It was widely assumed that politics was breaking away from religion and that as societies became more industrialized religious belief and practice would be restricted to private thoughts and activities. The decline in the social and political importance of religion in the West was grounded in the social scientific traditions flowing from the commanding figures and the religious sociology of for example Emil Durkheim Durkheim and Max Weber, who insisted in different ways that secularization was integral to modernization.

The processes of modern industrialism which Weber saw as being characterized by depersonalized functional relationships and increasing bureaucratization were leading, if not to the final 'death of God', at the least to the 'disenchantment of the world'. The numinous forces that had underpinned the medieval cosmos would be psychologized, subjectivized, and demythologized. on the face of it, the 1979 revolution in Iran seriously dented conventional wisdom. Here was a revolt deploying a repertoire of religious symbols that brought down a modernizing government and placed political power in the hands of a religious establishment steeped in medieval theology and jurisprudence. Moreover this was clearly an urban, not a rural, phenomenon-a response, perhaps, to 'over-rapid' or'uneven' development, but not in any sense a movement such as the counter-revolutionary movements in the Vende or the peasant jacqueries that challenged the secular project of the French Revolution.

Some commentators even argued that the mix of politics an religion that came huition in Iran was peculiarly Islamic, or even uniquely Shitii Islam, it was said, unlike Christianity, had a built-in political agenda: the Prophet Muhammad had combined the role of revelator with that of state-builder, and that all who sought to follow his path must sooner or later be drawn into the political game. Shiism was a counter-cultural variation on this theme. Originally a protest movement against the worldly Umayyads who took over Muhammad's empire, it developed into a tradition of radical dissent, one that oscillated over the centuries between quietism and activism, withdrawal and revolt. The Khomeinist revolution-like the rise of the Shii Hezbollah in Lebanon-represented the swing of the Shii pendulum towards activism, after decades of sullen acquiescence in 'unrighteous' government.

By the early 1980’s, however, it was becoming clear that religious activism was very far from being confined to the Islamic world and that newly politicized movements were occurring in virtually every major religious tradition. In America the New Christian Right (NCR) challenged and temporarily checked the boundaries of church-state separation that had steadily been moving in a secular direction. Commenting on the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist churches in America at the expense of the liberal 'mainstream', Peter Berger, doyen of Weberian sociologists, was forced to admit that 'serious intellectual difficulties' had been created 'for those who thought them.

But the compliment post-modernism payd to religion is back-handed and treacherous. By proclaiming the end of positivism and the ideology of progress, which was supposed to have replaced or overtaken religion, postmodernism opens up public space for religion-but at the price of relativizing its claims to absolute truth. By saying, in effect, 'Your story is as good as mine, or his, or hers', post-modernism allows religious voices to have their say while denying their right to silence others, as religions have tended to do throughout history. For the true fundamentalist, the 'post-' prefixed to modernism is a catch, perhaps even a fraud, because modernity, in Anthony Gidden's formulation, is founded on the 'institutionalisation of doubt'. Far from 'de-institutionalizing' doubt, however, the pluralism implicit in a post-modernist outlook sanctifies it by opening the doors of choice, which is the enemy of certainty.

Like religious communities, the nations are collectivities that transcend the sum of their individual parts; like religious communities nations bear witness to the idea that human blood must be shed in their defence: the war memorials, cenotaphs, and Tombs to the Unknown Warrior that grace our cities attest to transcendental demands the nation makes of its citizens. Such demands, as I pointed pointed out in my 1999 seminar on related subjects (see further down this website), are made on the basis of faith rather than empirical evidence. For nationalists, the nation, whatever the acts committed in its name, is essentially and ultimately good, as the future will reveal; the conviction of its virtue is not a matter of empirical evidence, but of faith.

However heologically, fundamentalists must reject choice because they know there is only one truth that has been revealed to them by the 'supraempirical spiritual entity' most of them call God. But the contemporary situation under which this deity (or in some cases deities) makes demands on them are utterly different from those that prevailed in pre-modern times when most people were exposed to a single religious tradition within a cultural milieu largely formed by that tradition.

