Scope
In retrospect, Barth’s radical appeal to revelation is a useful way of thinking about the trajectory of 20th-century religious thought up through secularist and traditionalist postmodernisms. Where the former tends to extend the modernist criticism of revelation, the latter thinks about revelation in a postmodern context. The ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a general approach to this traditionalist View by pointing us toward the “trust” and the community that ground all forms of human life. Rowan Williams’s theology of revelation as God’s call to a new world gives us a notion of Christian revelation that is at once postmodern and grounded in the Christian tradition. It also shifts the terms of suspicion, suggesting that suspicion directed at particular beliefs and practices, rather than an abstract “religion in general,” would tit better with the views of reason and cultural criticism that are emerging at the end of modernity
Outline
I. This lecture focuses on two examples of the resurgence of conservative political and fundamentalist religion around the world, particularly Christianity in the United States and Islam in the Middle East.
II. The term “fundamentalism” can be very useful to identify important commonalities among such groups as the Moral Majority, A1-Qaida, Hindu nationalists in India, and ultra-orthodox settlers in Israel.
A. The Fundamentalism Project, based at the University of Chicago, defines fundamentalism in terms of two basic characteristics.
1. It invokes a pure religious past based on a selective recovery of tradition as the basis for a present religious vision.
2. Central to fundamentalism is a struggle against secular modernity.
B. Christian fundamentalism includes a range of groups from the heirs of earlier American fundamentalism to groups that might more appropriately be called conservative evangelicals.
C. In the case of Islam, we find the militant assertion of a purified faith based on the absolute authority of Scripture. But here we find ideas and patterns that differ significantly from those in Christian fundamentalism. To mark this difference, we will use the term “Islamism” instead of “Islamic fundamentalism.”
III. After World War II, especially in the context of the Cold War, fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals articulated a more politically active, nationalistic, and capitalistic message.
A. The sense of alienation of these groups from the mainstream of U.S. political opinion and policy was heightened in the 1960s and early 1970s with Supreme Court opinions banning prayer and Bible study in schools and legalizing abortion and with the rising visibility of the left-Wing counterculture.
B. For many of the figures and groups loosely aligned as the “religious right,” the connection between religion and politics is focused on the perceived need for a moral revival, a return to “traditional values,” in American society.
C. In the past decade, there have been some indications that a more liberally oriented evangelicalism is emerging.
IV. The history of modern Islamism is rooted in response to Western colonialism and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century.
A. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we can identify three distinct types of response to Western colonialism: “commanding the good,” adopting modem Western attitudes toward nationalism and secularism, and returning to the fundamentals of the Qu’ran and the Sunna.
B. Another major reform group originating in Egypt prior to World War II was the Muslim Brotherhood.
1. The Brotherhood’s founder, Muhammad Abduh, wanted to purify Islam in Egypt by setting it up as a kind of grassroots charitable, social activist group that established hospitals and schools.
2. But by the end of the 1930s and especially after World War II, debates within the Brotherhood over the use of politics and force to achieve their goals moved the organization in a more radical direction.
C. The most important figure for understanding this movement was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who, in writings from the 1950s and 1960s, created what became for many the intellectual Framework for Islamism.
V. Fundamentalism and Islamism have played a significant role in reenergizing that form of modernist secularism and atheism that sees in religion a profound threat to the modern project of a humanity guided by reason.
Suggested Reading:
Grenz and Roger, 20th Century Theology.
Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism
Lawrence, Shattering the Myth.
Qutb, Milestones.
Questions to Consider:
1. What were some of the crucial events and movements in the United States of the mid-20th century that led to the revival of fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism?
2. What are the key elements of Islamism that distinguish it from other forms of Islam?
Lecture Thirty-Two -- Transcript
Fundamentalism and Islamism
Back in our first lecture, I noted that in the 1970s two events took place that brought to widespread public attention political and Fundamentalist forms of religion that many in the media and the academy had thought were long gone: the election of self-professed born-again Christian Jimmy Carter to the United States Presidency in 1976 and the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Since then, as we all know, these forms of religion have continued to play a significant role in the world. I’ve spent a lot of time in these lectures talking about who I consider to be the most interesting religious thinkers of the modem period, but at this point in history -- in the first decade of the 21st century -- the impact of conservative, political, and Fundamentalist religion around the world seems far larger.
