Islamic Fundamentalism

Religious and political movement that urges Islamic societies to return to a literal interpretation of the Koran and to conduct their political and legal affairs in accordance with the prescriptions of Islam's holy book. Islamic fundamentalism stresses the duty of every Muslim to follow all Koranic tenets in their everyday lives.

[Page 385]The Islamic fundamentalist movement is based on the assumption that there is only one legitimate interpretation of the verses in the Koran. The movement posits that any critic of the fundamentalist interpretation, regardless of his or her specific beliefs, is considered, at the very least, severely misguided and, at the most, a dangerous heretic. From a political standpoint, Islamic fundamentalism seeks to replace secular regimes (often accused of having succumbed to Western influence) with governments that pass only laws that are in conformity with specific Islamic jurisprudence texts.

The Basics of Fundamentalism

Islamic fundamentalism is not a unitary movement, either from the religious or from the political point of view. Indeed, fundamentalist groups often disagree with each other on the correct interpretation of the Islamic texts, as well as on the desired course of political action. They do tend to agree, however, on several basic tenets.

First, according to the fundamentalist doctrine, the Muslim world is currently in a state of moral decay brought about by ignorance and corruption. It is believed that the source of much of this evil is Western civilization, which has enslaved Islam for centuries and has no intention of releasing Muslims from its grip. Believers thus have a duty to resist Western influences (not necessarily through violent means) and take steps to build a society that conforms to the teachings of the Koran.

The fundamentalist movement does not call for a return to preindustrial times. It is not technological progress that the movements finds so corrupting about the Western world, but rather the moral relativism and lack of piety that seem to characterize many Western societies.

Historical Beginnings

Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity, to the Enlightenment-driven, European secularizing influence on traditional Muslim societies. As such, it is, paradoxically enough, a consequence of modernity and not a movement with very deep historical roots. For the approximately three centuries of its existence, the Islamic fundamentalist program has undergone a series of transformations.

Given the ambiguousness of the term fundamentalism, one would be hard-pressed to identify the exact origin of the Islamic fundamentalist religious and political movement. One could easily, however, recognize that several historical Islamic figures had a tremendous influence on the shaping of contemporary Islamic fundamentalist thought. One of the most important of those figures was Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who led a religious and political movement in mid-18th-century Arabia aimed at purifying Islam of superstitions, idolatries, and other kinds of deviances. Currently, the Wahhabist interpretation of Islam is the official (and unique) religious ideology of Saudi Arabia.

The Brotherhood and the Ayatollah

The first major Islamic fundamentalist movement was the Society of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the late 1920s by Hassan al-Banna. The brotherhood sought to help Muslims break free of the corrupting influence of Western secularism.

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