Understanding the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism

Here's a portion of an essay I happened to find, which offers some interesting analysis of Islam's latest shift toward orthodoxy. Source

Part II.
Islamic Responses to the West
Westernization, Modernism, Fundamentalism

As European power expanded in the 19th Century, there were attempts by Islamic societies to modernize. The introduction of newspapers and the telegraph by Europeans in the 19th Century made widely evident the “backwardness” of the “Oriental” Other. Two major strategies were developed to proactively respond to Western power and its expanding hegemony (Davidson 1998). First, leaders and intellectuals advocated westernization and secularization as the surest way to compete with Europe. This vein won out in terms of political power. As the west carved up the Islamic world into various states, indigenous leaders led the secularization of some Islamic societies, notably Turkey, promoting western education, law, science, etc. Much like the Japanese Restorationists, modernity was backed by the military. Second, a relatively small circle of intellectuals advocated an Islamic Modernism, arguing that Western methods and key institutions, legislatures, modern administrations, banks, could be revised along the lines of Islamic law. This movement was neither able to influence either the Westward leaning, secular political elites of the day nor the conservative Islamic religious authorities. These ideas did not reach the uneducated masses. Hence, Islamic development generally became polarized between Westernizing and conservative extremes.

Theorizing in the early 20th Century, Weber was personally troubled and theoretically concerned with the negative side of modernity, its rationalization of the world that dehumanized the person and reduced everything to what could be quantified. Economic striving, detached from a religious ethic, had become an empty striving for shallow materialism. A new industrial elite was emerging. A century after Weber wrote about the moral nullity of Western civilization, mass mediated consumerism, privatized hedonism devoid of meaning, has proliferated everywhere. The globalization of capital, secularization, and rapid social and cultural changes, together with population movements, has fostered both anomie and the attenuation of social ties. In face of changes, crises and challenges, one of the typical responses has been the embrace of dogmatic, orthodox positions. In a similar way, countries with economic challenges often embrace authoritarian governments, if not fascism. Fundamentalism and terrorism are both reactions to and moments of resistance to the dominating aspects of modernity and the shallowness of secularism. And, as discussed in Part III below, ressentiment mediated through radical fundamentalism can become part of the impetus for religious terrorism.

The Nature of Fundamentalism

One of the most important religious social transformations of the last century has been the gradual rise of fundamentalism, the embrace of anti-modern religious orthodoxies. Why has there been a rise of fundamentalisms? Jurgensmeyer (2001) notes that religious fundamentalism across various religious cultures is on the rise globally for three common reasons: first, radical conservative religious movements reject the liberal values of secular institutions and blame society’s decline on the loss of religious inspiration; second, these radical religious movements refuse to accept boundaries of secular society which keeps religion a private observance and not the public sphere; and third, these conservative movements are seeking to restore religion as central to social life. As noted above, in the face of challenges, groups may become more dogmatic and intolerant. We have suggested that in response to challenges, ranging from the sacking of Baghdad to the expulsion from Spain to the decline of the Ottoman Empire, that Islamic leaders have repeatedly embraced more conservative positions. This created conservative traditions as the basis for a conservative response to Western secular encroachments. This, however, is a general global cultural phenomenon in response to rapid social change, uncertainty, attenuation of social ties, challenges to ingrained value precepts, etc.

Fundamentalisms generally require unquestioning acceptance of transcendent religious precepts, a strict adherence to compulsory rituals and a subjugation of the self to higher powers. Fundamentalism may be defined as a conservative religious reaction to secular society that typically includes the following characteristics: Exclusive truth claims are typically based on a sacred text. It often has Manichean truth claims in which non-believers are constructed as immoral and an apocalyptic view of the world. Fundamentalism seeks to restore a glorious past from which people had strayed. Fundamentalism makes exclusive truth claims grounded in canonical religious, spiritual texts and seeks to recreate an idealized religious community while paradoxically embracing modern means: mass media, bureaucratic institutions, and destructive technologies in militancy. Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Islamic fundamentalisms more or less follow this pattern. Thus, fundamentalisms resist the usually hedonistic, secular, materialistic values of modernity. At the same time, fundamentalists are modernists in that they use elements of tradition in combination with modern methods-advanced technology, institutional forms, and instrumental rationality-to transform the political order (Tibi 1998).

Radical religious movements often position themselves to act in the public sphere as moral agents. From the viewpoint of religious radicals, it is not so much that religion has become political as much as politics has become religious. The reasons for this deep antagonism are not merely political. Secular modernity and its valorization of Reason has made an assault on religious values and worldviews that erode the impact and power of religious institutions leading to a general crisis in religious belief. As secular society is suffering a crisis of morality and meaning, there is a space for religious critiques of secular modernity and transcendental alternatives. The West, celebrating the secular materialism of modernity, spread through a political economic imperialism and mass mediated consumerism has created spaces for radical religious movements, both in the developed and developing countries.