The situation facing Muslims living in the West illustrates dilemmas that can be applied, with suitable modifications, to be lievers in other faith traditions who may feel ghettoized, or to those living as minorities in a globalized, predominantly secular culture conditioned by technologies originating in the post-Enlightenment West. Islamic websites such as www.islam-qa.com, in which sheikhs based in Saudi Arabia advise young Muslim females living in America to submit to abusive parents or (implicitly) to avoid calling in the 'unbelieving' authorities even when raped by their fathers, are operating within a wholly different context from the 'traditional' milieu where Islam was dominant, where the Islamic judges would have had knowledge of the individuals concerned in particular cases. in the old city of Fez in Morocco the law books which guided the scholars were supplemented by their personal and community knowledge. Far from being the agents of 'blind justice', the Islamic judge was expected to have 'knowledge of men' (ilm al-rijal). Similarly, the formalistic 'do's and don'ts' of Islam as contained in a popular compendium published by the fundamentalist Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi reveals the skeleton of Islarnically correct behaviour without showing the flesh-and-blood context in which the Islamic system of values used to operate. In a pluralistic world where Muslims are obliged to live cheek-by-jowel with non-Muslim neighbours, where almost everyone has access to televised images of what used to be called the domain of war or unbelief (dar al-harb or dar al-kuft), the modalities of everyday living acquire a significance they did not have before.

Under modern conditions an open question-what is the proper way to behave, is replaced by a much narrower one: how should Muslims (or followers of other faith traditions) behave under modern conditions, the implication being that for Muslims nowadays the whole world has become dar al-harb because even in Muslim majority areas ways of living differently from the 'straight path' prescribed by Islam are ever-present alternatives. In precolonial times, during the era of what might be called the classical Islamic hegemony, the possibility of alternative non-Islamic lifestyles simply did not arise for the majority of people. Where pork is not available, no one has to make a decision about whether to eat hot-dogs.

Where wine was the preserve of a privileged elite who drank it in the privacy of their palaces, the permissibility of alcohol consumption was not a burning social question. In a 'homosocial' society where women were strictly segregated, lesbian and gay relationships (though formally prohibited) were rarely seen as threatening to the social order. Under pressures from outside forces all these issues, especially those involving sexual appearance and behaviour, have acquired iconic significance as marking boundaries between the insiders and outsiders, the community of salvation and the 'unsaved' people who live beyond its boundaries. Thus in an archetypically Western milieu such as the American high school, Muslim identity defaults to gender segregation, with veiled Muslim coeds holding all-female 'proms' in order to avoid breaking the taboo on sexual mixing. Their evangelical Christian counterparts hold assemblies of 'promise-keepers', who proclaim their commitment to chastity before marriage and fidelity afterwards. In a pluralistic environment such as America, all religious groups will use behavioural restrictions as a way of marking the boundaries between believers and nonbelievers, between 'us' (the saved) and'them' (the damned). Mormons abstain from tea and coffee as well as alcoholso they are distinguishable from orthodox evangelicals who are mostly teetotal. Jehova's Witnesses avoid blood transfusions (and military service), Christian Scientists avoid conventional medicine (because Christ is the only Healer), and some Hasidic Jews (like some ultra-orthodox Muslims) exhibit behaviour bordering on incivility by refusing to shake hands with non-believers.

Such behaviour is often described by those whom it is designed to exclude as 'fundamentalist'. One of the 'family resemblances' exb ibited by movements in this book is the concern or even obsession with the drawing of boundaries that will set the group apart from the wider society by deliberately choosing beliefs or modes of behaviour which proclaim who they are and how they would like to be seen.

In this respect fundamentalisms are distinctly modern phenomena: like the New Religious Movements that have sprouted in some of the post industrialized parts of the world (notably South-East Asia and North America) they feed on contemporary alienation or anomie by offering solutions to contemporary dilemmas, buttressing the loss of identities sustained by many people (especially young people today) at times of rapid social change, high social and geographic mobility, and other stress-inducing factors. As two well-known American observers put it: 'Fundamentalism is a truly modern phenomenon-modern in the sense that the movement is always seeking original solutions to new, pressing problems. Leaders are not merely Constructing more rigid orthodoxies in the name of defending old mythical orthodoxies. In the process of undertaking "restoration" within contemporary demographic/technological centers, new social orders are actually being promulgated.’