In this lecture, I want to focus on two examples of this resurgence, focusing especially on Christianity in the United States and Islam in the Middle East. I focus on the former because it allows me to pick up on the story of Fundamentalism that I began in an earlier lecture. I focus on Islam not only because what we tend to call “Fundamentalist Islam” is perhaps the most talked-about religious phenomenon in the world today, but also because Islam in recent decades has begun to significantly reshape Western religion and Western religious thought. Islam belongs to the same family of religions as Christianity and Judaism, but until recently it has not played a major role in constituting the religious consciousness of the West, except as it served as a kind of alien, oriental other to Western religion through the history of the Western tradition. Today, however, Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States-
it’s a major presence in Europe, and as such it’s raising many fascinating and difficult questions about religious pluralism and secularism.
I want to begin with some questions of definition. Often when we talk about groups such as the Moral Majority or Al-Qaida, the power of the Religious Right in the United States, or the Madresses in Pakistan, even the Hindu nationalists in India, and the ultra-Orthodox settlers in Israel, we tend to lump all these groups together under the term “Fundamentalism” This term can be very useful to identify some important commonalities between these and other groups or movements. Most of them, to one degree or another, reject secular modernity and strive, in various ways, to realize forms of politics and governance based on religious principles.
One of the most comprehensive studies of contemporary Fundamentalism -- The Fundamentalism Project based at the University of Chicago and run by historians Martin Marty and Scott Appelby -- the Fundamentalism Project has defined Fundamentalism in terms of two basic characteristics. First, Fundamentalism invokes a pure religious past based on a selective recovery of tradition as the basis for a' present religious vision. We’ve seen in a previous lecture how Christian Fundamentalism focuses on an inerrant Bible -- and also that in doing so it was ignoring the fact that the Christian tradition was rich in non-literal readings of the biblical text. So, we have with Christian Fundamentalists a kind of selective recovery of views of the Bible. Second, central to Fundamentalism is a struggle against secular modernity that is grounded in the belief that what is variously referred to as “secularism,” or “secular humanism,” or even just “the West” is a threat to religious identity, and that it is religiously imperative to resist this threat and change the world to conform to God’s will. This is, I think, is a useful definition of Fundamentalism, but we need to use it carefully because it’s necessary to also consider the differences between the many religious movements that might, in one way or another, be grouped under this definition.
As we’ve seen, the term “Fundamentalism” is of Christian origin -- it is the self-designation of a group of conservative Evangelicals in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. But if we consider the most visible manifestations of the Religious Right in the United States over the past 30 years, such as the Moral Majority or its successor groups, we need to recognize that it includes a range of groups -- from the heirs of earlier American Fundamentalism to groups that might more appropriately be called “conservative Evangelicals” and that are more willing to adhere to the secular principles of the separation of Church and state. So, here, even when we’re talking about the Religious Right, the idea of Fundamentalism is already a bit problematic.
In the case of Islam, we also find the militant assertion of a purified faith based on the absolute authority of scripture -- and in this sense, there are some real parallels with Christian Fundamentalism. But we also find here in the case of Islam ideas and patterns that differ significantly from those found in Christian Fundamentalism, and to mark this difference in this lecture I’m going to employ the term “Islamism,” instead of “Islamic Fundamentalism” to designate these groups. Although for Islamists the Qur’an is the Word of God and the fundamental religious authority, almost as important is the Sunna or the model for true submission to God and interpretation of the Qur’an as it was lived by the prophet Muhammad. So, we have both the Qur’an and Mohammad’s model of how to live a pure Islamic life, the Sunna -- and the Sunna itself is preserved in literary form in what is called the Hadith. So, in Islam we have the Qur’an, but we also have Sunna or Hadith as a religious authority that is almost as important and that is necessary as a kind of lens for reading the Qur’an. Also important for having lived true Islam are the companions of the prophets, or what are called the “pious ancestors,” and this is the term from which we get the contemporary term “Salafism,” which is often used to designate the Islamists. These pious ancestors were seen to be models of a pure Islam in the way they followed Mohammad and followed the Qur’an. So, we can use the term “Islamist” or Salafist. I’ll tend to use the term “Islamist” in this lecture.
