CHAPTER 8
THE FEAR OF FUNDAMENTALISM
There is much debate about what fundamentalism is but I should like to begin by explaining what it is not.1 Fundamentalism is not necessarily violent; only a tiny proportion of fundamentalists take part in acts of terror and violence; most are simply trying to live what they regard as a truly religious life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to faith. Fundamentalisms are not harking back atavistically to the past: they reflect modern concerns and could have taken root in no time other than our own. Nor are these conservative movements: they are highly innovative and constitute a break with the past. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared that a cleric should be head of state this was as shocking to Shiʿi sensibilities as if the pope should abolish the Mass and Protestant fundamentalists interpret their scriptures with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. Finally, fundamentalism is not a purely Islamic phenomenon. During the twentieth century, all the major world faiths experienced a fundamentalist revolution and Islam was the last of the three monotheistic traditions to develop a fundamentalist strain.
So what is fundamentalism? It is basically a rebellion against modernity. In every region of the world where a secular government has separated religion and politics, a counter-cultural movement has emerged alongside it, determined to drag God and/or religion from the marginal position to which they have been relegated back to centre-stage. Whatever the pundits or the politicians believe, people all over the globe have demonstrated that they want to see religion taking a more prominent role in public life. What is so problematic about modernity? Every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is rooted in a profound fear; all are convinced that modern secular society wants to wipe out religion and each one begins with what is perceived to be an assault either by secularists or their liberal co-religionists. Fundamentalisms are haunted by a fear of annihilation. This should not be dismissed as paranoid. In Judaism, for example, fundamentalism took two major steps forward: first after the Nazi Holocaust, when Hitler had indeed attempted to exterminate European Jewry; and secondly after the October War of 1973, when the armies of Egypt and Syria took Israel by surprise and were repelled only with great difficulty.
In the Muslim world, modernisation has often been problematic. Modernity and the values of which we are so proud – freedom, democracy, and toleration – were made not only possible but necessary because of a major change in the economy. Instead of being based on a surplus of agricultural produce, like all pre-modern civilisations, Europeans developed an economy based on the technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital, which liberated the modern West from many of the constraints of an agrarian economy that could never develop beyond a certain point. No society before our own could afford the constant replacement of the infrastructure that ceaseless progress demands. Ideas that required too great an expenditure of resources were generally shelved, and original thought was discouraged, not because of an innate timidity, but because these ideas could rarely be implemented and the consequent frustration could result in social instability. In the pre-modern world, the preservation of social order always took priority over intellectual freedom: civilisation was experienced as a fragile experiment and it was more important to preserve what had already been achieved than to risk losing it all by trying something new.
Democracy did not become widespread because of an inherent Western magnanimity. To keep the markets expanding, more and more people had to be drawn into the productive process – as office clerks, printers, or factory workers. To perform their tasks efficiently they had to receive a modicum of education, and the more educated they became the more they began to demand a share in the decision-making of government. Modern communications also enabled the lower classes to organise politically in a way that had been impossible for the peasant masses in agrarian civilisations. It became clear, over time, that those countries that democratised outstripped those that tried to confine the benefits of modernity to a privileged elite. Toleration was also an industrial virtue; rulers had to utilise all their human resources and that meant bringing out-groups – such as the Jews in Europe and Catholics in England – into the mainstream; but the tragedy of the 1930s and 1940s showed how superficial this ‘toleration’ really was. The economy required independently-minded people, who could think unconventionally and were not impeded by the rules of their class, guild or clergy, so the conservative spirit had to be replaced by intellectual and religious freedom.
In the West, therefore, modernisation had two major characteristics and, without these qualities, no matter how many computers, sky-scrapers, and fighter jets a country produces, it will lack the modern spirit. The first was independence; modernisation was punctuated by declarations of independence on all fronts: Martin Luther declared independence from the Roman Church; the American Declaration of Independence was a typical modernising document; and scientists and intellectuals had to be free of the constraints imposed by the clerical or aristocratic establishment. The second modern attribute was innovation. Modernisation had been traumatic in Europe: it was achieved by bloody revolutions, civil wars, the elimination or impoverishment of the aristocracy, the execution of kings, wars of religion, dictatorships, the despoliation of the countryside, anomie and malaise in the new industrialised cities, and the exploitation of workers. We are seeing similar upheavals today as countries in the developing world make this painful rite of passage. But Western modernisation was exciting. We were always inventing something new, discovering something fresh, and pitting our wits against unprecedented problems.
