Islamic Fundamentalism: New Age Spirituality Dictionary on Islamic Fundamentalism

Islamic Fundamentalism

In Islam, Fundamentalism is a contemporary category of scholarly comparative analysis referring to those ideologues who advocate a mythic view of Islamic values and seek to restore the timeless fabric of holistic law. They oppose the secular ethos that, in their view, characterizes not only the non-Muslim West but also putatively Muslim nation-states.

Islamic fundamentalists are largely drawn from male groups who have experienced colonial rule as disruption and alienation and postcolonial independence as acculturation and hypocrisy. They resent the economic forces that produced urbanization. They protest the absence of divine mandates in the public sphere of sprawling cities. They reject the modernist hegemony, equating pluralism with relativism and atheism. Instead, they uphold radical patriarchy, for which they find sanction in both scripture and history.

Islamic fundamentalists, like other fundamentalists, are modern without being modernist. Whether accepting oil export revenues or using clandestine bank accounts, they benefit from the capitalist-driven world system, despite their official opposition to both capitalism and communism as Western ideologies. They also understand the power of modern technology. They resort to modern media (newspapers, radio, television, cassettes) and, when necessary, they use state-of-the-art weapons (car bombs, Sten guns, plastic explosives) to achieve short-term objectives. Masters of the communications revolution, they often project their message better than do their adversaries.

Yet only a few Islamic fundamentalists are terrorists, and not all Arab terrorists are fundamentalists. It is important to distinguish fundamentalists from other political or social reformers.

The late-nineteenth-century activists Jamal ad-din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh used Islamic symbols to mobilize powerful anticolonial movements, yet they did not perceive less fervent fellow Muslims as their enemies.

Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists differ from one another, especially in their attitude toward the state. Neither Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, nor Abul-Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), founder of the Muslim League, believed that the nation-state, itself a truncated residue of colonial rule, could become the vehicle for inscribing Islamic values or pursing Islamic ideals.

By contrast, their Shiite counterparts had faith in the state, provided it had adopted an Islamic constitution. Shiite fundamentalists have openly employed the range of Western worldviews, from Marxism to just-war theory to creation science. Ideology itself has been embraced as voluntary religion. Unlike customary religion, ideology requires collective ideals to be translated into reality through concerted action. Islamic fundamentalists have captured a major state (Iran in 1979), they have assassinated a bold Muslim statesman (Anwar Sadat in 1981), and they have marshalled sporadic public support in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and, most recently, Jordan. However, they remain a minority viewpoint among all Muslims.

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For more articles related to Islamic Fundamentalism , see: Islamic Fundamentalism , New Age, New Age Spirituality, Body Mind and Soul.

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