So, where Christian Fundamentalists focus exclusively on the Bible, Islamists interpret the Qur’an through the Sunna and see in the companions, the pious ancestors, the exemplary submission to these authorities. Another crucial difference between Christian Fundamentalism and Islamism is that the context for the emergence of Islamism was very different from the historical context of Christian Fundamentalism. Where Christian Fundamentalism emerged in the heart of the modem First World, Islamism is largely a phenomenon of the Third World, and much of the anger that fuels the movement is directed against Western colonialism and the widespread poverty of the Islamic world. In this lecture, I want first to discuss the development from the Christian Fundamentalism in the early 20th century in the U.S. to today’s Christian Right, and then I want to turn to the emergence in the 19th and 20th centuries of an Islamism that is today sweeping through the Islamic world.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fundamentalism emerged from a conservative Evangelical Christianity struggling with Darwinism, historical biblical criticism, and liberal theologies. With their stress on the pessimistic view of history inherent in their premillenialism. many of these Christians were more interested in saving souls than in saving society, but they also felt that the forces of modernity were taking over the main Christian denominations and so made the saving of souls more and more difficult. In the first decades of the 20th century there ensued a struggle between Fundamentalists and modernists for the control of the main Christian denominations. By and large, the Fundamentalists lost this struggle, and many of them left the major denominations.
This began a process of separation that, in concert with the very visible embarrassment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which we already talked about, as a result the Fundamentalists were left culturally and religiously marginalized for the next four decades. These were decades of retrenchment and reorganization, a very successful reorganization that created a widespread network of Fundamentalist and conservative Christianity in the United States. From the successful revivalist movements of preachers like Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, to the establishment of numerous Bible colleges and seminaries, such as the Moody Bible Institute and the Fuller Theological Seminary, to the powerful radio and then TV networks of Charles Fuller and Oral Roberts -- there was a large umbrella of organizations created, such as the American Council of Christian Churches. In these various ways, Fundamentalists and other conservative Christians in the ’3Os, and ’40s, and ’5Os created a network of organizations and income that rivaled and even outstripped those of the mainstream Christian denominations. In this context, it’s impossible to try to address this period in any depth -- so here, I just want to point to some very general trends that can help explain how at least some of the groups that made up this network came to public prominence in the late 1970s.
After World War II, and especially in the context of the Cold War, Fundamentalists and conservative Evangelicals began to articulate a more politically active message, led by figures such as Billy Graham and Oral Roberts. Anti-communism may have been the most powerful element of this new political ideology that was emerging, because for many communism seemed to epitomize the dangers of “secular humanism” that the Fundamentalists thought the United States was getting overrun by. Earlier Fundamentalists had tended to embrace nationalism, but in the context of the Cold War this nationalism became more and more pronounced as leading figures of these movements incorporated American patriotism and American capitalism as central pillars of their biblically based Christian faith.
This message resonated through the country -- or at least it resonated enough through a Washington that was already shaken by figures such as Joseph McCarthy -- for by the end of the 1950s, a country founded on the principle of separation of Church and state had inserted the words “under God” into the pledge of allegiance and had imprinted the words “In God we trust” on all its currency. These were products of the l950s.
While some Fundamentalist groups continued to insist on strict separation from a decadent American culture, a new kind of Evangelical spirit was starting to energize many conservative Christians impelled by the need to protect the United States as a "Christian nation.” This sense of the Christian nation and the threats that surrounded it was only increased during the 1960s-this was a period, as we all know, of cultural upheaval and protest that left many conservative Christians convinced that America was declining even further into decadence. There were some especially troubling signs and events during this decade. Early in the 1960s, the Supreme Court ruled against prayer and Bible reading in the public schools. As the decade progressed, new curricula were introduced in public schools that included sex education and early forms of multiculturalism -- both of which conservative Christians saw as forms of secular humanist indoctrination. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women had the right to abortion -- and, again, for the conservative Christians this was only another sign that America was growing more and more immoral.
