Text 2 Fundamentalism unlimited

Are the world's religious activists bound bу а single thread?

The label is unsatisfactory but the phenomenon exists, stretching from Egyp­tians demanding jihad through Japanese New Religions to American evangelicals. Journalists seized on the word, academics until recently despised it as misleading and loaded with negative connotations.

But the alternative labels are по less bad; not all "fundamentalist" movements are militant, all of them are too radical to be called conserva­tive. Now, after а five-year programme sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the word as well as the concept is begin­ning to mean something.

The Fundamentalism Project, based at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, brought together academics from all over the world. Despite the diversity of disciplines and views, а consensus on what fun­damentalist movements are, why they have sprung up with such force at the end of the 20^th century, and what they hope to achieve, has begun to emerge in six massive vol­umes, three of which are now in print.

Fundamentalists are ambitious: most of the movements studied by the project aim either for political power or to change society in some radical respect. All of them, accord­ing to Professor Martin Marty, the project's architect, "draw on the full resources of an established tradi­tion." This definition excludes cult­ists, such as David Koresh of the siege in Waco, Texas. Also excluded are separatist groups, such as the Amish, who simply want to keep the outside world at bay in order to preserve а tradi­tional or "pure" way of life.

Fundamentalists may have started as traditionalists but have been forced, by events or history or the world at large, into activism. All see themselves as "fighting back", using violence if necessary, against the forces of secularism or modernism. 1n so doing they adopt modern weapons-from guns to computers, telephones and televi­sion-while using traditional symbols, typically holy books, to rally support.

Unlike traditionalists, fundamentalists engage in а "selective retrieval" of the past. Muslim fundamentalists adopt male-fe­male segregation as their shibboleth. Yet the religious dress worn by fundamentalist women in Egypt is not traditional, while genuine features of pre-modern Islam-for example, the ban on representations of humans and animals-are ignored.

Foremost among fundamentalist as­pirations is а "return" to "family values", with women as mothers and housewives and теп as the principal or only bread­winners. Rhetorically, if not always practically, all fundamentalists are anti-femi­nists-although in some fundamentalist groups and churches, women play а more active part than they do in traditional reli­gions, and теп are encouraged to take par­enthood seriously.

The Chicago analysts distinguish between fundamentalists in the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Is­lam-and "fundamentalist-like" move­ments in other traditions. Those which ас­knowledge an all-powerful, transcendent deity who reveals himself through а sacred book have themes, like moral abso­lutism and textual inerrancy, built into them. Sikhism also has а sacred book. But Hinduism, Buddhism and East Asian traditions such as Shinto and Confucianism do not have а single transcendent God and have not made their texts into cultural icons.

Nevertheless, the Chicago academics note "family resemblance" between the Abrahamic funda­mentalisms and East Asian phenomena such as the Japanese New Religions and the Confucian reviv­alist movements in Taiwan. 1n the case of Hindu fundamentalism, the extremists in the Bharatiya Janata Party, who were responsible for de­stroying the mosque at Ayodhya last December[1], are less interested in reli­gion itself than in exploiting reli­gious symbols for political purposes. A similar fundamentalist-like militancy has appeared among Sri Lankan Buddhists who see them­selves as guardians of the national identity. Hindu and Buddhist fun­damentalist-like movements inevitably define the Muslims or Tamils whom they exclude as the hated "other"-with disastrous conse­quences for South Asia's delicate communal balance.

Experts disagree on how govern­ments should respond to the religious upsurge. Some insist that repression works, cit­ing the "decisive" action that Syria's President Hafez Assad took against the Muslim Brotherhood in the mass slaughter at Hama in 1982. Others argue that mili­tants thrive on martyrdom and that the best way to deal with them is to co-opt, or allow, them into power. The occasional pragma­tism of the current regime in Iran is quoted as proof that the responsibilities of government curb Utopian fantasies.

There is more agreement on the causes of the new religious activism. These include the collapse of Marxism, the failure of na­tionalist governments to honour promises made after independence, and the emer­gence of а world market, which has led to traditional hierarchies being replaced by "insiders" who do well and "outsiders" who do not. Fundamentalist ideologies appeal to "outsiders", since most draw on tra­ditions that stress social justice and the re­distribution of wealth.

An important exception mау be sub-Sa­haran Africa, where American fundament­alist churches are making inroads by buying television airtime. The message put out by such evangelists as Jimmу Swaggart and Pat Robertson comforts some regimes. Don't blame incompetence or corruption for the ills of society, says the message, blame Sa­tan. But as Iran's revolution demonstrated, belief in the devil can be а formidable political weapon when а religious leader per­suades the masses to identify а particular government, and the foreign power that backs it, as Satan. Religions have а way of getting to parts of the human psyche that secular ideologies no longer reach.