islam has moved away from its origins and in doing so has lost its purity, which can be regained by returning to the interpretation of the first generations of Muslims (salaf).

This explains one type of fundamentalist movement, for example, that of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia or the Jamiat-i Islami in the Indian subcontinent.  However, other so-called fundamentalist movements, such as the revolutionary ideology of Iran, are diametrically opposed to those movements.  Iranian thinkers stress not so much a “return” to the past as a future-oriented interpretation of Islam as a postmodern critique of modernity.

If one were to single out elements that characterize the diverse and often incompatible currents of Islamic fundamentalism, three elements would stand out:

1) desecularization (anti-secularism);

2) the priority of divine law over human law;

3) sectarian protest (alternative Islam.)

Origins of Islamic fundamentalism

Whereas the origins of Christian fundamentalism may be traced to a 19th century reaction in conservative American Protestant circles, Islamic fundamentalism finds its roots in a religious response to the loss of sovereignty.  When Muslims looked around the world at the beginning of the 19th Century, they were forced to ask, “What went wrong?”  From having possessed, in previous centuries, the world’s most powerful, advanced, and prosperous states in the Ottoman, Safavid and Moghul empires, by 1800 Muslims had succumbed in almost every region to the rule of others.

In Asia it was Christian European powers - first the Portuguese, then Dutch, British, Spaniards, Russians, and Americans - who came to dominate Muslim regions.  At the same time, Chinese, Thai, and Burmese Buddhists incorporated Muslim regions into their domains.  In Asia, only Afghanistan was able to remain independent, due to its geographical isolation and a skillful playing off of Russian designs against those of England.  In the Middle East and North Africa, the British and French were locked in a power struggle over regions inhabited by Muslims, with other European powers holding on to whatever enclaves they could.  Iran and Turkey, while remaining nominally independent, had to accept humiliating terms which gave European powers rights to intervene, interfere, and impose their will.

How did the Muslim world fall so far so quickly?  A radical response was provided by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab in Arabia, who held that Muslim peoples were reduced to their low state because they had deviated from the true Islamic path.  When Muslims abandoned Islam in its original purity, God left them to suffer the evil consequences.  Ibn Abd al-Wahhab felt that only a return to pure, original Islam would permit Muslims to regain their past dynamism and initiative.  In his analysis, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab did not create a new theory, but drew upon a minority strain of thought that had been present in the Islamic community from the beginning as a protest against secularizing tendencies.

Those who took up his views were called “Wahhabis.”  They wanted not only to purify Islam of all accretions and novelties that had wrongly been accepted as Islamic in the course of time, but they held that the Sufi desire to follow a spiritual path leading to a loving union with God was a distortion of the original intent of the religion.  They claimed that Islam was meant to be a program for building a human society whose every aspect was lived in accord with the will of God.  Many hajjis making the pilgrimage to Mecca encountered Wahhabi ideas in Arabia and brought these views back with them to their homelands in Asia.

Political agenda of the Wahhabi movement

The Wahhabi analysis had political implications.  If God intended the purification of the Islamic community aimed at an Islamization of society in all its social, economic, and political aspects, this could only be accomplished if Muslims themselves were in control of the political systems.  Their political theory held that the state existed to permit Muslims to foster the Islamization process, to forbid deviations and punish wrongdoing.  They felt that the Sufis, in their efforts to draw up interior spiritual paths aimed at mystical union with God, ignored political realities and held Muslims back from the task of forming society according to God’s will.  In this way, the Muslim revival linked religious and political concerns.  In order to pursue their societal ends, they sought to create a state that would favor and implement these goals.  The first objective, therefore, was to achieve liberation from non-Muslim rule.  Wahhabi-inspired revolutionary movements worked to overthrow colonial regimes in order to create an Islamic state that would implement the Islamization of society.

Geopolitical factors influencing Islamic revival

After 1945, when most Muslim regions attained independence, two organizations challenged the view that rule by Muslims was sufficient to create Islamic societies.  These organizations sought to articulate the concept of the Islamic state in modern societies.  In Egypt and other Arab countries, the Muslim Brotherhood, insisted that Muslim government did not ensure the creation of Islamic states, worked to counter nationalist feelings which they felt divided rather than united the Islamic umma.  The harsh repression of the Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria convinced many that the new regimes were as opposed to the creation of an Islamic state as the colonial powers had been.

