It's common to see people talk about or reference Muslim fundamentalism or fundamentalist Islam, but what do these terms mean? Fundamentalism was originally coined in reference to a strain of traditionalist Christianity in America and can't be transferred to other religions without careful definition and explanation.

In the February, 1990 issue of Political Quarterly, Tariq Modood writes:

The term ‘fundamentalism’ originally arose to describe the literalist attitude of certain American Protestant sects to the Bible. As such, it cannot be directly transposed on to Muslims for the vast majority of Muslims, including those in Britain, are Sunnis who, incidentally, owe no allegiance whatsoever to Shiite Ayatollahs, and who, unlike the Shia, take all passages in the Quran literally rather than metaphorically. I understand fundamentalism in Sunni Islam to consist of the following beliefs:

(i) to recapture the essence of one’s faith one needs to return to the source, namely the Quran and prophet Muhammad as the perfect model of a Muslim in personal life and public affairs and to reject all other historical accretions and contemporary norms as un-Islamic;

(ii) this source is not just a moral vision or a body of ethical principles but a comprehensive and indivisible way of life and the sole legitimate basis for positive law in all its details, all social institutions and all aspects of personal life and with appropriate leadership and effort can be implemented in any time or place for it is of universal authority, eternally valid and yet capable of a single correct interpretation;

(iii) no modern society, including most if not all the Muslim states, is or is endeavouring to be Islamic and Muslims in all societies, especially where they are a majority, are under an obligation to work to create an Islamic state.


A Sunni fundamentalist, then, believes that Islam is a totally systematic, self-sufficient set of ideas that owes nothing to history and can be enacted in a single uniform way of life which is the life that God meant for humankind and which it is the duty of all Muslims to approximate to as much as possible and in as many spheres of life as the distribution of political power between Muslims and non-Muslims allows (though Muslims have a further duty to improve this distribution in favour of ‘true’ Muslims as circumstances allow).

Modood’s definition actually helps point to just how similar fundamentalist movements around the world are, not how different they are. The details are obviously different — Jewish and Christian fundamentalists don’t call for a return to the Quran, after all — but they general principles are pretty consistent and familiar.

Whatever the background religion in question, fundamentalists claim that their religion is absolutely true, that it owes nothing to any human culture, that we must all return to a “true” form of this religion in order for society to be “right” and moral, that the only “true” form of this religion is what they claim is the “original” form — untainted by human culture — and that true believers are obligated to fight against corrupting influences from the broader culture.

This basic description can be repeated over and over for various fundamentalist movements around the world. Religious fundamentalists frequently have more in common with fundamentalists from other religions than they do with more liberal adherents of the same religion. The reason why is that, in some ways, the actual dogmas and doctrines of the religion can be less important than the reaction to modernity and the desire to reconstruct traditional ways of life, traditional structures of authority, and traditional religious privileges.

 

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