By the end of the 1970s, although some hardcore Fundamentalists saw America’s social chaos as a sign that the Rapture was near, others argued that a less militant and more politically active approach was necessary to save souls and save America. They rather quickly determined that Jimmy Carter’s brand of Evangelicalism was too moderate, and so in the late ’70s they began to form a number of politically active groups-the most visible of which was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, a group explicitly devoted to changing the nation through religiously infused politics. As Falwell put it: “Only by godly leadership can America be put back on a divine course. God will give national healing if men and women will pray and meet God’s conditions.”
Interestingly, though, the Moral Majority saw itself as a coalition that included not just Fundamentalists and conservative Evangelical Protestants, but also Catholics, Mormons, and Jews. We see here the emergence of what will later become the “Religious Right” -- it’s a coalition focused less and less on details of doctrine and so on a pure Christianity than on the perceived need for a moral revival in the United States -- a return to “traditional values” or “family values.” At the heart of this new religious vision was a sense of American history as deeply marked, if not by Christianity itself -- though many would insist that we were and are a Christian nation -- at least by the Bible and biblical values and by a strong suspicion of the growing secularism in the United States.
As a final point, we should also note that in recent years a different kind of Evangelical voice has emerged on the American scene-one that questions the preoccupation among Fundamentalists and Evangelicals of the past 40 years with so-called traditional or family values and seeks to recover a different biblical vision. Jim Wallis, for example, who edits the journal Sojourners, has sought-like many liberation theologians-to recover the prophetic strand of the Bible to argue that a true Christian vision focuses on those relegated to the margins of the society, especially the poor. For Wallis, a personal, Jesus-centered religion remains central-and here, he’s a traditional Evangelical, and he tends to be critical of liberation theology for not emphasizing this enough-but his so-called “politics of God” is less nationalistic than other forms of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism and seeks not to work from the top down by trying to legislate Christian values, but focuses more on the grassroots -- trying to persuade people to the kind of transformation toward the marginalized that he sees at the center of Jesus’ vision. Whether this version of Evangelical, political religion is making inroads on more traditional forms of Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity it’s difficult to say at this point, but what is clear is that for many Christians in the United States today, religion is no longer just a matter of personal piety, but a matter of politics and social issues.
I want to turn now to look more closely at Islamism, and specifically the Islamism that has emerged in the Middle East hi the 20th century among Sunni Muslims. Sunni Islam is the major branch, and its adherents of Islam far outnumber those who profess Shia Islam, which dominates in places like Iran. The roots of contemporary Sunni Islamism go back at least to the 18th and l9th centuries -- a period of major decline in Muslim power in the Middle East as the main Islamic empire of the medieval and early modern period, the Ottoman Empire, was in decline -- and the Western colonial powers starting with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the early 19th century were solidifying their hold on much of the Middle East.
Western influence and power led to deep social and economic dislocations in the Middle East as Western forms of government gradually encroached to displace Islamic rulers, legal experts, and educators-and particularly in northern Africa and the Middle East, as traditional economies were undermined by large-scale agriculture controlled by the West. In the course of the 19th century, Muslims responded to the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the growing Western power in three distinct ways. The first was what legal scholars of the medieval period called “commanding the good.”
These scholars argued that the responsibility of the Muslim is to call attention to, and denounce, evil when they see it, but not necessarily to resort to force to stop it. It is up to God, according to these legal scholars, to bring down punishment on the infidels and evil-doers. From this perspective, as long as one lived in a society in which one can live an authentic Muslim life -- to pray, follow Islamic law, at least in one’s personal life, and live under a ruler who professes Islam -- as long as these conditions were met, the main duty of the individual is to uphold central values of religious life -- not seek to overthrow colonial power. This is arguably still today the approach to Islam that the majority of Muslims practice.