In the Indian subcontinent, the Jamiati Islami held that Islam offered the world an Islamic solution to every modern problem.  Their leader and spokesman Abu’l Ala al-Maududi claimed that there already existed an Islamic science, economics, politics, legal system, and pedagogy.  Muslims had to search in their own early tradition to rediscover the ingredients necessary to develop Islamic alternatives to these secular fields.

As one Muslim nation after another achieved independence in the years after World War II, the revivalists hoped that Islamic states would be set up.  What actually happened was quite different.  Muslim rule replaced the colonial regimes, but the ideals of the Islamic state were far from being implemented.  The new ruling class throughout the Muslim world generally created nation states on a European nationalist model.  Legal codes were based on those of Western nations and were usually mere revisions of colonial law.  On the grounds that it was more egalitarian and would prevent the abuses of uncontrolled capitalism, socialist policies of a one-party state, state ownership of industries, and centrally planned economies were adopted.  Cultural mores as well as development concepts were borrowed from the West.

Post-war factors leading to Islamic revival

In the first years after World War II, many Muslims were enthusiastic about the creation of Pakistan, which they considered a model for the modern Islamic democracy.  When it gradually became clear that Pakistan’s Islamic identity did not enable the country to overcome ethnic clashes, economic mismanagement and corruption, military takeovers, and equitable distribution of wealth, many Muslims claimed that the Pakistan model was a failed experiment.  A truly Islamic state would have to undergo a more revolutionary societal restructuring.

The emergence of the state of Israel in 1949 had great influence on the thinking of militant Muslims.  Israel was seen as a state created for non-Muslim Europeans in the Arab heartland by Western powers to assuage their guilt for Europe’s treatment of its Jews.  In expelling and oppressing the Palestinians, successive Israeli governments provided the imagery of oppressed Muslims achieving liberation through armed rebellion.  The Palestinian cause engendered a conviction that the West, despite its professions of concern for the development of Muslim peoples, was in fact opposed to Islam and that Arabs and Muslims generally were victims of injustice perpetrated by inimical Western powers.

The disastrous 1967 war was a watershed in modern Muslim thought.  Egypt, the cultural capital of the Arab world, led by the charismatic Gamal Abd al-Nasser, sustained by alliances and financial backing from other Arab countries, met quick and humiliating defeat by tiny Israel.  Not only were Nasser and the secular ideology of pan-Arab nationalism discredited, but also the military.  Corrupt and ineffective in its role of defending the nation, the military was seen as a costly expenditure which existed mainly to preserve the internal status quo and enable the ruling elite to govern by force, in many cases, against the will of the people.

Lingering hopes that the Western powers would provide the assistance needed in Muslim regions were dashed when those states supported Israel both financially and in international diplomatic arenas such as the United Nations.  In response to these reversals, many began to question the efficacy of nationalist thought and turned to religion to furnish more effective means to govern Muslim peoples.

The 1979 Iranian revolution gave concrete shape to these grievances. The world was amazed when religious solidarity enabled Iranian Muslims to overthrow with apparent ease a wealthy and unpopular Muslim regime, one which had been presumed to be of unassailable stability.  The fact that the Shah’s regime was a strong proponent of secularization and closely allied to the West was not lost on Muslims.  The Islamic Republic of Iran replaced, in the thoughts of many, the failed Pakistan as the model of an Islamic state.  All observers, whether sympathetic or not, agreed that the government of Ayatollah Khomeini was truly revolutionary in rethinking and reorganizing every aspect of social life according to the principles of Islam.

Later events in the Muslim world encouraged the growth and spread of revivalist ideals.  The 1991 Gulf War and the continuing blockade against Iraq, along with economic and diplomatic measures taken against other outspoken Muslim nations, confirmed for many that the West, particularly the U.S.A., intended to isolate Muslim countries much as communist states had previously been isolated.