The born-again Christian finds comfort and support, not just by internalizing the iconic figure of Jesus as a personal super-ego, but also by accessing the support of fellow believers. Islamist organizations such as Hamas are not just involved in armed resistance to the Israeli occupation of their land but dispose of a considerable range of welfare activities. As well as being places of worship, churches, mosques, and synagogues are the focus of social networks. The intensive religiosity exhibited by fundamentalists in all traditions may strengthen the support and increase the social opportunities the individual receives from such networks, though there are perils here as well: in the absence of disciplined hierarchies disputes about the interpretation of texts makes fundamentalists vulnerable to the splits that afflict many radical movements.

Nationalist rhetoric everywhere is suffused with religious symbolism and purpose. To give but one example, let me cite some extracts from the address by the Irish patriot Padraic Pearse, architect of the 1916 rebellion against Britain, at the graveside of an earlier nationalist, the Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa in August 1915: Pearse declares that he is speaking 'on behalf of a new generation that has been re-baptised in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme'. He goes on to propose 'that, here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows ... We stand at Rossa's grave not in sadness but rather in exaltation of spirit that it has been given to us to come thus into so close a communion with that brave and splendid Gael. Splendid and holy causes are served by men who are themselves splendid and holy.'The language is the language of religion ('baptism', 'exaltation', 'communion', 'holy', 'spirit'), not the empirical language of politics.

For example the biblical story of Exodus exercised a powerful influence on the construction of American identities, from the Pilgrim Fathers to the New Zions (Nauvoo, Illinois, and Salt Lake City, Utah) founded by the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith and his successor Brigham Young ('The American Moses') in The Israeli example is instructive. As members of a First World, industrial society accustomed to Western lifestyles with swimming pools, flush-toilets, and other modem conveniences, the Israeli settlers are greedy for water, a scarce resource in Palestine.

According to recent accounts, Israeli settlers are now using 80 per cent of the water available to farmers in Palestine. When religious language is used, the illegal and disproportionate use of water is translated into a God-given grant of land and water-rights to Abraham. In the biblical rhetoric of the settlers, the Jews are God's special people; the Arab Palestinians are identified with the Amalekites, a Caananite tribe whom the ancient Hebrews were commanded to annihilate totally, with their women, children, and flocks. Where good and evil, God and the Devil, are ranged in opposite camps, who would deliberately choose the latter? Far from being its ideological competitor, the religious 'fundamentalism' in Israel-Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and many other of the world's most troubled regions is best understood as an intensification or deepening of nationalism by way of religion's mobilizing potential.

South Asian religious fundamentalisms provide a good illustration of this argument. If one looks at fundamentalism in terms of its primary Protestant meaning as defending the 'fundamentals' or orthodoxy of a religious tradition, there is a case for saying that the T-word' should not be applied to movements such as the RSS in India and its political offshoots, the BJP currently leading the governing coalition in Delhi, the VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad, 'World Hindu Society'), the Sikh Akali Dal Party in the Punjab, and the Sinhalese nationalist party ruling in mainly Buddhist Sri Lanka.

The sociologist Steve Bruce produces three arguments for excluding these South Asian movements from his definition of fundamentalism. First, he says, with reference to the B J P and VH P, they have been 'provoked more by the threat of Islam than by a decline in religious observance by Hindus'. Second, they are directed more towards expelling or subordinating 'foreigners' (as they see most Muslims) than to revitalizing and purifying the Hindu faithful: 'there is no decline in orthodoxy to redress, because there is no orthodoxy.' Third, they are only tangentially a reaction to secularization. For these and other reasons Bruce concludes that 'the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam offer much more fertile soil for fundamentalism than Hinduism and Buddhism.

On the face of it the three Abrahamic monotheisms might seem more susceptible to political exploitation of the kind we have been describing than Hindu polytheism or Buddhism, because of the absence in these traditions of an orthodoxy based on a single scriptural tradition. As Bruce argues, 'Hinduism might be better described not as a religion but as a loose collection of religions-that ofthe Shaivites, the Vaishnavas, the Shaktas, the Smartas and others-that share some common themes but that tolerate a huge variety of expressions of those themes.

