In the nineteenth century, it was widely believed that ‘excessive’ religious devotion or ‘enthusiasm’ as it was then called might lead to insanity. This was held to be the case not only by psychiatrists, but also by conventional believers. From it sprang the legend, for example, that the millennialists who accepted William Miller’s predictions of the Second Coming in the early 1840’s ended up in asylums. While we tend to smile patronisingly at such ideas today, imputations of fundamentalist violence are often scarcely more sophisticated.
A second and more powerful, stigmatising factor has been the identification of fundamentalist religion with terrorism. This connection was made well before the attacks of 11 September, 2001. In an influential 1996 article, Walter Laqueur predicted that terrorism would increasingly grow out of ‘sectarian fanaticism’. While Laqueur, too, spoke of ‘cults’, he also pointed to the violence potential of ‘religious fundamentalism’ and ‘apocalyptic millenarianism’, both lodged within historic religious traditions. References to ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ have become so commonplace in discussions of violence that they scarcely occasion any notice.
However, as with the flood of religious political movements, the prevailing association between fundamentalism and violence, particularly terrorism, should not be regarded as self-evidently true. It is, instead, often an act of labelling for the purpose of condemnation, with little regard for the beliefs to which the label is attached. ’Fundamentalism’ itself is a construct whose relationship to violence is extremely problematic. For purposes of understanding the relationship between religion and violence, it turns out to matter relatively little whether a group is a politically religious movement or has emerged out of an existing religious tradition. The two seem more separate than they are. Their distinctness is less a consequence of intrinsically different natures than of accidents in the division of academic labour. Religious-political movements and fundamental religious traditions tend to be studied by different people, participating in different networks, with the result that the end-products of scholarship underestimate convergences and overestimate differences.
The fear of ‘dangerous religions’, has given rise to a mind-set that seeks to identify their characteristics, in the hope that basic understanding of religion might allow one to distinguish the sinister from the benign. This essentialist argument asserts that it is possible to find markers of proneness to violence. These indicators allegedly centre on such features as styles of leadership for example, charismatic mode of organisation for instance, isolated and beliefs for example, apocalyptic expectations. Unfortunately, the essentialist approach has little predictive value. Although inductively generated from past violent cases, it founders on the presence of numerous contrary cases. It is always possible to find non-violent groups that are, for example, led by charismatic leaders, physically isolated and doctrinally rigid. But the search for a test based on the nature of the group is a blind alley, remotely confirmed by the history of fundamentalism itself.
Fundamentalist movements like Talibanisation arose committed to the militant purification of religious doctrines and institutions and the reshaping of personal, social, and public behaviour in accordance with religious tenets. While writers attempt to distinguish ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ from ‘Islamic civilisation’, the distinction is made difficult by the tendency to employ religion as the ‘central defining characteristic’ of civilizations. Critics have pointed out that linking civilisation and religion yields a ‘crude’ category. It fails to account for the many non-religious roles individuals occupy, as well as the variety of religious ideas that can be found even in societies that appear religiously homogeneous. The consequence is to ‘lend… authority to religious leaders seen as spokesmen for their worlds”. In the process other voices are unfortunately muffled and other concerns silenced.
The most powerful aspect of Bertrand Russell’s critique of religious belief is his claim that religion is based on fear, and that fear breeds cruelty. Fundamentalist Islam remains an enigma precisely because it has confounded all attempts to divide it into tidy categories. “Revivalist” becomes “extremist” (and vice versa) with such rapidity and frequency that the actual classification of any movement or leader has little predictive power. They will not stay put. This is because fundamentalist Muslims, for all their “diversity,” orbit around one dense idea. From any outside vantage point, each orbit will have its apogee and perigee.
What is remarkable about fundamentalist Islam is not its diversity. It is the fact that this idea of power for Islam appeals so effectively across such a wide range of humanity, creating a world of thought that crosses all frontiers. Fundamentalists everywhere must act in narrow circumstances of time and place. But they are who they are precisely because their idea exists above all circumstances. Over nearly a century, this idea has evolved into a coherent ideology, which demonstrates a striking consistency in content and form across a wide expanse of the Muslim world.
Extreme religious fundamentalists are preoccupied with keeping the opaque side of the lantern turned against the real world with its perceived threats and frustrations. They refuse to travel between illusion and reality and attempt to maintain illusion as their own special reality. Unlike infants who can effectively block out the external world, adult extreme religious fundamentalists are more aware of what they perceive as a threatening environment. This is a key reason why an extreme form of religious fundamentalism has the potential to strike out against threatening objects.
Today the Middle East, where about 60 percent of the population is under the age of 25, is a region dominated by humiliation and anger. Failure plus rage plus the folly of youth equals an incendiary mix of both. Injustices and violence caused by the oil economy have sparked a reaction from dangerous religious fundamentalists in the Muslim world. Fundamentalism in all faith traditions is volatile and hard to contain once it has been unleashed, and it is hard to reverse its essentially reactive and predictably downward cycle.
A few principles may help us breach a path out of this mess. First, religious extremism will not be defeated by just a military response. Significant evidence is available that such a strategy often makes things worse. Religious and political zealots prefer military responses to the threats created by Islamic extremism. Ironically, this holds true on both sides of the conflict; the fundamentalist zealots also prefer the simplistic military approach because they are often able to use it effectively. Fundamentalists actually grow larger with the new recruits amid overly aggressive military campaigns against them.
Second, religious extremism is best neutralised from the inside rather than smashed from the outside. The best antidote to religious fundamentalism of all tribes is the genuine faith tradition that is alive and well in most world religions. For example, the best that the moderate and progressive West can do in the struggle with fundamentalism in other faith traditions is to make powerful alliances with the moderate and progressive leaders in those communities. Fundamentalist religion must be countered with prophetic religion, and a new alliance between prophetic religious leaders across all faith traditions is the best way to defeat the fears about the dangerous religions in the world.
Third, while the use of force to protect our security and bring perpetrators to justice is justifiable, it will take much broader and more creative strategies to defeat the mind set and motives of leaders in West. What the modern Muslim world most needs today is education, especially of its young women, the building of technology and infrastructure, and a principled focus on economic development. The Middle East in general needs that kind of assistance from the West, not more weapons and money poured into the coffers of corrupt regimes.