A second response to the colonialism in the 19th century and 20th century was that many Muslims adopted modem Western attitudes towards nationalism and secularism. This resulted in the emergence in the 20th century of some tension between nationalist and Islamic identities -- a tension exacerbated and even confused by the fact that Western powers throughout this period were drawing new political, national boundaries. We can think about Iraq and the fact that the national borders of Iraq were created by Western powers after World War I, bringing together groups that don’t naturally fit together. This meant that for many Muslims in the 20th century the path from independence from colonialism came not through a recovery of Islamic tradition, but through the creation of secular nation-states. So, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Ataturk led a revolution that established a secular Turkish state that banned Sufi orders, dissolved many religious institutions -- though it did, in fact, create a state-
sponsored version of Sunni Islam as the national religion.
In 1952, Gamal Nasser took over Egypt in a coup and eventually freed the country from British rule. He originally was allied with Islamic reformists, but once he took power he moved the country in the direction of a more ethnic identity -- what we can call a “pan-Arabic ideology,” by which he sought to strengthen bonds between Egypt and other Arabic countries. For Nassar, Egypt was not an Islamic state, and Islamic law was confirmed only to the private sphere, and secular courts ruled in the public domain. A third response to Western colonialism -- and also to the perceived decline in genuine Islam-came from Muslim reformers who saw this decline of Islamic power and the rise of Western power as the work of an angry God, angry that Muslims had wandered from the true path.
For them, the way to regain God’s favor was to go back to the fundamentals of the Qur’an and the Sunna and to strive to reshape Islamic societies to reflect these fumdamentals. The first of these groups that we need to consider are the Wahhabis. The Wahhabis are a Sunni Muslim movement that has been instrumental in shaping the Islam of groups such as the Taliban and A1-Qaida. Wahhabism was founded by Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the middle of the 18th century. In the early days of his movement, al-Wahhab forged an alliance with Muhammed ibn Saud, the founder' of the Saud dynasty that rules Saudi Arabia today.
This gave the Wahhabis a political power base from which to push their Islamic reforms. Wahhabism is based on a theological emphasis on the unity of God: There is no God but God, and God is One. This emphasis on unity was at the foundation of the Wahhabis’ vision of a uniform Islam that would transcend the particularities of cult, nation, and ethnicity-and in which all Islamic ideas and practices would be grounded in the word of this one God, the Qur’an, and on the model of the perfect Islamic life, Mohammad’s Sunna.
For the Wahhabis, the sophisticated traditions of Islamic law and Qur’anic interpretation that had been developed over centuries during the medieval period had become ossified and constricting. They called for the recovery of the traditional notion of ijtihad -- that is the use of independent judgment or reasoning -- in interpreting the Qur’an and the Sunna as opposed to a kind of slavish reliance on medieval legal traditions. At the same time and influenced by medieval' reformers such as Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, the Wahhabis pursued an uncompromising vision of a pure Islamic society that rejected any allowance for what they considered non-Islamic practices. So, the Wahhabis, with the backing of the Saudi state, pursued these reforms vigorously against various cults and practices within Saudi Arabia and against the occupying Ottomans. One of their major targets were Sufi orders that the Wahhabis saw as too open to indigenous customs, and what they considered to be non-Islamic practices-such as worshipping at the tombs of saints. The Wahhabis destroyed these tombs and other Sufi holy sites and destroyed Shia holy sites as well.
As the l9th century progressed, Wahhabis and other reform movements increasingly, though largely without real effect, called for Muslim states to be shaped and controlled by Muslim values and practices. It’s important, however, to note that this did not amount to an all-out rejection of modemity on the part of the Islamists. As we’ve seen, they had their own criticisms of medieval Islam, and one of their goals was to show how a purified Islam-and purified in terms of the Qur’an and the Surma -- could shape a modern Islam -- forced, of course, from Western domination.
