CHAPTER 7
FUNDAMENTALISM AND MODERNITY1
The idea of modernity and the revival of seemingly archaic religious ideas are not an obvious match. Yet many scholars have argued that fundamentalism and modernity are intrinsically linked.2 More so, some believe that modernity and late modern phenomena, especially globalisation, have, in fact, caused the ‘fundamentalist wave’.3 How can globalisation and modernity produce progress in one field and the apparent opposite in another? To make sense of this apparent contradiction, we need to take a closer look at the historical interplay between religion and modernity, perceptions and effects of globalisation and (late) modernity, and – finally – the ways in which fundamentalists have politicised in response to the (late) modern challenge. What doing so will show is that fundamentalism and modernity are not just linked, they are – in many respects – two sides of the same coin. Contemporary fundamentalism is far from being a ‘return to the middle ages’: it is a quintessentially modern phenomenon that requires a modern response.
Defining Modernity, ‘Late’ Modernity, and Globalisation
Needless to say, none of the propositions put forward in this chapter are entirely straightforward, and it makes sense, therefore, to begin by explaining how key terms and concepts will be understood. Late modernity, which is often traced back to the end of World War II, describes the latest phase of modernity in which the social, political and economic processes that marked the modern era – the rise of capitalism and representative democracy, urbanisation, and industrialisation – have reached a new stage. Still rooted in modernity (hence, ‘late’ rather than ‘post’-modernity), prominent sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman argue that late modernity represents a ‘radicalised’ version of modernity in which some of the trends and processes that were present in modernity continue but have been accelerated, prompting substantive changes in the ways we live and work and leading to a seemingly all-pervasive sense of uncertainty.4 Globalisation, which as an academic concept caught on in the 1990s, is widely seen as one of the defining characteristics of late modernity. Giddens, for example, looks at globalisation as an outgrowth of modernity rather than a separate development. Modernity and late modernity, he argues, are ‘inherently globalizing’,5 and indeed this chapter will demonstrate that, in many instances, it is difficult to understand one without the other(s).
What, then, is globalisation? Sceptics argue that the international system is no more integrated now than it was in earlier historical periods, and that globalisation is neither novel nor valid nor relevant as a concept to describe change in the global political and economic system.6 There can be no question that these claims merit examination and debate, but the assumption underlying this chapter is that globalisation exists, that it represents a unique set of processes which have produced changes in degree and kind, and that its effects – through uneven – can be felt across the world. According to David Held and Anthony McGrew, globalisation describes (and can be measured in) kinds of processes: a ‘stretching’ of activities beyond national borders (extensity); the intensification of such activities (intensity); the ‘speeding up’ of global interactions (velocity); and, consequently, the growing significance of events and decisions in distant places (impact).7 Thus defined, globalisation can be said to have given rise not just to increased transnational flows of people, goods, capital and information but also to the creation of new ‘transcontinental or interregional […] networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power’.8
It seems clear that important political events such as the end of the Cold War, as well as developments in communication, information technology and transportation, helped accelerate the deepening and widening of global integration, with many of its most profound consequences becoming obvious in the 1990s. The roots of the phenomenon, however, are more complex and date back further in time. Moreover, although, like modernity, globalisation may have been driven to a significant extent by developments in the economic sphere, it would be mistaken to view globalisation as purely economic in its causes and consequences. The drivers of globalisation can also be found in politics, culture and technology, and its impact has been felt in all these spheres of human activity, extending even to the cognitive – expressed, for example, in people's changing sense of identity and their growing interest in, and realisation of, how events in faraway countries affect their lives.9
Religion and Modernity
The notion that modernity and religion are opposed to each other is rooted in the Enlightenment, which began in the middle of the eighteenth century and whose central idea was for reason rather than tradition to be the guiding principle of all human endeavour. It inspired important philosophical paradigms such as rationalism which demanded that all human behaviour and decision-making should be informed by the same logical processes from which insights in the natural sciences were derived. Another key concept, empiricism, postulated that all human knowledge should be gained from actual experience and systematic observation rather than belief or faith.10 Not all Enlightenment thinkers agreed with each other (indeed, there are contradictions between rationalism and empiricism), but they all believed in progress – progress through reason – and that ‘The growth of knowledge [would enable] mankind to shape a future better than anything it has known in the past.’11 The combination of reason and the belief in progress – together with a near-violent rejection of anything that could be construed as superstition – made the Enlightenment a uniquely powerful philosophical movement whose assumptions paved the way for modernity and continue to underlie, if not dominate, the Western way of thinking.
