Fundamentalist Islam

The key issue in the Middle East, increasingly, has less to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict and more to do with fundamentalist Islam. What is fundamentalist Islam? On the one hand, it manifests itself as a new religious conviction, reaffirming faith in an awe-inspiring God. On the other hand, it appears as a militant ideology, demanding political action now. One day its spokesmen call for a jihad (sacred war) against the West, evoking the deepest historic resentments. Another day, its leaders appeal for reconciliation with the West, emphasizing shared values. Its economic theorists reject capitalist greed in the name of social justice, yet they rise to the defense of private property. Its moralists pour scorn on Western consumer culture as debilitating to Islam, yet its strategists avidly seek to buy the West’s latest technologies in order to strengthen Islam.

Faced with these apparent contradictions, many analysts in the West have decided that fundamentalism defies all generalization. Instead they have tried to center discussion on its supposed “diversity.” For this purpose, they seek to establish systems of classification by which to sort out fundamentalist movements and leaders. The basic classification appears in much different terminological appearance, in gradations of subtlety.

“We need to be careful of that emotive label, 'fundamentalism’, and distinguish, as Muslims do, between revivalists, who choose to take the practice of their religion most devoutly, and fanatics or extremists, who use this devotion for political ends.” [1]

Fundamentalist Islam remains an enigma precisely because it has baffled all attempts to divide it into tidy categories. “Revivalist” becomes “extremist” (and vice versa) with such rapidity and frequency, that the actual classification of any movement or leader has little prognostic power. They will not stay put. This is because fundamentalist Muslims, for all their “diversity,” orbit around one dense idea. The West thus sees movements and individuals swing within reach, only to swing out again and cycle right through every classification.

The idea is simple: Islam must have power in this world. It is the true religion, the religion of God, and its truth is manifest in its power. When Muslims believed, they were powerful. Their power has been lost in modern times because many Muslims, who have reverted to the condition that preceded God’s revelation to the Prophet Muhammad, have forsaken Islam. But if Muslims now return to the original Islam, they can preserve and even restore their power.

That return, to be effective, must be comprehensive. It is not merely a religion, in the Western sense of a system of belief in God. It possesses an immutable law, revealed by God that deals with every aspect of life, and it is an ideology, a complete system of belief about the organization of the state and the world. This law and ideology can only be implemented through the establishment of a truly Islamic state, under the sovereignty of God. The empowerment of Islam, which is God’s plan for mankind, is a sacred end. It may be pursued by any means that can be rationalized in terms of Islam’s own code. At various times, these have included persuasion, guile, and force.

What is remarkable about fundamentalist Islam is not its diversity. It is the fact that this idea of power for Islam appeals so effectively across such a wide range of humanity. Fundamentalists everywhere must act in narrow circumstances of time and place. But they are who they are precisely because their idea exists above all circumstances. Over nearly a century, this idea has evolved into a coherent ideology, which demonstrates a striking consistency in content and form across a wide expanse of the Muslim world. [2]

Fundamentalist Forerunners

The pursuit of supremacy for Islam first gained some intellectual rationality in the mind and career of Sayyid Jamal al-Din “al-Afghani” (1838-97), a thinker and activist who worked to transform Islam into a force against Western imperialism. In many respects, Afghani was the prototype of the modern fundamentalist. He had been deeply influenced by Western rationalism and the ideological style of Western thought. Was Afghani a liberal or a proto-fascist, a reformist or a revolutionary? Was he the forerunner of those fundamentalists who plead their case in political ways? Some fundamentalists still pose this same obstinate dilemma of classification, although most of them have far weaker “liberal” and “reformist” credentials than had Afghani.

Between Afghani and the emergence of full-blown fundamentalism, liberal and secular nationalism would enjoy a long run in the lands of Islam. An Egyptian schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna (1906-49) founded a faction he called the Society of the Muslim Brethren. It would grow into the first modern