It is in the nature of any enduring religion’s foundational texts that they were composed a long time ago in a very different environment. Hence, much of what they have to say is likely to be irrelevant to the conditions under which the adherents of the religion currently live, and some of it will be incompatible with them. Thus, for Christian fundamentalists, who see themselves as champions of family values in a morally reprobate America, it is not helpful to have Jesus say this: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, … he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Likewise his promise that those who believe will be able to handle snakes and drink poison with impunity (Mark 16:18) seems downright bizarre in the world we live in today. Obvious parallels are the incantations and spells of the Atharva Veda, and what the Koran has to say about beating a recalcitrant wife (Q4:34) or the metamorphosis of humans into monkeys and pigs (Q2:65, 5:60, 7:166). Times change, and as a result such dislocations are inevitable.
This means that for a society under threat from more modern competitors, fundamentalism does not look like a sensible choice. When conservatism isn’t working, the obvious alternative is modernism—to become more modern by adopting those aspects of the culture of one’s competitors that are reckoned to be the basis of their success. In the past two centuries, outside the Western world, this has meant Westernization. Such an option does not entail an outright rejection of one’s past—or at least not of all of it; one can still retain self-esteem by looking back for inspiration to a golden age of one’s own, and nationalists do this as a matter of course. But inspiration is not a blueprint; directly or indirectly, the blueprints have come from the West. If we leave aside those populations that were demographically overwhelmed, responses along the lines just sketched are typical of the ways in which non-Western populations have reacted to the Western impact. There was, of course, a great deal of variety to these responses. Societies differed as to how long they clung to conservatism—the Koreans longer than the Japanese—and whether they opted for a democratic or an authoritarian political model—the Indians as against the Chinese. What all these societies nevertheless have in common is that they abandoned conservatism for modernism. Insofar as fundamentalism played a part in their responses at all, it was marginal, as our discussion of India and Latin America has amply illustrated.1
For much of the modern history of the Muslim world, and for many Muslims today, as no doubt in the future, things are not very different. It is only in the last few decades that an Islamism with a marked fundamentalist emphasis has emerged as a significant political contender; before that the Muslim world did not seem to diverge very much from the rest of the non-Western world. But the phenomenon is now sufficiently salient among a variety of Muslim populations across the globe to constitute a large and conspicuous exception to the normal pattern. As such, it demands explanation, and as usual there is more than one explanatory question to ask. The issue this book has been concerned with is why the divergent pattern should have emerged in the Muslim world and not among other non-Western populations. Here, as I hope to have shown, an examination of the character of the Islamic heritage can contribute materially to an answer.
Just as religious heritages differ, so also do the effects that fundamentalist highlighting has on them. The chapters in this section have shown the implications of these two factors in combination. In the Hindu case fundamentalizing one’s heritage has little to offer its modern heirs, and in the Catholic case it provides only a single asset. In the Islamic case, by contrast, it delivers several assets. Of course, fundamentalism also has its downsides, as we have seen in each case; but the most serious one in the Islamic case—the force of divine jealousy—is internally mitigated,2 and it does not appear to outweigh the attractions of fundamentalism. The key finding of this part of the book is thus that in the context of modern politics there is more to be recovered from the foundations of Islam than from those of Hinduism or Christianity—and this in terms of both identity and values.
Another way to put this is to say that the overlap between fundamentalism and modernism is greatest in the Islamic case. But, as we have seen, this affinity is reinforced by another overlap, that between fundamentalism and conservatism. Here, too, a tendency to fundamentalism works best in the Islamic context.
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1 One might see the imperial loyalism of the Meiji Restoration as a kind of fundamentalism, but the program of the new regime was unashamedly modernist.
2 See 391–92.