Arguably, the whole idea of the Enlightenment was constructed in opposition to the way in which religious ideas and institutions were believed to have stifled progress and held back humanity in the past.12 One only needs to read the French author Voltaire (who subscribed to the idea of a supreme being but rejected the Catholic Church and much of its doctrine)13 to understand quite how strongly the protagonists of the movement believed that people's potential would remain unfulfilled unless they freed themselves from the shackles of religious dogma. Conversely, they assumed that, if their ideas were allowed to spread, advances in technology, science and the resulting emancipation of society would make religion less plausible. The expectation was that knowledge and progress would lead to a decline in religious belief and practice: the more educated a society and the more it was governed by reason and rationality, the less it was necessary for people to look to religion and religious leaders for guidance.
For the first few decades following the end of World War II, the Enlightenment hypothesis seemed to be borne out by declining church attendance figures in Western Europe and the increasingly secular lifestyles of educated elites in the developing world.14 By the mid-1970s, however, sociologists and anthropologists were surprised to find that the seemingly unstoppable advance of secularism had come to a halt. Instead, conservative religious groups were springing up on all continents and in all cultures. The rise of the evangelical movement in the United States, Europe and parts of Latin America was echoed by the emergence of Hindu nationalism in India, the Islamic revival in the Middle East and the resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Israel and among Diaspora Jews. Indeed, it did not take long until the various religious revivals came to be reflected in politics. Gilles Kepel singles out the second half of the 1970s as a turning point: in 1977, strong gains for the religious parties ended nearly 30 years of Labour Party rule in Israel; in 1978, the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II signalled the return to a more traditionalist interpretation of Catholic doctrine; and in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini's movement expelled the Shah from Tehran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.15
Clearly, the Enlightenment hypothesis had failed to predict that people even in highly advanced societies could turn their back on progress and reason and revert to religious practices that many liberal minds considered anachronistic. How, then, could the sudden reversal be explained? In the early 1990s, many scholars began to argue that the two seemingly contradictory phenomena – late modernity and the religious revival – were in fact connected. Among the first to address the conundrum, Kepel argued that the return to religion was a reaction to the ‘worldwide discrediting of modernism’.16 He noted that, ‘wherever [religious revivalism] appears, it sets itself up against a “crisis” in society, claiming to have identified the underlying causes of that crisis beyond the economic, political or cultural symptoms through which it is manifested’.17 Writing at almost exactly the same time, Frank Lechner went even further, arguing that revivalist movements represented a form of resistance against not just modernity but, more specifically, the forces of globalisation. In his view, the emergence of such groups was ‘one effort among others to preserve or achieve a certain cultural authenticity in the face of a greedy, universalizing global culture’.18
Though somewhat more sophisticated than the Enlightenment hypothesis, these arguments ignored many of the subtleties that characterised the movements they sought to describe. Most significantly, they looked at religious revivals as if they represented a ‘return to tradition’, whereas – in many places – they clearly were entirely novel expressions of religiosity that had no precedent in a country's religious history. Though using the language of religion, there was nothing ‘culturally authentic’ about, say, the Salafi movement, which had been virtually unknown in many parts of the Muslim world prior to the religious revival of the 1970s, nor did evangelical Christians have any tradition to go back to in historically Catholic countries like Brazil. It was misleading, therefore, to frame the religious revival in terms of a confrontation between tradition and modernity.