But in the Muslim world, the modern economy did not come with independence but with colonial subjugation; and it could not be innovative, because the West was so far ahead that Muslims could only copy us. Instead of independence, therefore, there was dependence, and instead of innovation there could only be imitation; instead of modernising according to an internal dynamic, colonised peoples have had to proceed according to a foreign programme. If you are trying to make a cake but have to rely on powdered instead of fresh eggs, rice instead of flour, and do not have a proper oven, you are not going to produce the fluffy confection described in the cook book; you could get something very nasty indeed. Further, in the Muslim world modernity has had to be effected far too rapidly. It took Europe centuries to commercialise society and these countries have had to go through the process in a few decades. As a result, modernisation has often been both superficial and extremely aggressive.
When, for example, Atatürk secularised Turkey he simply closed down all the madrasas, abolished the Sufi orders, which had played a huge role in the spiritual and social life of the country, and forced all Turks to wear Western clothes. This last has been a constant preoccupation for reforming modernisers, although there is nothing sacred – or, indeed, particularly becoming – about Western dress, they wanted their countries to look modern, even though only a very small percentage of the population had any understanding of Western culture. The violent methods used to achieve this have had a backlash, making the veil a symbol of Islamic authenticity for the first time in Muslim history.2 In Iran, Shah Reza Pahlavi (r. 1921–45) ordered his soldiers to patrol the streets tearing the women's veils off with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces. In 1935, his troops fired into an unarmed crowd in Mashhad, one of the holiest shrines in Iran, who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress. Hundreds of Iranians died that day. In such an environment modernity did not seem liberating but was experienced as a lethal assault. The fundamentalism of Sunni Islam developed in the concentration camps in which President Gamal Abdul Nasser (r. 1952–70) incarcerated thousands of the Muslim Brothers, usually without trial and for doing nothing more incriminating than handing out leaflets or attending a meeting. One of them was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), who had once seen no conflict between his religion and secular nationalism. But when he watched the Brothers being tortured, flogged and executed and Nasser vowing to secularise Egypt on the Western model, secular modernity seemed a great evil. Qutb's writings are haunted by a fear of imminent annihilation. They have made an indelible impression on the Muslim world, because many are now convinced that the modern world has decided to destroy Islam.
Modernity has brought great benefits to many of us, but there have always been casualties: Jews, Native Americans, and African-Americans as well as the colonised peoples have suffered irreparable loss. During a visit to Senegal with the United Nations in 2006, I visited the slave house, which housed the Africans who had been torn brutally from their homes and were waiting to be shipped to the Americas. It was a terrible place: there was one room for the men; another for their wives; and the children were incarcerated in a room on the other side of a small hall. Parents would have been able to hear their children crying. What impressed me most, however, was the fact that the house was built in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. Modernity has brought liberty and power to some; misery, death, and enslavement to others.
It is essential that we bear this pain in mind. It is a great mistake to regard fundamentalism with secularist hauteur. Early in my studies, I came across a footnote in Marshall G. S. Hodgsons's magisterial survey of Islamic civilisation; it made a great impression upon me and entirely changed my attitude towards religion. In the course of his discussion of an abstruse form of medieval Islamic mysticism, Hodgson warns his reader not to approach the spiritualities of the past from the vantage point of post Enlightenment rationalism but to cultivate what the great French Islamist Louis Massignon called the ‘science of compassion’. By ‘science’, of course, Massignon did not mean physics or chemistry but a form of ‘knowledge’ (Latin: scientia) achieved by ‘compassion’, an ability to ‘feel with’ the other (Latin: compati-). It meant putting yourself, your preferences and presuppositions to one side and entering in a scholarly but imaginative way into the predicament of another:
The scholarly observer must render the mental and practical behaviour of a group into terms available in his own mental resources, which should remain personally felt even while informed with a breadth of reference which will allow other educated persons to make sense of them. But this must not be to substitute his own and his readers' conventions for the original, but to broaden his own perspective so that it can make a place for the other. Concretely, he must never be satisfied to cease asking ‘but why?’ until he has driven his understanding to the point where he has an immediate grasp of what a given position meant, such that every nuance in the data is accounted for and withal, given the total of presuppositions and circumstances, he could feel himself doing the same.3
But this does not simply apply to religious practices in the past; the ‘science of compassion’ is essential to our study of fundamentalism.
