The Fundamentalist Impulse in Islam & Christianity (Book Notes: Fundamentalism)
It's common for people to discuss fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam as if the phenomenon "fundamentalism" were essentially the same in both of these religions. That, however, isn't true - not only are the religions themselves very different, but their fundamentalist strains developed in very different contexts. This is key to understanding their fundamentalisms.
In Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning, Malise Ruthven writes:
The fundamentalist impulse in Islam ... takes a different form from its counterpart in Protestant Christianity, where the struggle between fundamentalism and liberalism was for the most part waged inside the churches and the teaching institutions that served them. In the majority Sunni tradition it is driven mainly by the secular elites, beneficiaries of modern scientific and technical educations, who wish to reintegrate the religious, cultural, and political life of their societies along Islamic lines: the shorthand for this aspiration is the 'restoration of the Sharia' (Islamic law).
Scholars make a distinction between those Islamists who put more emphasis on voluntary Islamization 'from below', through preaching, the building or taking-over of state mosques, the creation of charitable and social welfare networks, and cultural activities aIling women's halaqas (circles) or discussion groups; and Islamization 'from above' involving the exercise of influence at state level, including the take-over, by democratic or military means, of state power. The family resemblance to Protestant fundamentalism may seem tenuous: but there is an underlying similarity, which is the holistic or totalitarian idea of a political order 'ruled by God'.
So for Protestant Christianity, the battle between modernity and tradition was fought to a great extent within churches and within religious institutions (like seminaries and religious colleges). This means that fundamentalism, as a reaction against modernity, is partially a reaction to internal stresses within Christianity itself — the modernity to which fundamentalism is reaction is not just a "them" on the "outside," but also an "us" on the inside.
With Islam, however, the fundamentalism which developed was almost entirely a reaction to a "them" on the "outside." It's true that modernization was being pushed by fellow Muslims, but for the most part they weren't Muslims who were part of religious institutions. Instead they were self-consciously separate from traditional society, "elites" who ran secular institutions like governments, unions, and universities. The battle lines between modernity and tradition were thus drawn much more sharply and with much less confusion about who the enemy really was.
This means that there have been few, if any, authentic Muslim religious voices being raised in defense of modernity and liberalization. People who wanted to be authentically and genuinely "Muslim" only had varying degrees of more and less extreme traditionalism to choose from. For Christians, it was possible to retain one's identity as a genuine, authentic Christian while also adopting more modern and liberal attitudes — they just had to attend a more liberal religious college and/or join a more liberal church. This situation continues to a great extent even today. Christianity has a wide variety of churches which are liberal or conservative, modern or traditional. Islam, however, doesn't have such a variety of mosques where Muslims can explore different ways to be Muslim.
Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.
Comments
In Christianity, the worst excesses came in reaction
to encroaching secularism. The Inquisition, the protestant witch trials, the burning of Jan Hus, and the persecution of Galileo; all the result of a panicked reaction to the weakening of Christianity’s lock on Europe.
I see the rise of present day Islamic fundamentalism not as a strengthening of Islam but of its decline. When truth is on your side you pound on the truth, when it’s not you pound on the table. These fanatics are pounding on the table.
Religions are only tolerable when they are weakened to a point when they become just quaint traditions. There isn’t a good Islam and a bad Islam just as there isn’t a good Christianity and a bad Christianity. All true believers are dangerous.
Bamberg
Bamberg—I must respectfully disagree with your assertion that “Religions are only tolerable when they are weakened to a point when they become just quaint traditions. [...] All true believers are dangerous.”
So would such “Godless monsters” as Roger Williams (one of the first and most outspoken advocates of the separation of religion and government, who founded Rhode Island on that very principle after being expelled from Massachusetts by its “religionocrats,” and also founded the first Baptist church in the Americas—a church he left a year and a half later when he felt it was straying from its founding philosophy and trying in its turn to impose itself on civil government), numerous American campaigners against slavery and child labor and for public health and human rights over the past two centuries, the German “Confessing Church” and the “Righteous Gentiles” who risked their lives to to help and protect thousands of Jews during the Nazi era, Bishop Oscar Romero and other Liberation Theologians, and Nobel Peace Prize winners including Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjöld, Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter, Mother Teresa, Bishop Desmond Tutu, the 14th Dalai Lama, and the American Friends Service Committee.
A religion or philosophy is seldom “good or bad” in and of itself; what makes it good or bad is whose hands it falls into and how it is used. Whether a stick of dynamite is used to blast a tunnel for a highway or to blow up a school full of children isn’t the dynamite’s decision; it’s the user’s, and the same is true of ideologies.
That principle applies to atheistic philosophies as well as religions. When Stalin, Mao, and others like them got hold of Marx’s noble vision of communism, the result was (and in places like North Korea, continues to be) a nightmare.
We also tend to forget that during the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was the most scientifically advanced and religiously tolerant society in the West. Many Classical Greek scientific and medical texts that might otherwise have been lost were preserved by way of their Arabic translations, Muslim doctors were in demand among rulers and nobility in many parts of Europe, and Moorish Spain was home to one of the greatest cultural flowerings in the history of Judaism. Islam’s retreat into rigorism and xenophobia occurred primarily in response to the Crusades.
It’s undeniable that abuse of religion has led to oppression, persecution, and wars resulting in countless deaths, but to call religion (or dynamite, or anything else) “bad” in itself because of that abuse is nothing but intellectual laziness and prejudice. For every Torquemada there’s a Gandhi, for every Khomeini there’s a Dalai Lama, and that has always been and always will be true as long as human nature continues to be human nature.
One thing is certain: The world will be much better off once we all decide to stop blaming the tool and start looking at the user—and once we all, no matter what religion or ideology we claim to practice, remember to go back every so often and “read the instructions” (Qur’an, Das Kapital, Bible, or whatever else may be appropriate) and ask ourselves honestly whether we’re using our respective dynamite safely and sanely.
Just 2 brass farthings’ worth from a Zen Baptist Existentialist Christian Agnostic who usually (not always, but usually) prefers hanging out with atheists and agnostics to spending time with a lot of the “believers” she knows who would rather listen to someone else tell them what to do than read the instructions……….