Only in the mid-1990s did scholars manage to find a way of reconciling the religious revival with modernity. The American futurologist John Naisbitt conceived the notion of the ‘global paradox’, observing that, as globalisation unfolds, people have a tendency to revert to more ‘tribal’ concerns, such as ethnicity, language and religion.19 The political scientist Ben Barber popularised the terms ‘jihad’ and ‘McWorld’ as metaphors for the dialectic forces that marked the late modern experience. His explanation is worth quoting at length:
What I have called forces of Jihad may […] appear to be directly adversarial to the forces of McWorld. Yet Jihad stands not so much in stark opposition as in subtle counterpoint to McWorld and is itself a dialectical response to modernity whose features both reflect and reinforce the modern world's virtues and vices – Jihad via McWorld rather Jihad versus McWorld […] Modernity precedes and thus sponsors and conditions its critics. And though those critics, on the way to combating the modern, may try to resuscitate ancient usages and classical norms, such usages and norms – ethnicity, fundamentalist religion, nationalism, and culture for example – are themselves at least in part inventions of the agitated modern mind. Jihad is not only McWorld's adversary, it is its child.20
Though Barber had mostly nationalism in mind and was referring to religious movements only in passing,21 his central idea – namely that ‘fundamentalist’ movements are products of modernity rather than the past – still provides the most compelling (and convincing) prism through which to interpret the religious revivals that began in the late 1970s. At the same time, his concept of ‘jihad vs. McWorld’ left the central question unanswered. What is it about late modernity that makes people want to embrace ‘fundamentalist’ religious movements? How exactly does exposure to late modernity lead to revivals in religiosity?
Late Modernity and Insecurity
The key to unpacking the complex relationship between ‘jihad’ and ‘McWorld’ lies in understanding how late modernity not just made societies freer and more productive but how, in so doing, it has simultaneously produced more anxiety. When looking at Western countries, one can easily identify a whole range of uniquely late modern developments that have contributed to this widespread sense of insecurity. Take, for example, the use of technology and how it has challenged people's sense of control over their own destiny. As the journalist George Will explains, late modernity has ‘multiplied[…]. dependencies on things utterly mysterious to those who are dependent – things such as semiconductors, which control the functioning of almost everything from cell phones to computers to cars.’22 Whenever such complex systems fail, people realise that their late modern existence relies on institutions and processes they do not know or understand and whose workings they cannot influence. In fact, many have come to understand that, with many such systems being interdependent, it takes the failure of just one system – say, electricity or computers – in order for its effects to ‘cascade down’ and affect other vital systems.23 Hence, while modern Western societies may have attained a degree of sophistication that is unparalleled in human history, it is precisely their sophistication that has made them seem vulnerable. Technical and scientific progress has not necessarily led to more control but, on the contrary, has produced an all-pervasive sense of fragility.24
A second factor to be considered is the massive economic and social changes that Western societies have undergone in the decades following World War II. As early as 1986, Ulrich Beck pointed out that, with the rise of structural unemployment, part-time work and the idea of job mobility, many of the certainties that had marked employment in the modern era had ceased to exist. These changes, he argued, had been accompanied by equally dramatic transformations in the social sphere, especially new generational values and gender equality.25 And indeed, people in Western societies nowadays get married later, have fewer children and are divorced more frequently.26 The traditional constants of marriage, family and lifetime employment, which brought stability to life in the modern era, no longer seem to be reliable guides for late modern biographies. There can be no doubt that late modernity has introduced more flexibility and choice – people are less constrained by family, neighbourhood, culture and social convention – but this has also created new demands. Life in the late modern era may be filled with opportunities, yet the overabundance of opportunity also seems to have created uncertainty and confusion.
