Fundamentalism

THE word 'fundamentalism' has often been used and expressed in a pejorative sense. For facility of understanding can we term the embattled and frequently intolerant religiosity as fundamentalism? Are the so-called fundamentalists departing from the core values of compassion, justice and benevolence that characterise all the world faiths, including Islam? One could raise such a query as the myth of the supposed fanatical intolerance of Islam has become one of the accusatory ideas of the West.
One would be factual in commenting that the Western media often give the impression that the embattled and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as 'fundamentalism' is a purely Islamic phenomenon. This is not the reality. Fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced in every major faith in response to issues and problems of modernity. There is fundamentalist Judaism, fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Hinduism, fundamentalist Buddhism, fundamentalist Sikhism, and even fundamentalist Confucianism.
Historical experience shows that fundamentalism takes shape when modernisation process acquires a faster pace. During such process there are often efforts by religious people to reform traditions and effect a meeting between traditions and modern culture. However, when moderate measures are found to be of no avail, some people resort to more extreme methods, and a fundamentalist movement is born. In fact, fundamentalism was quite well established among Christians and Jews, who had had a comparatively longer exposure to the modern experience.
It would thus not be out of place and context to say that fundamentalism is an essential part of the modern scene. Fundamentalists will often register their protest and discontent with a modern development by overstressing those elements in their tradition that militate against it. Even in the United States the fundamentalists are highly critical of democracy and secularism. The fundamentalist movement strongly believes that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out. Such reaction is, however, not always paranoid. Experience shows that secularism has often been very aggressive in the Muslim world.
Interestingly, since the emancipation of women has been one of the hallmarks of modern culture, fundamentalists tend to emphasise conventional, agrarian gender roles, putting women back into veils and into the home. The fundamentalist advocates can thus be seen as the shadow-side of modernity. Curiously, they can also highlight some of the darker sides of the modern experiment. They also feel assaulted by the liberal or modernising establishment and as a result their views and behaviour become more extreme.
Looking back one would find that in the United States when the Protestant fundamentalists tried to prevent the teaching of evolution in the public schools, they were so ridiculed by the secularist press that their theology became more reactionary and excessively literal, and they turned from the left to the extreme right of the political spectrum. Thus when secularist attack has been violent, the fundamentalist reaction is likely to be even greater. Fundamentalism thus begins as an internal dispute with liberals or secularists within one's own culture or nation.
Fundamentalists feel that they are fighting for survival and that they have to fight their way out of the impasse. In this frame of mind some fundamentalists resort to terrorism. The vast majority, however, try to revive their faith in a more conventional, lawful way. Muslims can rightly object to the use of the term 'fundamentalism' because it was coined by American Protestants as a badge of pride. Religious Muslims, however, share their profound misgivings about modern secular culture. It needs to be noted that 'usul' for Muslim refers to the fundamental principles of Islamic jurisprudence, and all Muslims could be said to subscribe to 'usuliyyah' (fundamentalism).
Fundamentalists appear to be successful in pushing religion from sidelines and back to centre stage and thus it now plays a major part in international affairs once again. It cannot be branded simply as a way of using religion for a political end. It is rebellion against the secularist exclusion of the divine from public life, and to make spiritual values prevail in the modern world. However, the desperation and fear of the fundamentalists tend to distort the religious tradition, and highlight its more aggressive aspects at the expense of those that preach toleration and reconciliation.
In the Indian subcontinent Maulana Moududi was one of the early fundamentalist ideologues. He defied the whole secularist ethos and his Islamic liberation theology dictated that as God alone was sovereign, nobody was obliged to take orders from any other human being. To him revolution against the colonial powers was not just a right but a duty. The stress and fear of cultural and religious annihilation had led to the development of a more extreme and potentially violent distortion of faith.
The real founder of the so-called Islamic fundamentalism in the Sunni world was Sayyid Qutb of Egypt who became convinced that religious people and secularists could not live in peace in the same society. His espousal of a form of Islam distorted both the message of the Quran and the Prophet's life because the Prophet achieved victory by an ingenious policy of non-violence. The Quran adamantly opposes force and coercion in religious matters and its vision is manifestly tolerant and inclusive, and ,thus, far from exclusion and separation. Some Muslim fundamentalists, in their struggle to survive, make religion a tool of oppression and even of violence.
A vested quarter in the West had developed a stereotypical and distorted image of Islam, which they regard as the enemy of decent civilisation. The scholar monks of Europe had purposely depicted Islam as an inherently violent and intolerant faith. One needs to recognise that secular aggression and persecution can be just as violent as religion.
Islam has always kept the notions of social justice, equality, tolerance and practical compassion in the forefront of the Muslim conscience for centuries. Muslims may have at times faltered in internalising those ideals in their social and political institutions. However, to cultivate a distorted image of Islam would be a catastrophe.

The writer is a columnist of The Daily Star.