The CQ Researcher : Islamic Fundamentalism

From the March 24, 2000 issue of The CQ Researcher, Volume 10, No. 11, p. 244-245.

What Do Fundamentalists Want?

By David Masci

There is no word in Arabic for fundamentalism. “The closest that we have is usuliyan, which means principalist,” says Ebrahim Moosa, an associate professor of religion at Stanford University.

In fact, says Bahman Baktiari, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, Islamic fundamentalism is a purely Western construct, “used to describe the rise of Islamic forces in the Middle East.”

Moreover, Baktiari says, “this movement is not homogeneous.” From North Africa to Asia, fundamentalists have different views about how to build a good Islamic society. For instance, in Iran, women can attend school, drive, vote and even hold public office. By contrast, women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan can't.

Still, several common assumptions and principals underlie almost all fundamentalist, or Islamist, movements. Indeed, like orthodox movements within other faiths, Islamic fundamentalism took hold because of what some Muslims see as a crisis of epic proportions -- namely, the state of confusion and decay in the Muslim world. The answer, they believe, is to return religion to its proper place of importance in society.

“God has not forsaken Muslims,” the fundamentalists often say, “rather Muslims have forsaken God.” [1]

A millennium ago, Islam was the foundation of the most dynamic civilization in the world. While the Christian West was still trying to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire, Arabs throughout North Africa and the Levant were building a sophisticated and energetic culture. But after several hundred years of prosperity, the Muslim world went into decline, increasingly beset by the military, economic and cultural power of Europe and, later, the United States. To make matters worse, Islamic fundamentalists say Muslim countries have been shamelessly forsaking their own glorious culture and replacing it with shallow, if not obscene, Western notions.

The first step on the road to reversing this decline, fundamentalists say, is to cast off Western music, literature and other influences.

“They want to do away with Michael Jackson and Madonna, this hedonistic culture that has been imposed on them,” says Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at The George Washington University.

Fundamentalists also want to re-examine Western institutions and law. “The idea of the all-powerful state, which now exists in most Muslim countries, is also Western and alien to Islam,” Nasr says. “Fundamentalists want peace and security like everyone else, but they don't want a government that meddles in their lives so much.”

In place of Western culture and institutions, funda-mentalists call for a return to a society based on Islam at all levels. “This is about Islam being part of public norms, in the political, economic and cultural spheres,” Moosa says.

For the individual, this means finding homegrown alternatives to Western imports. “We need to reassert our identity,” Nasr says. “And so instead of reading, say, a French book or an American book, we need to be looking to our own literature.”

Music, fashion, cuisine, architecture and other aspects of culture must also reflect the influence of Islam. “Islamicizing society means a lot of things, from getting rid of pornography to making women wear chador [a head scarf to cover one's hair] to banning alcohol,” says Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia.

On the political level, a return to Islam entails infusing public institutions with religion. “All public life in Islam is religious, being permeated by the experience of the Divine,” writes Hasan al-Turabi, who in 1989 engineered Sudan's experiment with an Islamic government. “Its function is to pursue the service of Allah as expressed in a concrete way in the Shariah, the religious law.” [2]

But the meaning of the Koran, is, to some degree, dependent on who is reading it. “There are many different ways to interpret the Shariah,” Moosa says. “Each group calibrates their reading of things based on local conditions.”

In rough-and-tumble Afghanistan, for instance, the Taliban interpret the texts rather harshly. “But Iran is more cosmopolitan,” Moosa says, “and it does not see things in such a Draconian way.”

[1] Lawrence Davidson, Islamic Fundamentalism (1998), p. 83.

[2] Quoted in Ibid., p. 127.