Globalisation has added a further dimension to the widespread sense of insecurity experienced in Western societies. Global migration has created hybrid identities, especially among the second and third generation descendants of immigrants, contributing to the attractiveness of transnational identities and ideologies.27 However, the impact of global migration has not been restricted to the immigrants themselves. Being confronted with the cultural, ethnic and religious ‘other’, whether in the form of immigrants or other foreign influences, has compelled indigenous populations to question their own sense of identity. John Tomlinson cites the example of Mexican labourers who, upon moving to the United States, ‘were pressed to […] adopt a particular form of […] identity as a member of a collective or “community”’,28 and – in turn – made US Americans think harder about their own identity. The same process, albeit on a larger scale, can be observed in Western Europe. The influx of foreign labour, which began in the late 1950s and 1960s, turned monocultural into multicultural societies and, in doing so, has raised often uncomfortable questions about what it means to be British, German or French. Globalisation and late modernity, then, have not just spread a generalised sense of uncertainty and instability but challenged the very idea of national identity.29
In developing countries, the tension between ‘jihad’ and ‘McWorld’ results not from the transition between modernity and late modernity but, rather, from the unsettling clashes that occur between the pre-modern, modern and late modern elements that co-exist in many of these societies. The geographical space in which such clashes are played out are the cities whose populations have multiplied in the course of the post-war demographic explosion and the resulting mass migration from the countryside, which Saskia Sassen pointedly described as ‘people on the run’.30 Such mega-cities contain the ‘new arrivals’ from the countryside, the recently settled lower and middle classes who occupy (often badly paid) jobs in trade, services and the industrial sector; and the (often Western) educated elites whose values, attitudes and lifestyles often resemble those of their late modern counterparts in the modern world.
While each of these groups would have plenty of reason to feel anxious on their own, it is the interaction between them that has made their experience particularly intense. The lower and middle classes, for example, have long been frustrated about their lack of economic progress and access to higher social strata, especially in former colonies where the struggle for independence was accompanied by the hope for more justice and equity. What has caused them anxiety are the ‘recent arrivals’ who are competing against them for income, jobs and, more generally, a place in society. As a result, rather than moving up the social ladder, the lower and middle classes feel that they need to fight in order to keep what little they have got. For the ‘recent arrivals’, the challenge is both economic and social. Not only do they need to make ends meet, they also have to learn to cope in unsettling social environments with unfamiliar customs and practices. For instance, Mustpaha Pasha points out that, ‘removed from established patterns of rural life, the vast majority of Muslim youth who now inhabit the congested cities [in south Asia and the Arab world] confront unexpected encounter with the opposite sex’.31 Tossed into a ‘new social universe’ in which they lack orientation and cultural points of reference,32 many of the ‘recent arrivals’ are certain to go through periods of tension, uncertainty and confusion.
As in the developed world, globalisation has added to the widespread sense of insecurity. Jamal Nassar shows that, while globalisation may have shrunk distances, it has simultaneously raised expectations, especially in the developing world where, thanks to the expansion of foreign tourism, returning labour migrants and satellite television, the dispossessed and the poor have been ‘educated’ about ‘their own poverty dispossession versus the rising wealth and power of the few’.33 It may well be true that economic globalisation has benefited millions, but these benefits have not ‘migrated’ as fast as people's expectations,34 nor have they reached all the developing countries to the same extent. In 2005, a high-level working group of political economists, which convened at the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security in Madrid, concluded that some countries' successful integration into the world economy had been mirrored by
the growth of ‘weak globalisers’ who become less competitive, whose populations have failing or stagnant incomes, and – as a result – experience growing unemployment, political tension, and religious fundamentalism. A number of African and Muslim countries have steadily ‘de-globalised’ over the last 25 years. The general effects are an increase in inequalities and social polarisation.35
Indeed, it is often overlooked that the same process of stratification has occurred within as well as between developing societies, and that, in many countries, the success of some has caused others to feel left behind. As the journalist Anand Giridharadas points out:
Societies are not monolithic blocks that go global all at once. Social change has early and late adopters, and the choices of the timely alter the options among which the tardy must subsequently choose. And so a defining fact about globalization may be that it has freed untold millions from inherited destinies, even as it makes others feel as though their control over fate is slipping away.36
Those societies – or segments within societies – that have so far failed to take advantage of any economic benefits may experience globalisation as a threat. From their perspective, not only does globalisation seem to fail to deliver on the promise of prosperity, it is sometimes viewed as a pretext for the imposition of alien values and culture. Globalisation, therefore, has accentuated the conflict between the pre-modern, modern and late modern sections of developing societies and, thus contributed to the general sense of instability and turmoil that has marked many of these countries' recent history.