For others, the electoral victory of the Front Islamique du Salut (F.I.S.) in Algeria in 1992 showed that a grass-roots Islamic political movement could succeed through democratic processes.  The uncritical welcome given to the military coup and dictatorship in Algeria confirmed, for many Muslims, the hollowness of European rhetoric about democracy and its implacable enmity towards Islam.  As the more moderate members of the F.I.S. coalition were either killed, arrested, or fled the country, the Algerian opposition was left in the hands of its most violent and extremist exponents.

The emergence of traditional Islam

Muslim fundamentalists reserve much of their harshest criticism for the way that Islam had developed in traditional Islamic societies.   Muslims in Asia were often devout and zealous but their understanding of Islam often did not have a strong doctrinal basis.  The Sufis, who represented mystical tendencies, emphasized religious experience as the basis of an interior union of love with God.  They viewed the practices of the shari’a and the study of Islamic law as either peripheral or preliminary to the real project of Islam, which was the path to union of love and will with God.

All of this made Muslims flexible in tolerating popular religiosity, expressed as visits to local shrines and holy sites such as the tombs of revered persons.  Once Islam was established in a region and began to have its own holy men and women - in many cases the missionary who brought Islam to the region - the Muslim’s tomb either replaced or was joined to the already existing pilgrimage site.  Islamic practice distinguished Muslims from the non-Muslims with whom they lived in basic ways - one God, prohibition of pork and alcohol, the Ramadan fast.  But in other matters - dress, marriage customs, village organization, and religious architecture - Muslims followed local norms.

Given their desire to arrive at a personal, loving union with God, the Sufis tended to focus on individualized interior religious practice and they correspondingly de-emphasized the social and political aspect of religion.  Islam was seen as a way of life that could be lived in any form of government, in any culture or nation.  Even when Muslim regions came to be governed by non-Muslim rulers, traditional Islam was politically quietist and found a work­able, if uncomfortable modus vivendi with the new realities. In the struggle for independence, it was not the traditional Muslim scholars who took the lead, but rather the reformist lay leaders, usually trained in secular disciplines rather than in the religious sciences.

Revivalist critique of traditional Islam

The easy accommodation of traditional Islam with cultures has been challenged by Wahhabis. They understand the purpose of Islam to be the construction of a society in accord with God’s will, rather than one based on human likes and dislikes, customs and traditions.  The Islamic community is to be distinguished from others not simply by a certain number of specific injunctions (e.g., the prayers, fasting during Ramadan) or prohibitions (e.g., alcohol or pork), but by a way of life that embraces every aspect of behavior and social relations.

To the reformers, it is not simply a matter of correcting the accommodations that traditional Muslims made with cultures.  What is needed is a total reorientation in understanding the nature of Islam.  For the reformers, Islam is a social program aimed at building a certain kind of society, not, as Sufis had seen it, a spiritual path to union with God.  The guidelines for what society should be like are found in a careful study of the shari’a.  The Islamic way of life is not limited to spiritual personal perfection, but extends to societal relations, economic affairs, and political systems.

The role of the state is to enforce good, prohibit evil.  This means, negatively, that the state must not put any obstacles in the way of the project of Islamization.  It must not command that which is forbidden, nor prevent Muslims from carrying out the social and ritual prescriptions of Islam.  Many reformers add that the role of governments includes positive promotion of Islam.

In the colonial period, this understanding of the role of the state brought Muslims regularly into conflict with colonial administrators, and reformist Muslims played a prominent role in the struggle for independence.  They believed that until Muslims were themselves in control of the political apparatus and governing their own nations, the state could not play its proper role in Islamizing society.  After independence, reformist movements discovered that the new rulers, liberal fellow Muslims, were not interested in promoting Islam.

Muslim reformist critique of modernity

Many factors underlie the emergence of militant Muslim movements.  There is a criticism of the Sufi roots of Islam and a desire to reorient the inner-directed thrust of Sufism towards an activist program of social reform.  The political philosophy of Muslim militants holds that the state should be an instrument to promote an Islamic way of life.  In many Asian countries, a revivalist approach to Islam is an attractive alternative that promises to resolve the crises in existing institutions: the lack of effective and representative government, imbalances in wealth and property, the wasteful yet ambiguous role of the military, the failure of socialist central planning and management of the economy, and the institutionalization of the traditional religious leaders which made them servants of the governments rather than spokesmen for the people.