Another major reform group, originating in Egypt, was called the “Muslim Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood’s intellectual basis goes back to Muhammed Abduh, who argued that Islam can embrace modernity, particularly modern science, but only on the basis of a society shaped by the Qur’an and the prophet. The founder of the Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, wanted to purify Islam in Egypt by setting it up as a kind of grassroots, charitable, social activist group that established hospitals and schools. He was very critical of what he perceived as the decadent Western mores and behaviors that were making themselves known in Egypt at the time, and he dedicated himself to ridding Egypt of this corruption. But he saw this mostly as a social and cultural issue-more a matter of purifying hearts than of changing political structures.
But by the end of the 1930s and especially after World War II, debates within the Brotherhood over the use of politics and force to achieve their goals moved the organization in a more radical direction. It was involved with the assassination of Egypt’s prime minister in 1948 and, as I’ve mentioned, with Nasser’s coup in 1952. It became even more radical when it became clear that Nasser was not a real supporter of the Brotherhood’s aims, and members at one point tried to assassinate Nasser -- which led many of the group’s members to be imprisoned, and some to be executed. At this point, although the Brotherhood remained visible as a charitable social organization, many of its more activist members went underground, and a new form of Egyptian Islamism began to take shape. This has had a powerful impact on Islamism at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century.
The most important figure for understanding this movement was Sayyid Qutb, who in his writings from the 1950s and 1960s created what became for many the intellectual framework for Islamism. Qutb was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966, but his book Milestones has had a significant influence on contemporary Islamist groups-such as Hamas, Algeria’s FLN, and the Taliban. As a young man, Qutb was a secularist and a modernist, but by the 1950s he had adopted an Islamic world-view sharply critical of the West -- particularly of Britan’s role in Egypt; France’s suppression of nationalist movements throughout northern Africa; and of Britain’s and the United States’ support of Israel, which he saw as an attack on Islam. He also criticized what he saw as Western secular decadence and Christianity for the way it fit so easily into the secularized West. He argued that no such separation was necessitated by Islam-and that Islam, therefore, could be the answer to the ills of the modem world.
But the Islam Qutb had in mind was not the Islam of “commanding the good,” but a modem, pure, and revolutionary Islam. He, therefore, favored overthrowing all those governments that were not willing to fight for true Islam. In a period when former colonies around the world, including the Islamic world, were pinning their hopes for independence on the nationalist model imported from their colonizers, Qutb argued that because nationalism assigns sovereignty to human beings and the nation and not to God, it is unbelief On the basis of these ideas, then, an Islamic radical could find justification for labeling other Muslims as unbelievers, and thus deserving of punishment.
In Qutb’s ideas we find the intellectual underpinnings of the Islamist condemnation of the West and its enmity against more moderate Muslims. Qutb’s ideas and those of other radical Muslims found a wider and wider audience from the 1960s onwards in conjunction with a series of events that led more and more Muslims to conclude that it was necessary to assert a militant Islam against the West and against feeble Muslim governments. These events included the success of Israel, supported by Great Britain and the United States, and Israel’s struggle with the Arab world; it included the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union; and it included the First Gulf War and the establishment of a significant U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia.
The emergence of Islamism and Christian Fundamentalism onto the world scene in the last decades of the 20th century has very clearly had a profound effect on the way that scholars, social critics, and religious thinkers view religion in the contemporary world. As I’ve said, it has been instrumental in leading sociologists and others to rethink the secularization thesis. It has led political theorists, legal scholars, and religious thinkers to take a new look at the relation between religion and politics -- where, in the United States, we find secularists arguing that we need to strengthen the wall of separation between Church and state, partly in response to the power of the Christian Right. We see some religious thinkers arguing that we need to take more seriously the fact that religion, for many believers, whether members of the Christian Right or of more liberal forms of various religious traditions, is not easily confined-as the modernists would have it-to so-called “private” spheres of life.
I’ll talk about these two issues in the last two lectures of the course. But Fundamentalism and Islamism have also played a significant role in reenergizing that form of modernist secularism and atheism that sees in religion a profound threat to the modern project of humanity guided by reason. It is to this topic that I turn in the next lecture.