Unlike the Abrahamic traditions, each of which has a canonical scripture that can function as a rallying point for defence, the Hindu tradition contains such an abundance of scriptures, laws, and philosophies that 'it becomes very difficult to single out any one specific item' as being basic or'fundamental'.

Despite this important difference, however, there are compelling parallels that Bruce overlooks. Like its Islamic counterpart, Hindu revivalism with its nationalist or fundamentalist offshoots is rooted in a reformist religious tradition more than a century old.

The original movement was not in the first instance anti-Muslim but anti-colonial, stimulated by the British administration's pigeonholing of India's religious communities into identifiable and hence manageable groups according to the principle of 'divide and rule'. From the 1871 census the British defined their Indian subjects according to religion. With the introduction of democratic institutions at local level, starting in igog, religious groupings were organized into separate electorates, with a number of constituencies reserved for Muslims in each province, and similar arrangements for Christians in Madras and Sikhs in the Punjab. For the educated Hindu elite the need to cultivate their own constituencies meant 'delineating a broad-based communal identity'beyond the old caste system. The creation of a new 'Hindu' identity inevitably generated reciprocal responses amongst Muslims and Sikhs (as well as from the smaller Jain and Parsee communities whose separate identities were acknowledged), with all of the three main groups competing against each other for a 'privileged position in colonial society’.

The reformist movements within 'Hinduism' (a term invented by Europeans) bear some 'family resemblances' to the Islamic salafi movement that originated in colonial Egypt towards the end of the nineteenth century. Swami Dayananda Sarasvati (1824-83), founder of Arya Samajthe Society of Aryas-is one of the spiritual and intellectual progenitors of the RSS and its offshoot the BJP. In some respects he resembles Afghani in his rejection of tradition and the search he undertook for a modernized, more rational religion that would regenerate his society. A Brahman from a well-to-do Shaivite family in Gujarat, he was profoundly affected, aged 14, by watching a mouse consume (and pollute) offerings of food made to the statue of Shiva during an all-night vigil when other members of his family had dozed off According to his autobiography Dayananda felt it impossible 'to reconcile the idea of an omnipotent, living god with this idol which allows the mice to run over his body and thus suffers his image to be polluted without the slightest protest'. After wandering around India for thirteen years as a holy man (a conventional apprenticeship for an aspiring guru) Dayananda found a teacher who persuaded him to preach his reformist doctrines in Hindi (the popular vernacular) rather than in learned Sanskrit.

Some of Dayananda's ideas reveal an affinity with the 'fundamentalisms' to be found in the Abrahamic traditions. He believed that the Indian scriptures-the Vedaswere the highest revelations ever vouchsafed to humanity, and contained all knowledge, scientific as well as spiritual. 'All the knowledge that is extant in the world' he would claim 'originated in Aryavarta'-the Land of Arya, his name for ancient India, a mythical realm whose kings ruled over all the earth and taught wisdom to all their peoples. Through their vast knowledge the ancient Indians were able to produce the weapons of war described in the great epics such as the Mahabharata. 'Since the knowledge of the Vedas is of general applicability, all references to kings and battles are in fact political or military directives. ' The sentiment is identical to that of the Islamists who recall the age of the 'Rightly Guided Caliphs' as an era of justice and prosperity (although in actual fact, three of the first four caliphs were brutally murdered). His point about military directives is strikingly similar to an argument employed by the Islamist writer Sayyid Qutb in Milestones, the tract he wrote while in prison in Egypt before his execution in 1966. Muhammad's Companions, according to Qutb, used the Koran not just for aesthetic or even moral guidance, but as a manual for action 'as a soldier on the battlefield' reads his daily bulletin .

Dayananda's ideas first took root among Hindus in the Punjab, which has large Muslim and Sikh populations, and it was Punjabi leaders of the Arya Samaj who founded the Punjab Hindu Provincial Sabha (council), the first politically oriented Hindu group, in igog. By 1921 it had become the All-India Hindu Mahasabha (great council), gone of the best-known institutions of Hindu reaction' . The council actively fostered the growth of the RS S, Now a highly professional organization with 25,000 branches throughout the country, the RS S has lent its organizational skills to two political parties, the Jana Sangh and its de facto successor, the BJP. Both L. K. Advani, president of the BJP, and the Indian Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee started their careers as RSS organizers.