This is accompanied by a harsh critique of modernity.  Militant Muslim objections to are similar to those of Christian fundamentalists but have their own slant.  Among Muslims, the focus of protest is secularism, and their social program can be called desecularization or, as they prefer to put it, the resacralization of society.  Like their Christian counterparts, Muslims are ready to accept and use modern communications technology to promote their cause.

They perceive in Western secular humanism a post-religious ideology that seeks to overturn a God-centered, community-based understanding of human life.  They see modernity as an egoistic, individualist approach to life that relativizes religion, exalts the individual, and divides the world into masters and subjects, advanced and underdeveloped.  Ethics is reduced to market expediency, while family values and moral choices are left to the private decision of the individual.  The natural world is not seen as the precious gift of the Creator God to be carefully protected and preserved, but simply as raw material to be economically exploited.

Muslim reformers claim that modern societies have abandoned God and view a religious outlook as an outmoded relic from former times.  In this secular age, the need for God has been superseded, and religion is seen as typical of primitive, immature, backward, superstitious societies.  This is symptomatic, the reformers hold, of human arrogance, of the view that man is capable of all things, sufficient unto himself, the measure of good and bad, right and wrong.  Domination, power, wealth, sex-appeal and conspicuous consumption are signs of success, evidence that someone is an achiever.

In the highly individualistic modernist outlook, it is not society or the social group, not even the family that counts.  It is the individual person who makes his or her own morality, autonomous in moral code and decisions.  Human rights are equated with the rights of the individual.  Muslim revivalists underline the prior rights of God to determine proper societal relations.  God’s revealed Word gives precedence to the rights of society, to the overriding prerogatives of the collectivity over the desires of the individual.

Another characteristic which the Muslim reformers share with Christian fundamentalists is the harsh anger of the outsider, of those who are excluded from the elite in-group who both promote and profit from modernity.  The Muslim reformers perceive this liberal elite to be occupying the seats of power - the great international bureaucracies at the U.N., W.H.O., and I.M.F., government ministries even in Muslim countries, the universities, schools and departments of education, think tanks and consultancy boards, the owners, promoters and personalities of the mass media.  In short, they hold that the liberal consensus has created an environment in which the only viewpoint to be taken seriously is their own, while other points of view are simply dismissed as unenlightened, backward, or fanatic.  In the view of the reformers, the liberal elite not only express public opinion, they create it and dictate it.

A conflict of values

According to Muslim reformers, what is at stake is a fundamental conflict of values.  On the one hand, in a secular value system, the individual person is conceived as the center of the universe.  Fulfilling to the utmost one’s potential, capabilities, and legitimate desires is considered the highest human goal, and individuals must be free to achieve these aspirations.  The only limitation on human freedom is that in pursuing one’s personal objectives, no one must violate the rights of others to pursue and achieve their own goals.

While secular liberalism does not deny the existence of God or reject religion as such, it is skeptical of the ability of any religious system to attain truth, and it is opposed to the role of religion in public life.  Religion can be admitted as the personal choice of some individuals who feel they need some moral direction in their private and familial lives, but it has no place in public affairs.  The marketplace, social interaction and, above all, government, are autonomous spheres that must exist and operate outside the influence of religious thought.

Against secular values, Muslim revivalists propose their own theocentric value system.  For them, God has revealed a proper way for humans to live and has laid down the principles on which society is to be built.  They take the moral will of God very seriously and view as enemies those who would propose incompatible ethical values.  They are called upon to struggle (the root meaning of jihâd) against secular, i.e., anti-God, anti-religion, anti-morality forces propagated first and foremost by American and European societies.

The direction of history

In their reading of historical events, Muslims have their own distinctive vision.  They hold that the modernist ideology, with its anti-religious component, scored its first successes in intellectual circles in Europe and was then taken up and spread throughout the world by America.  Having got its start in predominantly Christian regions, the first victim to modernist philosophy was Christianity, which Muslim reformers are convinced is dead in its medieval European homeland.