Islamisms

Islamic fundamentalisms arose in various Islamic states. For example, Wahabbism was embraced in Saudi Arabia, as the Ottoman Empire declined in the later 18th, early 19th Century. As Western power grew and the division of the Islamic world proceeded, Western interests encouraged the suppression of progressive movements in the Middle East such as socialism or even nationalism. (Note that there have been intrinsic reasons why these Western ideologies were not embraced.) For example, the US has strongly supported the (oil rich) House of Saud, where Islam has turned increasingly conservative and militant in resistance. Islamic fundamentalism is a response many factors, central among which are the domination by the West, the relative poverty and underdevelopment of the Muslim world, and the lack of political outlets to express discontents.

In the 20th Century, Westernization did not yield its promised results. Modernity failed Islamic states, for a variety of reasons mentioned above, especially the conservatism of its religion, the underdevelopment inherent in colonialism and foreign sponsoring of local elites, the lack of education of the populace, and, the conservatism of religious leaders. Islamic states generally secured the wealth and power of the elites and sustained oppressive secular governments rather than seek expansions of democracy and human rights. With the failure of modernity to bring its promised benefits, conservative Islamic brotherhoods and movements, originally organized to address social justice issues attempted to reinvigorate, reform and reestablish Islam as the basis for revitalized Islamic states. As westernizing strategies in Islamic states failed and/or were suppressed in the 20th Century, conservative religious responses grew more pronounced, generating various Islamisms, Islamic fundamentalist movements. Note that in many developing nations, secular thought and autonomous institutions, especially democratically elected legislative bodies and executive are not very well formed or advanced. Religious ways of life and social-political institutions hold more public power, especially in Islamic countries. Hence, there is a strong link between religious belief and resistance to Western hegemony among radical religious movements in the Islamic world. We also note that the rigid claims and orthodoxy of fundamentalism generally prevents a group from self-examination and critical reflection. This is not likely to change as long as the educational processes in the developing world remain tied to traditional religious institutions. Studying the Quran and/or Islamic studies does not much prepare the student for science, industry, commerce or critical thought.

Conservative Islamic movements have pursued three main ends in Islamic society: reformism, revivalism, and radical defense. The main interest of these movements is to reestablish the moral and political virtues of traditional Islamic society (Choueiri 1990). Islamism is modeled on the attempt to recapture Muhammad's early role of rebel in Mecca in criticizing moral corruption and need for lifestyle and political economic reforms grounded in religious mores. For revivalists, just as Muhammad challenged false gods and immoral ways instead of a righteous life, Islamism is seen as a path to justice and equality against the Western ways of corruption and worship of its false gods. Islamist ideological analysis offers these reasons for the decline of Islam: 1) Islamic society declined due to the departure from the practice of religious values and dictates; 2) This decay made possible the Western intrusion; and, 3) The solution is to revitalize and return to Islam by a) reintroducing the Shariah, Islamic law, while purging most Western cultural influences, but not science and technology and b) re-politicizing Islam, along lines of Muhammad's role as administrator and law giver in Medina.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism was the result of many factors beginning with general factors that have also fostered the growth of Christian fundamentalism, Orthodox Judaism and even Hindu fundamentalism. But further, in Islamic societies, the barriers to modernity mentioned in Part I above, have joined together with economic underdevelopment, traditional education, and the suppression of political dissent to dispose fundamentalism. Further, various Islamic institutions have provided cheap alternatives to public education, in which young boys learn strict conservative forms of Islam, as for example the madrassas of Pakistan funded by Saudi Arabia. Islamism has often been directly reproduced through strictly enforced civic codes in which “moral police” vigorously patrol the borders of virtue as in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and the former Taliban controlled Afghanistan.

There have been wide variations in the extent to which Muslim societies have embraced Islamisms, and within particular societies, there have been wide disparities in the appeal of Islamisms. For example, Afghanistan, under the Taliban, was an extreme, even by fundamentalist standards. But so too was (is) Afghanistan one of the poorest, least educated societies in the world. In contrast, Pakistan was (is) not a fundamentalist country. After General Zia took power, he tried to impose fundamentalism from the top down. It had few adherents, not more than about five percent of the people, primarily among tribal groups-looked down upon in Pakistani society. The Saudis financed madrassas that were accepted by subsequent governments in order to divert scarce funds to nuclear weapons programs, in response to India. Islamic fundamentalism was accepted by elements within Pakistani Security (the ISI) who used these schools to provide “volunteers” to fight against India in Kashmir as well as train US-financed mujahadeen that would fight a proxy war against Russia. In Algeria, a prolonged conflict between urban, Western modernists and rural fundamentalists has cost perhaps 200,000 lives. Although fundamentalism has been widely embraced in the Muslim world, and it often promotes hatred of infidels, the vast majority of fundamentalists do not become terrorists, and not all terrorists in Islamic societies are “holy warriors”. Nevertheless, the world wide rise of fundamentalism, with its Manichean division of the world into those who are good and those who are evil, with it assertions of patriarchy and promises of redemption, creates an atmosphere in which terrorism can thrive.