Despite a similar analysis of the problem, much of the literature in the 1990s focused almost exclusively on the resurgence of ethno-nationalist identities. Barber himself concluded – somewhat confusingly – that ‘the language most commonly used to address the ends of the reinvented and self-described tribes waging Jihad […] remains the language of nationalism’.37 This may have been the obvious conclusion to draw at the time, given the numerous instances of war, ethnic cleansing and even genocide that followed the break-ups of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In reality, though, nationalism was just one of several ways in which people could express their desire for certainty in an uncertain world. An equally powerful source was religion, yet Barber and many of his colleagues had lost the courage of their convictions: having correctly identified the dialectics of late modernity and the resurgence of identity that it had produced, they pushed religion to the margins, believing it was of secondary importance.
In many ways, of course, religion was the more obvious source of identity in a rapidly changing global environment. Where people believed they had lost control over their destiny, religion offered a sense of direction and guidance. Where people were confused and overwhelmed by new choices and unfamiliar social environments, religion brought clarity and purpose. And where people felt threatened by instability, religion offered a way of making peace with themselves and the seemingly chaotic world around them. In short, religion provided meaning, direction and a sense of belonging in a world that appeared to have lost its way.
The two fundamentalist revivals – religious and nationalist – not only shared the same roots, they also seem to have followed similar trajectories. Although their violent manifestations often became obvious only in the 1990s, they can both be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s.38 There was one important difference, however. Nationalism was political by definition, whereas religion and the religious revival were spiritual in the first and political only in the second instance. It may have been reasonable to assume, therefore, that the religious revival was less likely than the nationalist resurgence to ‘tip over’ into politics and political violence, especially terrorism. Yet it did, and in the final section, we will attempt explain how and why this happened.
Fundamentalism and Politics
In the literature, we can find two approaches that seek to explain the politicisation of (fundamentalist) religion in the late modern period. The first revolves around the search for authenticity. It argues that all forms of secular governance in the post-war – especially post-colonial – era had failed, and that religion was the one culturally authentic system for organising a society that was left.39 During the Cold War, most of the so-called Third World countries had to align themselves with one of the two superpowers, yet neither communism nor capitalism provided the kinds of economic and social improvements that many people had hoped for, particularly in countries that had only achieved independence recently. On the contrary, secular nationalism – be it of the community or the capitalist variety – was experienced by many people as corrupt, oppressive and highlight inefficient. Paradoxically, then, the same secular ideologies that had mobilised the masses in the name of national liberation when under colonial rule came to be seen as forms of locally administered colonialism – a cunning way of exporting imperialist ideas ‘from the Western world, where [they] first emerged, to the rest of the world’.40 Against this background, religiously inspired government was perceived not only as a plausible alternative but, even more importantly, as the return to a culturally authentic way of life – even if the particular variety of religion that emerged as a result of the religious reveal was sometimes far from authentic.41
This process, of course, did not unfold everywhere. While almost every society that has been touched by modernity has experienced some form of religious revival, the politicisation of new religious movements happened in some parts of the world (the United States, parts of Africa, Israel, the Muslim world, India) but not in others (Europe, large parts of Latin American and Asia). It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider each of these places in detail, but the ‘failure of secularism’ hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for some of this regional variation. In the Muslim world and India, for example, religiously inspired political ideologies offered a clear alternative to what many people regarded as the secular, neo-colonialist status quo because the colonial experience had been recent and the language of the religious revival – Islam and Hindu nationalism respectively – provided a marker of cultural distinctiveness from the West. In Latin America, on the other hand, secularism was no longer bound up with colonialism in the public's mind because most countries had been independent for more than a century. Furthermore, the religious revival in Latin America promoted an entirely novel, more distinctly Western version of Christianity (Protestantism) at the expense of the more traditional, historically rooted one (Catholicism). As a consequence, not only was there no demand for non-secular ideologies, it would have been hard to convey them as authentic.