Dialogue is one of the buzz words of our time; but the dialogue form invented by Socrates, founder of the Western rational tradition, demanded that people interrogate their most fundamental prejudices. To philosophise was not to bludgeon your opponent into accepting your point of view but to do battle with yourself, questioning every one of your received opinions and most deeply held certainties. A successful dialogue should lead to ekstasis, a ‘stepping outside’ one's preconceptions, inhabiting another person's point of view, and being changed by the encounter. In our study of fundamentalism instead of simply pontificating on its limitations we have to learn to listen to the pain that often lies beneath the surface of fundamentalist discourse. Instead of simply dismissing the apocalyptic vision of American Protestant fundamentalists, as lunatic and deranged, we should, perhaps, see it as expressive of trauma. A patient who approached a psychiatrist with such a nightmarish fantasy of catastrophe, massacre, destruction, deceit, battle, plague, and ubiquitous, irredeemable wickedness would probably be diagnosed as somewhat disturbed. The fact that millions of people in the richest and most powerful nation in the world believe implicitly in this (eccentric) interpretation of the book of Revelation is extremely worrying. So too is the belief of so many Muslim fundamentalists in a giant international conspiracy intent on the destruction of Islam; this kind of conspiracy thinking has recurred throughout history. It led to the pogroms that terrorised the Jews of Europe. It surfaces in people feeling themselves to be in the grip of changes that they do not understand, living in regimes that lack transparency so that accurate information is hard to come by, and feeling that they have no control at all over their destiny. Fundamentalists are expressing fears and anxieties that no society can safely ignore.
History shows that when fundamentalists are attacked – either with guns or in a media campaign – they invariably become more extreme. The assault convinces them that their intuitions are correct and the modern world really is out to destroy them. This was what happened after the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee (1925), when Protestant fundamentalists tried to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. The press gleefully and cruelly exposed the fundamentalist position as hopeless anachronisms. The journalist H. L. Mencken denounced them as the scourge of the nation, the enemies of science and intellectual liberty, who had no place in the modern world and would drag America back to the dark ages. They were, of course, absolutely right to insist that science must have the freedom it needed to advance, but instead of ameliorating a serious conflict within American society, this media assault made it worse. Fundamentalist abhorrence of evolution was fuelled less by science than by the vulgar social Darwinism that blamed evolutionary theory, with its emphasis on the survival of the fittest, for the German atrocities of World War I. Evolution was not simply a scientific hypothesis for the fundamentalists, but had become a symbol of everything that was most violent and terrifying in the modern world at a time when people were trying to come to terms with the bloodiest war in history. Their faith was rooted in an anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument.4 Before the trial, only a small minority had argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail; after the trial, they became more militantly literal in their interpretation of the Bible and ‘creation science’ became the flagship of their movement. They also drifted to the right of the political spectrum. Before Dayton, leading fundamentalists had been willing to work for social reform with people on the left; afterwards they swung to the far right, where they have remained.
