Muslim Fundamentalism

The term "fundamentalism" came into existence at the Niagara Falls Bible Conference which was convened to define those things that were fundamental to belief. The term was also used to describe "The Fundamentals", a collection of twelve books on five subjects published in 1910 by Milton and Lyman Steward [5] [6]

Fundamentalism as a movement arose in the United States starting among conservative Presbyterian academics and theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary in the first decade of the Twentieth Century [5] [6]. It soon spread to conservatives among the Baptists and other denominations during and immediately following the First World War [5] [6]. The movement's purpose was to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and zealously defend it against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other "-isms" which it regarded as harmful to Christianity [5] [6].

Since then, the focus of the movement, the meaning of the term Fundamentalism, and the ranks of those who willingly use it to identify themselves, have gone through several phases of re-definition, [5] [6] though maintaining the central commitment to its orthodoxy. The earliest phase involved the identification and listing of "The Fundamentals of Christianity", and resulted in an urgent battle to expel from the ranks of the churches, those inimical to orthodox Protestantism [5] [6].

In 1909, Lyman Stewart, founder of Biola University, and his brother Milton, anonymously funded the publication of a twelve-volume series of articles called The Fundamentals, [5] [6] published between 1910 and 1915, and distributed free of charge to a wide range of Christian teachers and leaders, "Compliments of Two Christian Laymen." These volumes were intended as a restatement of conservative Christian theological teachings, primarily in response to the growing influence of modernist, liberal theology in the Church. In 1917 these articles were republished in a revised, four volume set by Biola. The term "fundamentalism" is in part derived from these volumes. The Fundamentals, were authored by a broad range of denominations in North America and the United Kingdom in which various core doctrines and traditional teachings (all considered basic to the Christian Faith) were defended against any movement which appeared to undermine the authority of Bible, the Holy Scriptures. Examples of those considered unfriendly, having the disposition of an enemy, and even hostile, were: Romanism (Catholicism), Socialism, Modern Philosophy, Atheism, Eddyism (Mary Baker Eddy - Christian Science), Mormonism, Spiritualism ("Channeling" etc.), and above all, "Liberal Theology"[7] (a movement which held a naturalistic interpretation of the doctrines of the faith, German higher criticism, and Darwinism).

Almost immediately, however, the list of unfriendly movements became narrower and the “fundamentals” less specific. Some of the original defenders of The Fundamentals of Christianity began to dissent and re-organize into other denominations. In 1910, The General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church affirmed several essential doctrines in the church regarded as under attack: The Inerrancy of Scripture, The Virgin Birth of Jesus, The Substitutionary Atonement of Christ, Christ’s bodily resurrection, and the Historicity of The Miracles.[citation needed] These were reaffirmed in 1916 and again in 1923. Another version put the Deity of Christ in place of the Virgin Birth.

The term "fundamentalist" was perhaps first used in 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws in the Baptist Watchman-Examiner[citation needed][8], but it soon became widely accepted as a common term identifying anyone who believed in and actively defended the traditional doctrines of Christianity. For example, in the 1920s the Baptist John Roach Straton called his newspaper The Fundamentalist. The Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen