From Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow. 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1998), 280-288.

Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism is a modern form of politicized religion by which self-styled "true believers" resist the marginalization of religion in their respective societies. Fundamentalists identify and oppose the agents of marginalization (secularists) and seek to restructure political, social, cultural, and economic relations and institutions according to traditional religious precepts and norms.

"True believers" adopt different approaches and methods in pursuing their common goals. Some battle secularists gradually on the cultural and social fronts by establishing schools, religious academies, journals, newspapers, hospitals, and orphanages to serve, educate--and convert--people in need of such services. Other fundamentalists enter the political arena by forming political parties and contesting elections. Seeking power through established, conventional means, they hope to transform society in dramatic ways. Still other fundamentalists, abandoning rule by law and conventional politics, become militants who wage a religious war to overthrow the established political order or commit violent acts of terrorism designed to intimidate the enemy into making concessions.

Defining Fundamentalists

Use of the term fundamentalist for everyone who pursues one of these strategies can be misleading if other considerations are not taken into account. For example, some modern religious leaders eschew political power and concentrate on fostering a return to religious practices and lifestyles by fallen-away Muslims, Christians, or Jews. It is more accurate to call such apolitical leaders revivalists and see their movements as expressions of religious revivalism. In other words, not every person who takes her religion seriously, practices it fervently, and organizes her life and career around it is a fundamentalist. Fundamentalists, by contrast, want to change the behavior of nonbelievers as well as believers; therefore, they strive to change the laws and structures of society that impede their mission of opposing the godless and converting the nonbeliever. At the other extreme, many terrorists and so-called religious warriors are not motivated by religious sensibilities at all; rather, they are mercenaries or secular ideologues exploiting religious fervor for their own irreligious ends. The genuine fundamentalist is both religious and political; indeed, he believes that circumstances require him to act politically (and perhaps violently) in order to fulfill his religious obligations.

If Fundamentalism is defined as a cross-cultural, religio-political pattern of thought and behavior rather than equated with a specific set of beliefs, rituals, or religious practices, it becomes clear that fundamentalists may be found within any historic religion that has sacred scriptures and basic teachings. They are defenders of a religious tradition that goes back centuries rather than promoters of a new religion or cult centered on one charismatic leader, such as David Koresh of the Branch Davidians, a cult centered in Waco, Texas, in the early 1990s. Although fundamentalists defend traditional beliefs and draw on the symbolic and organizational resources of their ancient religion, they are not merely conservative or orthodox believers. Being a conservative Christian, a devout Muslim, or an Orthodox Jew, in other words, does not necessarily make one a fundamentalist. Rather, fundamentalists are militant conservatives who see the world as a battleground between absolute good and absolute evil. Thus they are spiritual (and sometimes physical) warriors who oppose nonbelievers as well as the doubters or compromisers within their own religious community.

Most fundamentalists are neither uneducated, backward-looking people nor the credulous dupes of silver-tongued preachers. To the contrary, they are medical doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, businessmen, and college-educated mothers and fathers, who readily use (or even invent) the tools of technology, mass communications, and modern science. Yet they feel strongly that Western societies erred grievously when they replaced God, religion, and divine law with human reason and secular political principles as the basis for the legal and social order. For such people, religiously derived morality is the only acceptable framework for discerning the common good, evaluating human behavior, and governing society. Moreover, for most Muslims, Western ideas and institutions were imposed by European outsiders who colonized and dominated their societies, converting many of their brothers, sisters, and children to their foreign "godless" ways.

Accordingly, fundamentalists oppose ideas and social movements that carry secular values. Whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, fundamentalists are, for example, antipluralist because they believe in the superiority of the one true religion (their own) and therefore reject the idea that the state should offer equal protection under law to all religions or philosophical positions. Fundamentalists also tend to be antifeminist because they believe that the movement for women's liberation from patriarchy (a society ruled by men) violates the will of God (Allah, Yahveh) who created males and females for different roles, with women destined to be subordinated to men in society and in the home.

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim fundamentalists may not share the same specific beliefs, but they do share a way of thinking about their beliefs. First, fundamentalists are selective. They are selectively traditional, choosing certain scriptures or theological teachings from the past and insisting that all true believers "fight to the death" (literally or figuratively) to protect these "fundamentals." And they are selectively modern, choosing certain twentieth-century technologies (such as television, computer, and fax machine) and processes (such as modern political parties and elections) as weapons against their enemies.

Second, the fundamentalist pattern of thought is absolutist (the truth we proclaim is perfect, complete, and irreformable); inerrantist (the truth we proclaim is free from any kind of error); and dualist (we who proclaim the truth are children of light; all others are children of darkness). Fundamentalists also believe that they are living in a special time in history, perhaps the last days, in which God is working in a new way among the true believers. This idea, known as millennialism in Christianity, helps fundamentalists to explain why they sometimes resort to violence even though their religion normally forbids it. In the final days, when the true believers find themselves in direct combat with the enemy, God wants them to retrieve teachings that justify violent action in defense of the faith.

Members of fundamentalist movements often live by strict rules of discipline; they dress, eat, drink, and perhaps marry according to rules prescribed by an authoritarian leader who always is male and also may be charismatic (gifted with special powers, including the ability to inspire heroic action in others). And members devote a great deal of energy toward maintaining the borders between themselves and outsiders, whom they may portray as witting or unwitting agents of Satan.

Fundamentalists are found within the three great monotheistic faiths--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Many of the characteristics of fundamentalism also appear in twentieth-century South Asian religious movements, including Hindu nationalists in India, Sikh radicals in Punjab, and Buddhist militants in Sri Lanka. In the South Asian cases, the innovative and (ironically) antitraditional character of fundamentalism is especially clear: the political leaders of these movements, seeking to use religion as the basis for an ethnically and culturally exclusive nationalism, have found it necessary to "Westernize" the host religious tradition.

Hinduism and Buddhism do not readily lend themselves to the political dynamics of fundamentalism; they lack the necessary theological "raw materials"--a comprehensive religio-legal code, a concept of time as linear and progressive, and a salvation history prefigured in sacred scriptures and directed by an interventionist personal God. Thus Hindu nationalists created in the 1980s a synthetic fundamentalism by borrowing politically charged Western religious concepts and grafting them onto the diverse, local, folk-oriented traditions and practices known as "Hinduism." Members of the World Hindu Party (VHP, Vishva Hindu Parishad), the cultural wing of Hindu nationalism, staged a campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to promote the mythical deity Lord Rama to the status of a national patron of Hindustan, the imagined sacred nation whose citizens, whether they be Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, or Sikhs, must conform to the cultural and political requirements of Hindutva (Hindu-ness). Seeking to project Rama as a historical figure with a clearly defined birthplace and political legacy, the VHP helped to popularize (and modernize) the Ramayana, the epic poem celebrating the deeds of the god-hero, by broadcasting it, in serial form, on national television.

The renewal of Rama's myth and cult served explicit political purposes: the secular government of India, led by the Congress Party, was at the time implementing the "affirmative action" recommendations of a national commission, and Hindu activists vigorously opposed affirmative action for "minorities" in India, especially Muslims. The most flagrant expression of the new Hindu chauvinism was the 1992 destruction of Babari Masjid, a mosque established in 1528 in the north-central town of Ayodhya by Muslim leaders of the Mughal dynasty. Hindu nationalists, claiming the site as the birthplace of Lord Rama, razed the mosque in hopes of rebuilding the ancient temple as a twentieth-century Hindu national shrine. In doing so, they unleashed a spiral of violence across India that resulted in the death of thousands of Muslims and Hindus.

In whatever religious tradition they inhabit, fundamentalists always are outnumbered by conservatives, moderates, and liberals who practice the religion without developing a principled hostility toward outsiders. Despite their relatively small numbers, however, fundamentalists usually capture the headlines and cause controversy by acting in a way that other religious believers as well as the secular public find dramatic and intentionally provocative. Fundamentalists would say that they are only fulfilling sacred obligations; such fidelity to orthodoxy (correct religious belief) or orthopraxis (correct religious practice) may seem defiant and even scandalous, they acknowledge, to people who have compromised their religious identities by cooperating with nonbelievers for political or economic gain.

Christian Fundamentalism

In 1920 Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Baptist Watchman-Examiner, coined the term fundamentalist to describe the evangelical Christians of North America willing to do "battle royal" in defense of the fundamentals of the faith. Evangelical Christians, to paraphrase historian Grant Wacker, are Protestants who believe that the sole authority in religion is the Bible and the sole means of salvation is a life-transforming experience wrought by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ. And fundamentalist Christians, according to the liberal Protestant preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, are "mad evangelicals."

At the turn of the twentieth century, when they first emerged from the Protestant churches, the fundamentalists were angry because new secular ideas and methods were threatening to discredit traditional Christian beliefs. Englishman Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by means of random mutation and natural selection seemed to deny God's providence in creating and sustaining the world. When middle ground-seeking Protestants like Lyman Abbot proclaimed that evolution was simply "God's way of doing things," his bruising-for-a-fight coreligionists rankled. They saw an insidious link between evolutionism and the so-called higher criticism, a method of examining the historical and literary character of the Bible as if it were just another book. To make matters worse, liberal Protestants were importing the new methods and ideas from Germany into American Protestant seminaries and colleges.

In what would become fine fundamentalist fashion, the angry evangelical Christians reacted by selecting certain traditional beliefs--Christ's birth to a virgin, blood atonement for human sins by death on the cross, bodily resurrection, and anticipated second coming in glory--and fortifying them with a new way of describing the authority of the Bible. This fifth "fundamental," the strict inerrancy of the Bible, guaranteed that everything taught in Scripture, including science and history as well as religion, was absolutely true without qualification. Adherence to the doctrine of strict inerrancy served to separate the true believer from the moderate or merely conservative evangelical, whose judgment presumably was clouded by the seductive appeal of the prestigious new sciences. (Fundamentalists earned the name "come-outers" when they fled the mainline denominations and established their own independent churches in order to worship apart from their corrupted brethren.)

The fundamentalists also were innovative in their interpretations of the Bible's teaching about the end days. The Scofield Reference Bible (1909) presented their own unique form of apocalypticism. Called dispensational premillennialism, the widely adopted theory held that Christ would soon return to punish the nonbelievers, beginning with the liberal Protestants who accepted evolution and the higher criticism, and lift the true believers directly into heaven (rapture). After vanquishing the Antichrist in a terrible battle called Armageddon, the triumphant Christ would establish a thousand-year reign.

Christian fundamentalism found its form through a series of Bible conferences held during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From 1910 to 1915 Lyman and Milton Stewart, wealthy oil businessmen from California, financed the publication and distribution of a twelve-volume paperback series entitled The Fundamentals, authored by prominent evangelical thinkers who described their opponents within the churches as modernists. In 1919 these combative thinkers formed the World's Christian Fundamentals Association to oppose modernism. Charismatic preachers such as the colorful Billy Sunday popularized their antimodernist message through well-publicized revival meetings.

After World War I (1914-1918) the United States experienced "a revolution in morals," celebrated by the eastern media, including the new tabloid newspapers. Women smoked and even danced in public; popular literature discussed Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, and aberrant sexual behavior; and communal enforcement of Victorian standards of personal behavior virtually collapsed. In response, Christian fundamentalists launched a moral crusade and aligned themselves temporarily with Catholics and other Protestants to campaign for laws banning the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages. This effort culminated in passage of the Eighteenth Amendment implementing Prohibition in 1919.

Despite this temporary victory in the battle against alcohol, the war for the enforcement of Victorian/Methodist behavioral standards was ultimately lost. The death knell sounded in 1925, when fundamentalists in Dayton, Tennessee--led by the legendary William Jennings Bryan and opposed by the celebrated criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow--charged schoolteacher John T. Scopes with teaching biological evolution and thereby violating Tennessee's antievolution laws. Although Bryan won the "Scopes Monkey Trial," the fundamentalists, depicted as superstitious rubes and hicks, were discredited nationally. After campaigning against Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith in 1928, they withdrew from the American cultural and political mainstream.

During their period of cultural separatism, Christian fundamentalists were not inactive. In the 1930 and 1940s they built a subculture of fundamentalist radio stations, periodicals, publishing houses, Bible colleges, missionary bands, creationist science institutes, and Christian day schools and academies. Their operative world view, a premillennialist expectation of Christ's imminent return, encouraged missionary outreach and soul winning, however, rather than political activism.

A change in attitude occurred in the 1960s, when dismayed Christian fundamentalists observed what they described as a conspiracy of secular humanists invading the nation's schools, Congress, and the Supreme Court (which banned prayer in the public schools in 1962 and 1963 and permitted abortion on demand in 1973). In 1979 the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a gifted preacher and pastor of an independent Baptist church in Lynchburg, Virginia, explained that Christians could no longer wait for Christ to do the dirty work of rolling back the tide of atheistic humanists serving Satan; Bible-believing Christians, whom Falwell called the "Moral Majority," must reinvest the public square with the "Judeo-Christian values" on which the nation had been founded (according to the fundamentalists).

Falwell's Moral Majority was only the most prominent of dozens of Christian political action groups that sprang up in the late 1970s and had their heyday during Ronald Reagan's presidency, lobbying against abortion, pornography, and feminism, among other social forces erosive of a Christian America and "traditional family values." Politicians on the secular right helped fundamentalists perfect their mass marketing and voter mobilization techniques in exchange for support of Republican Party candidates who did not necessarily pursue the rather narrow, and controversial, Christian agenda. In 1990 Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority, claiming it had accomplished its goals. But, in fact, Congress and the Supreme Court, in their lawmaking and jurisprudence, were arguably no closer to Judeo-Christian values than they had been in the 1970s.

Nonetheless, the demise of the Moral Majority signaled only the end of the first phase of renewed Christian activism. The second phase began almost immediately with the formation of the Christian Coalition, a political action group led by Pat Robertson, a Pentecostal preacher, the son of a former U.S. senator, and a successful television entrepreneur (The 700 Club) in his own right. Robertson, like Falwell, established his own university as a base of operations. But, unlike the fundamentalist preacher, the Pentecostal media mogul turned over political management of the movement to his savvy young protege, Ralph Reed, a Ph.D. in American history with a knack for grass-roots politics. Reed shifted the focus of Christian politics from Washington, D.C., to thousands of communities across the United States, where his operatives organized local chapters of the Christian Coalition and trained candidates to run for the school board, state assembly, and Republican Party leadership.

The Christian Coalition quickly demonstrated its new political muscle by injecting strong antiabortion language into the 1992 Republican Party platform and then claiming credit for the 1994 congressional election results, in which 56 House seats, 10 Senate seats, 472 state legislature seats, and 11 governorships shifted from Democratic to Republican hands. Independent pollsters confirmed that the Christian right was indeed crucial to the electoral results. During the campaign the Christian Coalition, with 1.5 million members organized in 48 state units and 1,400 local chapters, had mobilized a network of 17,000 precinct coordinators, 30,000 local volunteers, and 23,000 "church liaisons," who distributed 33 million "nonpartisan" voter guides. Other organizations on the Christian right, including Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, and the Traditional Values Coalition, also helped to ensure that, for the first time, a majority of the nation's 50 million evangelical Protestants identified themselves as Republicans.

Meanwhile, the prolife movement Operation Rescue, led by Randall Terry, recruited fundamentalists and conservative Roman Catholics, whom they trained to participate in marches on abortion clinics. Acts of civil disobedience led to prison terms for some activists, who saw their jailing as a sign of God's unfolding plan of redemption for the United States.

Islamic Fundamentalism

In the twentieth century religious reformers within both major branches of Islam advocated adoption of a new practice by Islamists, or fundamentalist Muslims: identify and persecute the "infidel," or nonbeliever, including the person who pretends to be Muslim but has actually betrayed the faith by adopting Western attitudes and values. Muslim fundamentalists believe that the only remedy for the growing threat of apostasy (the renunciation of Islam) is to establish states governed exclusively by the shari'a,the law of Allah, inscribed in the Holy Qur'an and in the hadith, or traditions, of the prophet Muhammad (A.D. 570-632), the founder of Islam.

Muslim fundamentalists focus their rage first on lax members of the faith community itself and see the world as divided sharply between true believers and corrupt sinners. But Muslims are unique among the major monotheist traditions because they have never formally accepted and institutionalized a distinction between religion and the state, or between the "public" and "private" realms of society. Thus many radical Muslims believe that the real enemy is "Westoxification," the slow poisoning of Muslim purity by the insinuation of foreign ideas and practices imported from Western "imperialist" nations, especially the United States, Great Britain, and France.

In Sunni Islam, followed by nine-tenths of the world's one billion Muslims, the fundamentalist tendency first emerged in the work of Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949), an Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 after concluding that the shaykhs, or religious scholars, of the Islamic religious establishment in Cairo had sold out to British interests, allowing night clubs, advertising, the consumption of alcohol, and other un-Islamic activities. After the Muslim Brotherhood combined religious education with social services (child care centers, medical clinics, orphanages, and schools), the movement spread quickly throughout the Arab world.

In the 1950s the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood began to oppose the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), who had jailed and tortured hundreds of young Muslim activists. One of them, a literary critic named Sayyid Qutb, developed a radical fundamentalist ideology before he was executed in 1965. Published in a little book called Milestones, it inspired a generation of violent radicals who accepted Qutb's notion that jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance) had descended over Muslim societies, making it necessary for true Muslims to flee society, name the infidel, and attack the nonbeliever. One group inspired by this ideology, Islamic Jihad, assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (1918-1981) as retribution for the peace treaty he signed with Israel--the group saw the treaty as a flagrant betrayal of Islamic interests to the religion's greatest enemy. Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman, the blind religious scholar convicted in 1996 of conspiring to blow up New York City's World Trade Center and other U.S. landmarks, was one of Qutb's intellectual disciples.

Today the Muslim Brotherhood and its radical splinter groups are active in Egypt, Palestine, Sudan, Nigeria, Algeria, and several other Muslim nations. Some experts argue that the Muslim Brotherhood is a separate and distinct organization, no longer dedicated to the violent overthrow of corrupt regimes; it prefers instead to compete with secularists within the existing political system. In Jordan, for example, Islamists won election to parliament in significant numbers; in Egypt, while the Brotherhood itself was officially banned, its members were allowed to participate in the Labor Party and to operate their own press. But other analysts claim that the Sunni Islamic movement simply diversified in the 1980s and 1990s, with different levels adopting different tactics--the radical jamaat groups going underground and fomenting violent revolution, for example--in order to reach the same ultimate goal of replacing the existing states with Islamic governments and judicial systems based on shari'a.

In any event, Sunni Islam produced a variety of fundamentalist parties, movements, and activists in the final decades of the twentieth century. In 1992 the strongest such Algerian party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was poised to assume a commanding majority in the Algerian parliament. But President Chadhli Benjedid of the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) resigned, thereby delivering the government into the hands of the military and effectively ending Algeria's three-year experiment in democracy. By winning 180 of the 231 seats contested in the December 1991 election--the first free national election since Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962--the FIS Islamists surprised their secular opponents. Exploiting widespread disgust with the FLN--the Marxist party that has controlled Algeria for thirty years despite a record of inefficiency and corruption--the Islamists mobilized the disgruntled and the zealous alike, including thousands of veiled Algerian women clad in traditional Islamic garb.

After Benjedid's resignation, a High Security Council composed of military and civilian leaders canceled the second round of elections and announced the creation of a five-man body, the High State Council, to rule the country. Described as a junta by FIS spokesmen, this ruling body was headed by a founding member of the FLN and dominated by army officials. A thoroughgoing crackdown on the FIS followed, with the arrest of hundreds of Islamists and the party's most prominent leaders. Since the government crackdown, civil war has raged between the government and tenacious radical factions such as the Armed Islamic Group, which adopted terrorist tactics (including the murder of unveiled Algerian women) in the wake of the failure of Islamic fundamentalists to gain power by legitimate means at the ballot box.

The one Sunni fundamentalist movement to have tasted significant political power, the Sudanese faction of the Muslim Brotherhood (called the National Islamic Front), hardly provided a model of Islam as a force for democratization. Its charismatic leader, the Sorbonne-educated lawyer Hassan Turabi, spoke in grandiose terms of the inevitable Islamization of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, but his considerable influence in the Sudanese government did not prevent, and may have abetted, the country's decline into a debilitating civil war waged by the government against Christian and animist rebels in the south. Marred by the excessive human rights violations committed by the regime he helped to govern, Turabi's carefully cultivated image as the enlightened spokesman for the "Islamic Awakening" failed to persuade Islamists in other countries, much less Westerners.

The reach of Sunni Islamic fundamentalism extends to South Asia. In Pakistan, established in 1947, the Jama'at-i Islami (Islamic Group) and other fundamentalist movements characterize Islam as a comprehensive way of life that covers the entire spectrum of human activity, be it individual, social, economic, or political. By contrast, the conservative religious scholars confine Islam to the observance of its five pillars (the profession of faith, prayer, fasting, alms giving, and pilgrimage).

Jama'at-i Islami seeks to acquire political power and establish an Islamic state on the prophetic model. Sayyid Abu al-Ala Mawdudi (1903-1979), the movement's founder, taught that Islam cannot be implemented without the power of the state. His commentary on the Qur'an reads like an Islamic legal-political text, providing guidance in the fields of constitutional, social, civil, criminal, commercial, and international law. By providing Islamic discourse with a political vocabulary, Mawdudi achieved a pervasive influence on contemporary Islamic fundamentalist groups. By defining the Islamic system of life, ideology, constitution, economic system, and political system, Mawdudi elaborated the total subordination of the institutions of civil society and the state to the authority of divine law.

Although Sunni Islamists are more numerous than their Shi'ite counterparts and are organized in many more countries worldwide, the most prominent and politically consequential example of Islamic fundamentalism emerged from within Shi'ite Islam, practiced by about 100 million Muslims concentrated in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, and scattered throughout several Persian Gulf states. Shi'ite Muslims have endured a long history of persecution by the majority Sunnis and by non-Muslim rulers; part of their unique belief system holds that the Great Imam, or spiritual leader, will return from self-imposed hiding to lead the Shi'ites to victory over their many enemies. When the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini (1900-1989) successfully led a Shi'ite revolution against the modernizing shah of Iran in 1979 and later established the Islamic Republic of Iran, many of his followers came to believe that Khomeini was the Hidden Imam returned, or at least his powerful precursor--an impression Khomeini did little to correct. Instead, he retrieved a little-known Shi'ite teaching and developed it into a politically useful doctrine: the Rule of the Jurist. This innovative interpretation of Shi'ite theology justified the establishment of an Iranian government run by Muslim religious scholars and presided over by the grand ayatollah, Khomeini himself.

While striving to consolidate the Islamic regime in Iran during the 1980s, the charismatic Khomeini and his authoritarian successor, Hashemi Rafsanjani, attempted to spread the Islamic revolution elsewhere, most successfully in Lebanon. In that fragmented nation, suffering the ravages of civil war, the Shi'ite guerrillas of Hezbollah (Party of God) carved out a homeland and launched suicide missions in 1983 against French and U.S. troops stationed in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah eventually exercised political and military control over the region and continues to hold sway there today.

The future of Islamic fundamentalism--and its influence on the development of political systems in Muslim-majority nations--remains a pressing question. Many of the Algerian supporters of the FIS, motivated more by a passion for Islam than for democracy, were obviously not preoccupied with working out a long-term alliance between the two. The Qur'an and the shari'a provide a sociomoral framework rather than a detailed blueprint for the political order, and allow a measure of adaptation and flexibility in state building, as the history of Islam demonstrates. The Islamic Republic of Iran, while maintaining a virulent anti-Western discourse, has nonetheless entered into economic partnership with European and American corporations and with some European governments. In Palestine, Jordan, Nigeria, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, Sunni Islamic fundamentalists have made great demands on their governments without yet developing coherent and sophisticated alternative economic and social policies; the emphasis has been on cultural and political authenticity and self-reliance.

But the quest for sovereignty and self-reliance does not rule out a gradual process of incorporation and Islamization of Western structures and mechanisms, including mass participation in democratic procedures. Indeed, this has been the pattern followed in the Islamists' appropriation of Western science and technology, a borrowing they describe as an act of "repossession" of a mode of discourse and production that originated, they claim, in the golden age of Islamic civilization.

Jewish Fundamentalism

Two messianic movements within modern Judaism approximate fundamentalist patterns of thought and political behavior. The religious Zionists known as Gush Emunim (bloc of the faithful) are found primarily in Israel, while the ultra-Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, Jews known as the haredim (those who tremble before God) live in communities in Israel, Europe, Canada, and the United States. Together these movements constitute a minority within a minority--that is, they are Jews (numbering only fifteen million worldwide) who practice their religion (80 percent of Israelis are nonobservant Jews). More than most other Orthodox Jews, the fundamentalists narrowly focus their energies on the eagerly awaited coming of the Messiah, the divinely sent king who will bring justice to earth and vanquish the enemies of the Jewish people (including a considerable number of lukewarm Jews).

These two groups take different attitudes toward the modern world in general and the Zionist state of Israel in particular. The six thousand hard-core members of Gush Emunim are religious Zionists; they believe that God inspired secular Jews like Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) to create a political movement of Jewish return to Zion, the name for the ancient Jewish homeland in Palestine. Even though the Zionist movement was not explicitly religious, the Jews of Gush Emunim believe that the Zionist political leaders were and are unwitting agents of the Messiah. For evidence of this divine plan, they point to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 against all odds, and to the astounding victory of Israel against its hostile Arab neighbors in the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel took control of the Gaza Strip and territories on the West Bank of the Jordan River (which members of Gush Emunim refer to by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria).

To advance God's plan, Gush Emunim members have pressured the Israeli government to annex the territories, which they consider to be part of "the Whole Land of Israel" promised by Yahveh to the Jewish people in the Book of Genesis. However, the Palestinian Arabs who were displaced by the creation of the modern state of Israel claim the same lands as their own home. These competing claims to the West Bank and Gaza have led to several violent confrontations and terrorist episodes between the Jewish settlers and Arab and Muslim militants. For their part, Gush Emunim, like all fundamentalists, reject the idea of religious pluralism, divide the world into realms of evil and good (they believe that all Jews embody a "sacred spark"), and selectively retrieve the most politically useful Orthodox Jewish teachings from the past. Indeed, they selected one of the 613 Jewish ethical obligations--"settle the land"--and made it paramount.

The haredim are the second candidate for inclusion in a category called Jewish fundamentalism. Many returned to Israel but not to participate in the Zionist enterprise. Indeed, haredi Jews denounce Zionism as an ill-advised effort by nonobservant Jews who seek to take God's work into their own hands. To them, it was not God but human pride that inspired Herzl and the other Zionist pioneers. Unlike the Jews of Gush Emunim, who wear jeans, work shirts, and other modern clothes, the haredim wear the long black coats and dress of the Jewish villages of early modern eastern Europe, their traditional home before the onset of the so-called Jewish Enlightenment and disasters such as the Nazi persecution and murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews (known for their strict and unyielding adherence to the imperatives of Jewish law) include Hasidic, Polish, and Galician followers of a charismatic folk Judaism based on feeling, piety, and human attachments, and the Misnagdim, Lithuanian Jews who opposed the excesses of Hasidism and maintained a rigorous attachment to the letter of Jewish rabbinic law.

The haredim live uneasily, as exiles, wherever they are found--including in Zion (Israel), their religious and spiritual homeland. The various eastern European sects live crowded together in enclaves such as Jerusalem's Mea Shearim neighborhood, where the men spend years in yeshivas (religious schools) studying the Torah (the law, contained in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and shun the outside world, refusing to join the Israeli army or interact socially with other Israelis. (By contrast, members of Gush Emunim, some of whom studied in the same yeshivas as the haredim, have served in the Israeli army.) Haredi Jews are selectively modern, however; in New York City, for example, they own a photo shop where one can purchase the latest computer and communications technology.

The haredi political parties, such as Agudat Israel (Party of Israel) and Neturei Karta (Guardians of the Gate), were formed primarily to settle disputes within the haredi community itself. But in the 1980s and 1990s they were drawn into the larger world of Israeli politics, where they exercised influence disproportionate to their tiny numbers, often providing the votes needed to bring a larger political coalition to power. They sought to retain their privileges in the Israeli system and to promote the passage of laws to enforce the keeping of the Sabbath and other Orthodox Jewish norms.

Pluralism and Antipluralism

Fundamentalism today is one of several political forces vying for supremacy in the post-cold war world. In most cases fundamentalists represent the noncompromising, antipluralist elements in a conflict. In Israel, for example, both the radical Jewish settlers of Gush Emunim and the Sunni activists of Hamas (Islamic Zeal) violently opposed the peace process pursued by the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Throughout the Islamic world, radical fundamentalists are a destabilizing minority dedicated to the overthrow, by any means, of Western-supported governments. But in the United States, with its strong traditions of pluralism and democracy, Christian fundamentalists "play by the rules" and generally eschew violence. Their hope is to transform American society gradually into a Bible-believing republic, as they believe it once was. Fundamentalism, in other words, may exist in democratic as well as undemocratic societies, but it stands a much greater chance of dominating its enemies in states where pluralism and human rights do not enjoy strong protection under the law.

See also Banna, Hasan al-; Conservatism; Evangelicalism; Gush Emunim; Herzl, Theodor; Hinduism; Islam; Judiasm; Khomeini, Ruholla Musavi; Mawdudi, Sayyid Abu al-Ala; Millennialism; Qutb, Sayyid; Zionism.

Author: R. Scott Appleby

Bibliography

Appleby, R. Scott. "Religious Fundamentalisms and Global Conflict." Foreign Policy Association Headline Series booklet, 1994.
Heilman, Samuel. Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry. New York: Schocken Books, 1992.
Kepel, Gilles. The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991.
Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby, eds. Fundamentalisms Observed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Fundamentalisms Comprehended. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.