Teaching Fundamentalism

December 13, 2007

I find fundamentalism a difficult idea to teach. The reason is that when talking about religion people grasp at doctrinal content. We want group A to hold certain propositions and group B to hold contrary propositions. Those doctrinal distinctives are popularly what separate religious groups.

Fundamentalism stems from Christian experience in the 20th century. A series of volumes entitled The Fundamentals was published between 1910 and 1915. These contained essays that were a direct response to the perceived threats of modernism and Darwinism. It is from these volumes that we get the term fundamentalism.. meaning a movement that holds to the basic truths of Christianity. The term transfers well to other religious traditions since the underlying situation of religious views eroded by modernism is an experience that would be repeated by many traditions.. and the answer to this situation is often to re-entrench basic foundational beliefs through a literalistic approach to texts.

The problem is that the doctrinal beliefs of fundamentalists are not really different from those held by less defensive believers today.. and they are also indistinguishable from the beliefs held by people two or three centuries ago. What makes some guy who believes now in a literal interpretation of the Bible different from some guy in the 19th century who believed the same thing? Yet one is a fundamentalist and the other is not because he lived before there was any such thing. This could lead someone to simply toss out the term fundamentalism as useless.

But it is not a useless term! The point is to get away from defining a religious position in terms of overt doctrinal content and instead focus on an internal religious shift. Often when people discuss fundamentalism they talk about it as a particularly virulent form of Christianity. When I was growing up I heard a fundamentalist defined as an Evangelical with an attitude. Searching a little on the web I came across a Welsh minister who writes similarly:

But the doctrines of fundamentalism are often (actually, almost always in my experience) accompanied by an attitude which is contemptuous and judgmental of differing views, so if you do find me attaching the word ‘fundamentalist’ to any noun other than Christian you can be fairly sure that it is this attitude that I have in mind.

These kinds of statements are a hint that generally people understand fundamentalism to be about more than just an intellectual position.. it is an "attitude".

I think we can do a lot better than that kind of popular definition. For starters we could answer the question: what is at the bottom of this fundamentalist attitude? I think issues surrounding identity would be a great place to start.

Let me for a moment drift into Islamic fundamentalism. Milestones by the Egyptian writer Sayyed Qutb (1906-1966) is a central book in Islamic fundamentalism.. defining the movement. One chapter on "A Muslim's Nationality and His Belief" sets out clearly the importance of a Muslim identity:

Islam came with this total guidance and decisive teaching. It came to elevate man above, and release him from, the bonds of the earth and soil, the bonds of flesh and blood-which are also the bonds of the earth and soil. A Muslim has no country except that part of the earth where the Shari'ah of God is established and human relationships are based on the foundation of relationship with God; a Muslim has no nationality except his belief, which makes him a member of the Muslim community in Dar-ul-Islam; a Muslim has no relatives except those who share the belief in God, and thus a bond is established between him and other Believers through their relationship with God.

This is a totalizing and militant version of Islam. It is actively at war with alternative identity categories, most notably nationalism and any form of tribalism.

When reading a medieval traveler like Ibn Battuta or Ibn Jubayr it is striking how at home they feel all across the Umma, or nation of Islam. These men have a local identity that every now and then shows itself, but mostly they identify with the broader Islamic community. They have one primary identity category and then some smaller categories that are pretty clearly secondary.

Now fast forward a few centuries to our own time and the situation is different. We are born into complex situations in which nations and ethnic categories.. along with class and even sexual categories.. make a strong play on an individual. Most of us are now used to living with a lively group of identity categories that each define part of who we are. These are not categories we choose, but categories that are embedded even in the language we use to talk about the world.

Islamic fundamentalism seeks to establish Islam as the single identity category within a human being.. and when one tries to do that today one bumps up against a host of other categories and claims.. which must be abolished. Right here enters the "with an attitude" issue. It is not easy to just jettison alternative identity claims; it means a new way of talking and processing the world.

To the fundamentalist this process appears simple: the goal is to live like the religious paragons of another age. Muslims of the past lived in a world where that more unified identity category did not lead to mental strife.. instead it made sense of their world and smoothed their transactions within it. This religious identity cannot be simply translated into the modern world. An Islamic fundamentalist may believe the same things as some Muslim from another purer age.. but the internal place of religion is no longer the same. The attempt to re-create that past identity, embedded in its own cultural context, results in a high level of mental stress.. and at times anger.

That is what we should define as a fundamentalist: someone who attempts to establish a perceived identity category from the past within a modern system of multiple identities.