The second approach for explaining the politicisation of religion in the late modern period focuses on the widening gap between religious lifestyles and the social realities of late modernity. The movements that emerged as a result of the religious revival are often described as fundamentalist42 because they distinguish themselves from the rest of society in dress, customs and conduct; they are committed to conservative values, interpret holy texts literally, and – more often than not – hope to imitate an idealised past in which they believe perfect conditions for a sacred life existed. Modern and late modern societies, however, have made it increasingly difficult for such ‘fundamentalists’ to live their lives in accordance with those ideas. Most modern societies grant religious freedom and protect individuals' right to exercise their faith. But they also conceive of religion as a private affair, with the result that – to varying degrees – religious expression has been excluded from the public arena. As John Garvey put it, modern societies have enforced a ‘clean separation: religion is a private affair; the public sphere is secular’.43 Consequently, fundamentalists have found themselves in social and political environments that they increasingly have regarded as alien to their way of life. Globalisation, which has imported foreign influences, only added to the perception that people's religious identities are under threat and – more generally – that it has become impossible to reconcile religious principles with life in modern, secular societies.
Faced with seemingly hostile societies, many fundamentalists felt they had to choose between ‘flight and fight’. One option was to withdraw and separate from mainstream society. In the United States, Christian evangelicals set up compounds in the sparsely populated Western states, established evangelical universities and colleges, and even took their children out of state schools so they could be taught at home. The purpose was to isolate and protect themselves from modern life, which was believed to contaminate the purity of the faith. In the words of Michael Apple, ‘This “cocooning” is not just about seeking an escape the problem of the city (a metaphor for danger and heterogeneity). It is a rejection of the entire idea of the city. Cultural and intellectual diversity, complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and proximity to the Other – all these are to be shunned.’44 A similar – albeit far more extreme – response could be seen in a group of Egyptian Islamists in the 1970s who became known as Takfir wal-Hijra. Confronted with a society which they believed was morally corrupt, their leader, Shukri Mustafa, decided to excommunicate all Egyptian Muslims and then withdraw from ‘godless society’. Together with his followers, they set up camps in Upper Egypt where the group prepared for their triumphant return after (what they believed to be) the inevitable breakdown of the existing order.45
The other option – ‘fight’ – consisted of the exact opposite. Instead of withdrawing from society, some fundamentalists concluded that the public space had to be made safe for religion again. In their view, it was no longer sufficient for the state to protect people's right to exercise their religious freedom in private when the whole of society had, in essence, become a vast conspiracy to prevent believers from being good Muslims/Christians/Jews. All true believers had to be called upon to cross the ‘secular line’ and engage in politics so that the societal order would, once again, come to reflect the religious ideas and principles according to which life ought to be organised. Religion and religious identity thus turned into political activism and, for some, into a radical political project which – rather than merely safeguarding the right to believers to freely practise their religion and propagate their faith – advocated the transformation of all society according to religious principles. Ultimately, of course, this meant imposing religiously inspired tenets on those who were exercising their right to practise a different faith or no faith at all.
Conclusion
It seems obvious, therefore, that contemporary political phenomena – including the rise of political Islam, or religiously inspired terrorism – did not occur in isolation from broader social and political trends, no matter how anachronistic they often seem. On the contrary, the (fundamentalist) religious revivals that occurred in the post-war period in nearly all parts of the world constituted a more or less consistent response to the feelings of insecurity and uncertainty that were caused by the forces which late modernity and globalisation had unleashed. Fundamentalist religion offered a sense of clarity, direction and purpose in a rapidly changing global environment and – like nationalism – it provided people with a stable and clearly defined source of identity. Fundamentalism, therefore, must be seen as thoroughly modern in its genesis and manifestation.
It follows that the response to fundamentalism needs to address the modern and late modern conditions that have produced it. If the ultimate ‘root cause’ of fundamentalism is the need for identity and belonging in an increasingly uncertain age, governments and societies need to update concepts like integration and citizenship to accommodate the changing nature of global societies, while also – and importantly – creating strong anchors of identity that are more meaningful and distinctive than vague universalist norms like ‘human rights’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Unless identities such as ‘being British’, ‘being French’, or ‘being German’ have real meaning – unless, in other words, they go beyond universal norms on the one hand and national folklore and ethnic food on the other – people will fail to see the point in taking concepts such as citizenship and community seriously. Indeed, finding the right balance between universalism and identity will remain one of the most difficult and most frequently recurring challenges in the late modern era.
Notes
1. This chapter is based on extracts from P. R. Neumann, Old and New Terrorism: Late Modernity, Globalization and the Transformation of Political Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), Chapter 4.
