THE MANY FACES OF RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM
Terrorism
in the name of religion is very much in the news these days. Only recently, the
world witnessed three near-simultaneous lethal acts of terror by alleged
Islamists on three continents: foreign tourists gunned down at a beachfront
hotel in Tunisia; a man decapitated in an attack on a chemical plant near Lyon,
France; and the suicide bombing of a Shiite mosque after Friday prayers in the
Kuwaiti capital. Coming close on the heels of the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS)
blowing up the tombs of a Shiite and a Sufi saint in the world heritage city of
Palmyra, these acts of terror have one thing in common. Their perpetrators
claim divine support for their grisly mayhem from either a literal reading of
holy texts or a sectarian interpretation of religious history. Which brings up
two related questions: Is it proper to refer to the actors as religious
fundamentalists, and how does fundamentalism lead to violence and terrorism?
Fundamentalism,
or religious fundamentalism, is a popular term that has entered relatively
recently in the English lexicon. The Online Etymology Dictionary states that
the word was “coined in American English to name a movement among Protestants
circa 1920-25 based on scriptural inerrancy….” The faith in the absolute
literalism of the scripture makes fundamentalism a concept that is in direct
conflict with liberalism and modernism. The conflict finds its most potent
expression in the rejection of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. An early
high-profile battle on the subject was fought in 1925 with the Scopes Trial,
where William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow faced off against each other in
court over the right of a schoolteacher in Tennessee to teach evolution in
state-funded schools.
Over
the years, the meaning of fundamentalism has been broadened and made more
elastic to encompass other religious faiths. According to Oxford Dictionaries
on the web, fundamentalism is defined as “A form of religion, especially Islam
or Protestant Christianity, that upholds belief in the strict, literal
interpretation of the scripture.” It traces the origin of modern Christian
fundamentalism to the American millenarian sects of the 19th
century. One can reasonably argue, however, that the Catholic Church was
practicing an earlier version of fundamentalism when it banned the teaching of
the heliocentric theory of Copernicus (1473-1543), burned Giordino Bruno at the
stake for heresy (1600) and forced Galileo Galilei (in 1633) to recant his
advocacy of the Copernican theory.
Islamic
fundamentalism, in the words of Oxford Dictionaries, “appeared in the 18th
and 19th centuries as a reaction to the disintegration of the
Islamic political and economic power, asserting that Islam is central to both
state and society and advocating strict adherence to the Koran and to Islamic
law (sharia).” It has become increasingly virulent in recent decades,
fostering the dream of re-establishing the Caliphate over the Ummah
(Islamic Nation), in response to economic stagnation and explosive population
growth over a vast region of the world blighted by autocratic rulers, failed
states and civil wars.
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Fundamentalism
over the years has become nearly synonymous with blind faith. In this expanded
view, its myriad manifestations cut across virtually all religions and beliefs.
Jewish fundamentalism, for example, exacerbates the challenge of finding a
solution to the so-called Palestinian Problem. The fundamentalists in this
context refer to the Old Testament to claim all of a vaguely defined Eretz
Israel, including Judea and Samaria (the Biblical names for
the “Occupied West Bank”), as the divinely ordained Promised Land of the Jewish
people. Their Palestinian counterparts are people who believe literally in the
journey of Muhammad on a celestial animal (al Buraq) on a single night
from Mecca to Jerusalem and back. The place which he visited in Jerusalem, now
the site of the Al Aqsa mosque, is also precisely the location of Temple Mount
– the holiest site in Judaism.
Hinduism
suffers from this scourge too. While the word fundamentalism cannot apply
strictly to a religion without a scripture, it can be applied loosely to the
toxic brew of blind faith in Hindu epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata)
and semi-sacred texts (Puranas and Manu-Smriti, for example) with
intolerance for proselytizing religions (Islam and Christianity) imported in
the main by foreign rulers. A notable example of Hindu fundamentalism was the Ram
Janmabhoomi movement, which resulted in the 1992 demolition of the Babri
Masjid in Ayodhya. Its aftermath reverberated for years – from the Bombay
blasts of 1993 to the Gujarat riots of 2002 – with significant loss of lives.
Buddhism,
an avowedly non-violent religion, has its own share of bigotry too, as
witnessed in the recent persecution and forcible displacement of the minority
Rohingya Muslims by the majority Buddhists in Myanmar. Strictly speaking, since
there is no scriptural basis for the majority action, the label of
fundamentalism can be applied to it only in the loosest sense.
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Were
the gunman in Tunisia and the suicide bomber in Kuwait City Islamic
fundamentalists? We would never know because they are both dead, but it is
reasonable to assume that they were motivated by ISIS’ call for global terror
attacks during Ramadan. In Tunisia, the gunman wished to destabilize an
insufficiently Islamic government. The bombing in Kuwait was a reflection of
sectarian hatred -- a continuation of the earliest and still unresolved conflict
in Islam about whether Abu Bakr or Ali should have been the first Caliph after
the Prophet’s death.
It
is important to note that religious fundamentalism does not automatically lead
to acts of violence. The tension between the deeply faithful and those opposed
to their views can be mediated through the rule of law, i.e., the court system,
and the political process, e.g., elections. This happens both in the United
States and India, where the respective Supreme Courts try to adjudicate fraught
issues like legalized abortion and same-sex marriage (in the US) and sharia
law divorce settlement and legal rights to the Ram Janmabhoomi property
(in India). The verdicts do not please everyone
but are generally accepted by all. It is precisely the absence of comparable
mediating institutions and practices that has allowed Islamic fundamentalism in
the Middle East to metastasize into its present, virulent form. The Ummah
lacks a widely accepted and authoritative methodology to deal with either
internal conflicts in Islam that may lead to sectarian bloodbaths, or external
conflicts with other faiths that often give rise to gratuitous acts of
vandalism, like the ISIS destroying ancient artifacts at Mosul Museum in Iraq,
or the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas more than a decade earlier.
AMITABHA BAGCHI
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