Muslim activists are convinced that the goals of secularists are ambitious and inimical to Islam.  They believe that the West is out to destroy Islam as the last bastion of the religious worldview and perceive the attack to be multisided.  It is political in the sense that the Western alliance intends to isolate Islamic countries much in the way that the communist bloc had been isolated before 1989.  It is military in that tactics of war - blockades, frozen assets, air attacks, invasions, occupations and other coercive actions - are more often directed against Muslim nations than against others.  It is economic in that colonial domination has been replaced by economic globalization, markets manipulated from the outside, political leaders bought off by international industry, and military action taken to ensure control of resources.  The attack is religious in the constant presentation of Islam - in film, global television networks, newsmagazines, and spy novels - as a fanatic, violent, xenophobic faith that is impossible for others to live with.  The attack is cultural in that all things Western - education, clothing, law, manners, music, film, house furnishing, gender relations - are presented as superior and to be admired and imitated.  They see the alleged cultural superiority of the West, which presents itself as the unique font of truth, liberty, and progress, as an implicit attack on their faith, culture, and traditions.

If all this seems overstated and even somewhat paranoid, it reflects a widespread perception in the Muslim world.  The conviction that Islamic faith and Muslim culture are in danger explains many of the reactions among Muslims, of political, intellectual, and religious leaders as well as of the man and woman in the street, to recent events such as the Gulf War, the Algerian military coup d’état, and to the continuing dramas in Palestine, Bosnia and, most recently, Iraq.

Each of these tragedies is interpreted in the light of the preceding critique of modernity.  The Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq were seen as wars for control of Muslim oil fields, waged by a Western-assembled coalition attacking a predominantly Muslim people by use of vastly superior technological weaponry.  Israel is seen as the unilateral implantation of a Western people and ideology in the heart of the Islamic world.  The experience of Bosnia is taken as evidence that the European nations will never defend a predominantly Muslim people or permit a Muslim-dominated nation to exist in Europe.

Like Christian evangelicals, Muslim revivalists regard the direction that history has taken in this century as the temporary triumph of the forces of evil.  When Ayatollah Khomeini referred to the United States as the Great Satan, he was not simply engaging in invective, but making a theological statement.  The course of current history, they feel, is a threat to morality and a God-centered life.  Muslims foresee no imminent eschatological crisis.  They are optimistic that they will be successful in withstanding and eventually overcoming anti-God forces, although it will require struggle, sacrifice, and suffering on their part.  Many claim that the God-given task of Islam today is to save the world from the onslaught of Western liberal hegemony.

Bases for dialogue

The Muslim critique of secularism is a challenge to Christians.  For Muslims, it is God who is the center of the universe, at the heart of human life and every human activity.  A secular way of life that reduces faith to private morality and ritual is seen as an affront to God’s majesty and holiness.  They regard modern Christians’ easy acceptance of secular society and humanist ethics as a compromise with religious faith.  Muslims repeatedly affirm that they have no argument with true Christians, to whom they look as natural allies in the struggle against secular values, but they feel that Christians have sold their birthright in order to present themselves as modern and progressive.  It is tempting for Christians to feel that they have successfully reconciled religious faith with the demands of modern life and sometimes even boast that they are modern while Muslims are backward.  Yet Christians may not be conscious of the extent to which they have compromised their faith with incompatible elements of modern Western culture and unaware of the ways in which the Christian churches have been wounded in the course of their encounter with liberal values.

Yet it is precisely on issues of modernity that Christians must engage in dialogue with Muslims.  Modern Christians accept the challenges posed by modern values, such as the liberal critique of religion as often being a factor of oppression, inequality, and patriarchy in human societies.  They uphold a commitment to the legitimate human and civil rights of all, a commitment that does not entail a blind acceptance of everything that is claimed to be a human right.  In dialogue, Christians must challenge Muslims to enter jointly into a constructive and critical encounter with liberal philosophy in order to disentangle its positive humane values, which are confirmed by religious faith, from the destructive, divisive, and egoistic elements which are by-products of secular and modernist thinking and policy.