Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

<div><b>Gabriel A. Almond</b> is a professor emeritus of political science at Stanford University and the author of numerous works, including <i>Progress and Its Discontents</i>. <br><br><b>R. Scott Appleby</b> is a professor of history and the John M. Regan, Jr., director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of, among other books, <i>Religious Fundamentalisms and Global Conflict</i>. <br><br><b>Emmanuel Sivan</b> is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of a number of books, including <i>Interpretations of Islam and Radical Islam</i>.</div>

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After the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, religious fundamentalism has dominated public debate as never before. Policymakers, educators, and the general public all want to know: Why do fundamentalist movements turn violent? Are fundamentalisms a global threat to human rights, security, and democratic forms of government? What is the future of fundamentalism?

To answer questions like these, Strong Religion draws on the results of the Fundamentalism Project, a decade-long interdisciplinary study of antimodernist, antisecular militant religious movements on five continents and within seven world religious traditions. The authors of this study analyze the various social structures, cultural contexts, and political environments in which fundamentalist movements have emerged around the world, from the Islamic Hamas and Hizbullah to the Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries of Northern Ireland, and from the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition of the United States to the Sikh radicals and Hindu nationalists of India. Offering a vividly detailed portrait of the cultures that nourish such movements, Strong Religion opens a much-needed window onto different modes of fundamentalism and identifies the kind of historical events that can trigger them.

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STRONG RELIGION

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................ixIntroduction..........................................................................................1CHAPTER 1 The Enclave Culture........................................................................23CHAPTER 2 Fundamentalism: Genus and Species..........................................................90CHAPTER 3 Explaining Fundamentalisms: Structure, Chance, and Choice..................................116CHAPTER 4 Wrestling with the World: Fundamentalist Movements as Emergent Systems.....................145CHAPTER 5 Testing the Model: Politics, Ethnicity, and Fundamentalist Strategies......................191CHAPTER 6 The Prospects of Fundamentalism............................................................220Appendix to Chapter 2.................................................................................245Appendix to Chapter 3.................................................................................249Appendix to Chapter 4.................................................................................253Notes.................................................................................................255Index.................................................................................................273

Chapter One

[T]his is an age of demons and amoral angels and all sorts of deep fears. Like the first centuries of the Christian era, it's an age of extreme solutions.

Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

In Exile

Just after World War I, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, formerly a Jewish secularist thinker (Zionist, then cultural autonomist) who had recently returned to the faith, took stock of the state of Judaism. It was almost a century after the early proponents of ultra-Orthodoxy such as the Hatam Sofer (d. 1839) had been alarmed to discover an "unheard of phenomenon: the father being still God-fearing and knowledgeable in the Talmud while the son desecrates the Sabbath." Birnbaum assessed the impact of fourteen decades of Jewish Enlightenment and produced a gloomy diagnosis: most Western European Jews have ceased altogether to be mitzvot (precepts) observant and are indifferent to divine Providence; the mass immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States brings hundreds of thousands to a land of greed and licentiousness; and they are bound to lose their religion in this treifene medina (defiled country), as it was commonly dubbed by Orthodox rabbis. In Eastern Europe, Birnbaum thought, most Jews still observed the Halakah in both ritual and social relations, but there was no mistaking the fact that the curve was on the decline and defections from the faith were on the upswing. The observant, or haredim, live "in exile among Jews" (in Galus bei Yidn), that is, among nominal Jews, Jews by birth only. Even this diagnosis may have been too sanguine. The great Halakhic authorities of the day-the Hafetz Haim (Rabbi I. M. HaCohen), and Rabbi E. Wasserman-expressed grave doubts as to the quality of observance and belief among Eastern Europe's Jewish plain folk. In the post-World War II era, with these masses having been annihilated in the Holocaust, Birnbaum's diagnostic formula seemed to haredi activists more poignant than ever. As Rabbi E. Dessler, who had escaped to England (and then to Israel), put it in an incisive pun, virtually all Jews replace the injunction "thou should be qdoshim [sacred]" with a newly concocted one, "thou should be qaddishniks," thus reducing their Judaism to the act of saying the prayer for the dead (qaddish) on the memorial days of deceased family members. Small wonder that "in exile among Jews" is indeed one of the most common terms the haredim use, in sermons as much as in informal conversation, in order to denote their sense of being a tiny minority, marginal and alienated.

In the fall of 1990 an ultra-Orthodox weekly, Ha-Mahane ha-Haredi, was sentenced by an Israeli court to pay heavy punitive damages for calling a left-wing member of Knesset, a long-time critic of the haredim, a Nazi. The haredi press saw this libel verdict as further proof that "we live in exile among Jews," and, irony of ironies, in the Holy Land. The demographic growth of the ultra-Orthodox community and of its political clout in the 1980s and 1990s barely mitigated the gloomy, defensive gloss they tended to put on reality.

At about the same time that Birnbaum coined this term, Rashid Rida, a Syrian-born thinker living in Cairo, pondered the question, "How fares Islam?" He found most so-called believers to be mere "geographical Muslims" (muslimun jughrafiyun), people who belong to the faith merely by virtue of living in an Islamic land and performing certain rituals. Their belief is tepid, and worse still, they acquiesce to the European-inspired laws introduced by their ostensibly Muslim rulers who "forsake what was enjoined upon the believers by Allah.... They abolish allegedly distasteful penalties such as cutting off the hands of thieves or stoning adulterers and prostitutes. They replace them by man-made laws and penalties."

Terms like the "eclipse of Islam" were already frequent in Rida's day and age, especially after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the caliphate (1924), and the imposition of atheistic Communist rule upon Muslim Central Asia. Coining a powerful metaphor to depict this decline was a task left to an Indian Muslim, Maulana Maududi, in the late 1930s, and to an Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, a decade or so later. They saw a relapse of Islam to a state of jahiliyya, that is, to that of pre-Islamic pagan Arabia. Mid-twentieth-century Muslims, like their ancestors thirteen centuries earlier, were a tiny and harassed minority, surrounded by idolaters and the groupies of modernity cults as well as by nominal and hypocritical "believers."

Jahiliyya was an emotion-laden metaphor, redolent of historical connotations. The present-day idols-such as nationalism-were Western-imported but rendered all the more insidious for being cloaked in indigenous garb. In the 1980s another metaphor emerged: "Islam is in exile [ghurba] in its own lands," much like it was in Arabia when Muhammad had to flee pagan and hostile Mecca for Medina. As the Hadith has it, "Islam began in exile and will return in exile in the [end of history]. Blessed are the exiled."

Idols more openly inspired by European culture also made blatant inroads. By the late 1950s the Iraqi mullah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr would voice grave concern over the lure that communism and the Ba'th Party held for youth, including Shi'ite madrasa students. Such jeremiads would soon be echoed in Morocco and Egypt and were no different in a way than those of al-Sadr's Roman Catholic contemporary, Luigi Giussani, also a theology professor. Giussani, the future founder of the Italian Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione, worried that the nominally Catholic students in Italian high schools and universities were signs of the ultimate victory of the Enlightenment in an increasingly de-Christianized and individualistic Italian society in...