2. See, for example, S. Bruce, Fundamentalism (2nd edn) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
3. See, for example, G. Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 6–9.
4. Z. Baumann, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). See also U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
5. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 63.
6. See, for example, P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalization in Question (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), Chapter 2.
7. D. Held and A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, ‘Rethinking Globalization’, in D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader (2nd edn) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 67–8.
8. Ibid., p. 68.
9. D. Held and A. McGrew, ‘The great globalization debate: An introduction’, in D. Held (ed.), The Global Transformations Reader, p. 4.
10. M. C. Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (London: St Martin's Press, 2000), Chapter 1.
11. J. Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New York and London: The New Press, 2003), p. 7.
12. See P. Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf, 1966), especially Book Two. More recently, scholars have argued that Christianity – far from being the enemy – has been instrumental in giving rise to the Enlightenment, albeit inadvertently. See, for example, S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
13. For a selection of writings by Voltaire and other key Enlightenment thinkers, see I. Kramnick, The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), Part Three.
14. See, for example, C. G. Brown, ‘The secularisation decade: What the 1960s have done to the study of religious history’, in H. McLeod and W. Ustorf (eds), The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 31.
15. Kepel, The Revenge of God, pp. 6–9.
16. Ibid., p. 3.
17. Ibid., p. 2.
18. F. J. Lechner, ‘Global fundamentalism’, in W. H. Swatos (ed.), A Future for Religion? (London: Sage, 1993), p. 28.
19. See J. Naisbitt, Global Paradox (New York: Avon, 1995).
20. B. R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine, 1995), p. 157.
21. See, for example, ibid., pp. 164–5.
22. G. Will, ‘Building a wall against talent’, Washington Post (26 June 2008).
23. T. Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (New York: Island Press, 2008), p. 127.
24. See U. Beck, Weltrisikogesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), p. 26.
25. U. Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), Chapter 2.
26. The UK's Office of National Statistics recently announced it had recorded the highest divorce rates since records began. In the United States, the number of couples who stay together for more than ten years after getting married dropped from over 90 per cent in the 1950s to less than 50 per cent in the 1990s. See R. Force, ‘Getting married? It could end in divorce?’, The Times (28 March 2008).
27. See Neumann, Old and New Terrorism, Chapter 3.
28. J. Tomlinson, ‘Globalization and cultural identity’ in D. Held and A. McGrew (eds), The Global Transformations Reader, pp. 271–2.
29. Ibid., p. 274.
30. See S. Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 13, especially Chapter 1. Also S. Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
31. M. K. Pasha, ‘Globalization, Islam and resistance’, B. K. Gills (ed.), Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 250.
32. Ibid.
33. J. R. Nassar, Globalization and Terrorism: The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 104.
34. Ibid., p. 14.
35. T. R. Gurr, ‘Economic factors’ in Club de Madrid (ed.), Addressing the Causes of Terrorism (Madrid: Club de Madrid, 2005), p. 22.
36. A. Giridharadas, ‘The paradox of “choice” in a globalized culture’, International Herald Tribune (12 September 2008).
37. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, pp. 164–5.
38. For various examples of the nationalist revival, especially in the Balkans and the Caucasus, see J. Koehler and C. Zürcher (eds), Potentials of Disorder (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
39. This thesis has been argued by numerous scholars. See, for example, M. Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); M. Marty and S. Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies and Militance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).
40. A. al Masseri, quoted in A. Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 118. Also G. Salame, ‘Islam and the West’, Foreign Affairs (Spring 1993).
41. See F. Burgat, Face to Face with Political Islam (London: I.B.Tauris, 2001), Chapter 1.
42. For discussion of the term ‘fundamentalism’, see F. Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001 (London: Saqi Books, 2002), Chapter 2; B. Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), pp. 15, 17–18.
43. J. H. Garvey, ‘Fundamentalism and politics’, in Marty and Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms and the State, p. 15.
44. M. W. Apple, ‘Away with all teachers: The cultural politics of homeschooling’, in B. S. Cooper (ed.), Home Schooling in Full View: A Reader (Greenwich, CO: Information Age Publishing), p. 80.
45. G. Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), p. 221.
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