In June 1990, during an acute economic crisis in Algeria, the moderate Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) scored major victories in the municipal elections. FIS activists were young, well-educated, conservative in some areas (such as their insistence on traditional dress for women), but known to be honest and efficient in government. They were not anti-Western; their leaders spoke of encouraging links with the European Union. They seemed certain to succeed in the legislative elections scheduled for 1992. But the military staged a coup, suppressed FIS and threw its leaders into prison. Had elections been prevented in such a violent and unconstitutional manner in Iran or Pakistan, there would have been an outcry in the West; but because it was an Islamic government that had been thwarted, there was jubilation in the Western media. The bars and casinos of Algiers were safe and, in some strange way, the coup had struck a blow for democracy. The French government threw its support behind the new hard-line President Liamine Zeroual and strengthened his resolve to hold no further dialogue with FIS. The result was tragic and predictable. Pushed outside the due processes of law, despairing of justice, the more radical members of FIS broke away to form a guerrilla organisation, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and began a terror campaign in the mountainous regions south of Algiers. There were massacres, in which the population of entire villages were killed. The violence of the coup to stop the elections had led to an outright war between the religious and secularists and made a moderate group dangerously extreme.5 As I write this in the late summer of 2013, the recent military coup in Egypt that deposed the government of President Muhammad Morsy of the Muslim Brotherhood and was succeeded by riots in which hundreds of people have died, seems painfully close to the Algerian tragedy.
It is difficult for liberal secularists to enter the perspective of the fundamentalist or the ultra-Orthodox because they can feel that their own identity is in jeopardy. This has been eloquently expressed by the celebrated Israeli novelist Amos Oz. Walking around an Orthodox district in Jerusalem, he recalled that the early Zionists, who once lived there, ‘would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls […] They portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls.’ But now Oz felt overwhelmed by the vitality of this Orthodoxy, ‘for as it grows and swells, it threatens your own spiritual existence and eats away at the roots of your own world, prepared to inherit it all when you and your kind are gone’.6 Secularists can also fear annihilation and feel irrational dread when they confront the fundamentalist. Neither can see the other clearly. Both recall the excesses, cruelties, and intolerance of the ‘other side’ and, wounded, find it impossible to make peace.
I had a similar experience at a conference called ‘God in the Year 2000’. I was one of seven speakers, who represented a wide spectrum of different faiths, asked to explain what I personally had learned about God in my studies. It was a wonderful, lively conference with a responsive, eager audience. In the last session, all seven of us were on stage together for a final panel. Suddenly a fundamentalist erupted in the hall. It was difficult to make out what he was saying, because his words tumbled over one another so incoherently, but the gist of it was that Jews and Muslims had rejected Jesus and would go to Hell and people, like myself, who supported them would join them there. What was clear, however, was the extraordinary note of pain in his voice as he denounced us. During the conference we had been speaking with immense enthusiasm of pluralism, interfaith understanding, and the underlying harmony of all world faiths – all of which were sacred values for us and had immeasurably enriched our lives. But we had somehow assaulted that man at a profound level. When he was hustled out of the hall, the moderator said: ‘I wish we could have talked to him, because he is part of the story of God at 2000.’ He was quite right. Yet as we listened to the fundamentalist's diatribe, all seven of us, who had talked unstoppably and fluently for three days, were struck dumb and had been utterly unable even to speak to him. We had gazed at him in silence over an unbridgeable gulf of incomprehension and distance. That same abyss is getting wider every day in the Middle East, in Israel and the United States – and this too is a danger that no society can safely ignore.
Notes
1. I have written at length about fundamentalism in The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (London and New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
2. L. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 127–234.
3. M. G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam; Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 379; see L. Massignon, ‘Les Nusayrîs’, in L'Elaboration de l'Islam (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), pp. 109–14.
4. R. L. Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 161–3.
5. There has been some suggestion that the Algerian armed forces participated in the massacres to discredit the GIA.
6. A. Oz, In the Land of Israel, trans. Maurice Goldberg-Bartura (London: Flamingo, 1983), pp. 6, 9.
Bibliography
Ahmed, L., Women and Gender in Islam, Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1992).
Armstrong, K., The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (London and New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
Hodgson, M. G. S., The Venture of Islam; Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
Laurence Moore, R., Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Oz, A., In the Land of Israel, trans. Maurice Goldberg-Bartura (London: Mariner Books, 1983).