The parallels with the Muslim Brotherhood founded in British-dominated Egypt in 1928, just three years after the RSS, are compelling. Both movements adopted something of the style of their colonial masters: the Muslim Brotherhood had affinities with the Boy Scout Movement and Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) organizations that stressed the importance of physical activity, with paramilitary overtones. The khaki shorts worn by RSS volunteers during their drills were modelled on the uniform of the British Indian police. Both organizations discouraged democratic dissent under an authoritarian style of leadership. Both organizations encouraged male bonding by excluding women (though both allowed the creation of smaller all-female organizations). Both opposed the mixing of sexes within the organization as contrary to religious norms.

Like the Muslim Brothers, members of the RSS are organized into groups that transcend or substitute for family ties. Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, grouped his followers into 'families and battalions'; young Palestinians who today volunteer for suicide missions are organized into 'friendship packs' who may act as family substitutes, while holding them to their decision. The organizers of the RSS model themselves on Hindu renunciates. 'Dedicated to a higher goal [they] are supposed to abandon family ties and material wealth.' Like the Palestinian and Lebanese volunteers belonging to the Shia Hezbollah, they are generally young, unmarried men in their twenties. They wear Indian-style dress and are expected to lead an exemplary, ascetic existence, although some may marry and have families after a period of service. Organizers serve without salary, but their material needs are taken care of Some volunteers are provided with motor scooters for getting around town. Both the Brotherhood and the RSS consciously blend elements of modernity with aspects of tradition. Al-Banna sought to infuse his organization with some of the spiritual values of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) without its devotional excesses. As leader he called himself the murshid, or guide, a title usually reserved for the leaders of Sufi orders; his favourite reading, al-Ghazali's Revitalization of the religious sciences, is strongly informed by Sufi mysticism. In a similar manner the RSS leaders blended the prestige of secular learning with spiritual knowledge. The founder K. B. Hedgewarwho ranthe organization from 1925 to 1940 was known to his followers by the honorific Doctoji. His successor, M. S. Golwalkar (1940-73), was called Guruji. Both the Muslim Brotherhood and the RSS blended indigenous ideas of spiritual leadership with organizational techniques borrowed from Western bureaucracy.

The Hindu movement's leading intellectual was V. D. Savarkar (1883-1966), who held the presidency of the Hindu Mahasabha from 1937 to 1942. Like Sayyid Qutb he wrote his most influential work, Hindutva, 'Hindu-ness', in prison, where he spent many years after his detention by the British in 1910. Hindutva is a manifesto for religious nationalism. As Daniel Gold explains, Savarkar's 'idea of Hindu Nation stands in contrast to the idea of a composite, territorially defined political entity that developed among the secular nationalists and would be enshrined in the Indian constitution. The modern western idea of nation, according to Savarkar, does not do justice to the ancient glory of the Hindu people, the indigenous and numerically dominant population of the subcontinent. The people whose culture grew up and developed in greater Indiafrom the Himalayas to the southern seas, by some accounts from Iran to Singapore-this, for Savarkar was the Hindu Nation. The subcontinent is their motherland, and Hinduness is the quality of their national culture. ' Hindutva is not the same as Hindu religious orthodoxy because, according to Savarkar, its spirit is manifest in other South Asian religions, including Jainism, Sikhism, and Indian Buddhism. Muslims and Christians, by con trast, are seen as foreign elements in the subcontinent, which rightly belongs to Hindus. 'Hindus should actively reject any alien dominance: they have done so in the past and should renew their struggle valiantly whenever necessary.' For Savarkar India is both 'Fatherland' and 'Holyland': as Gold points out, this definition deliberately excludes Muslims and Christians for whom India is not a holy land. 'From the viewpoint of Hindu cultural nationalism, Savarkar's formulation effectively isolates the perceived other.

Golwalkar, like his Indian contemporary, the Islamist ideologue Mawdudi, expressed his admiration for the Nazis in Germany, who held similar ideas about national purity. 'Germany has shocked the world by purging the country of the sernitic races-the Jews,' he wrote in 1939 before the full horror of Nazi atrocities had taken place. 'Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races [sic] and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.'

As suggested by me (see also my earlier seminar transcript of ‘Reformed Aryans, in East and West, P.1’ next on this website), there is a 'fundamentalistic' element in Dayananda's elevation of the Vedas to the surnmum of human knowledge along with his myth of the golden age of Aryavartic kings. But the predominant tone, and its consequences, are nationalist. Hindutva secularizes Hinduism by sacralizing the nation, bringing the cosmic whole within the realm of human organization. As Gold astutely observes, 'If personal religion entails among other things the identification of the individual with some larger whole, then the Hindu Nation may appear as a whole more immediately visible and attainable than the ritual cosmos of traditional Hinduisrn.' The problem, of course, is that such a sacralization of nationality is explicitly antipluralistic. Both Arya Samaj and the RSS define their religion in contradistinction to other groups. The 'Hinduization` of Indian nationalism generated a reciprocal response among Muslims that led to the traumatic partition of the subcontinent in 1947, with many thousands killed or maimed in communal rioting. The shock of the sainted Mahatma Gandhi's assassination by an RSS member in January 1948 allowed Nehru to ban the RSS and its affiliates, enabling Congress to foist upon India a secular Constitution that lies 'squarely in the best Western tradition'. As Sunil Khilnani observes, 'Constitutional democracy based on universal suffrage did not emerge from popular pressures for it within Indian society, it was not wrested by the people from the state; it was given to them by the political choice of an intellectual elite.'

The sacralization of Indian identity would remain a potent, corrosive force in the body politic, a sleeping giant that could all too easily be woken by politicians willing to play the communal card. job reservations or affirmative action programmes aimed at protecting 'scheduled castes' (the former Untouchables), could be presented as clashing with the rights or aspirations of the majority. In the words British, who in recognition of their help against the great rebellion or'Mutiny'of 1857 recruited Sikhs into the army, allowing them to keep their long hair, turbans, and other marks of distinction. 'Building upon the tradition emanating from the sixth and tenth gurus, the British helped in shaping the notion of the Sikhs as a martial race and indeed as a distinct and separate nation.'35 Like other fundamentalist leaders Bhindranwale strongly resisted the pressures towards assimilation, whether Hinduistic or secular Western. In his preaching he called for a return to the original teachings of the ten gurus and strict adherence to their codes of moral conduct. Like fundamentalist preachers in other traditions he paid more attention to politics and social behaviour than to the cosmological questions the religion addresses.

In defending his community against the perceived cultural encroachments of Hindu Punjabis, Bhindranwale unleashed a campaign of terror that cost hundreds of innocent Hindu lives. To the symbolic or latent militancy of Sikhism represented by beard, dagger, and sword he added two new items: the revolver and the motorcycle. Towards the end of 1983, fearing arrest, Bhindranwale and dozens of armed supporters installed themselves in the compound surrounding the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the holiest shrine of Sikhism, an area constantly thronged with visitors, pilgrims, priests, and auxiliary helpers. By taking refuge in the temple area, he challenged the government to defile the sanctuary-using the pilgrims and others as human shields, while permitting his followers to desecrate it. There are parallels here with the seizure of the sanctuary in Mecca, Islam's holiest shrine, by the Saudi rebel Juhaiman al-Utaibi in November 1979. Operation Blue Star, the Indian Army's attack on the Golden Temple in June 1984, resulted in more than a thousand deaths (including Bhindranwale's), many of them innocent pilgrims. Shortly afterwards Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who authorized the attack, was murdered by her trusted Sikh bodyguards. Nearly three thousand Sikhs lost their lives in the ensuing rioting in Delhi and other cities. In a retaliatory attack, Sikh terrorists may have been responsible for the crash of an Air India jumbo jet off the Irish coast in June 1985, killing all 32 9 people on board.

The second major challenge to India's secular constitution took place seven years later, in 1992, when a gang of Hindu militants destroyed the Babri Masjid (mosque of Babur) in the town of Ayodhya, south-east of Delhi. Ayodhya is the mythical birthplace of Lord Rama, hero of the Rayama, one of the great Indian epics, and an incarnation of the great god Vishnu. The Kingdom of Ayodhya over which Rama rules with his beautiful consort Sita after his exile and travails in the forest, epitomizes the golden age of Aryavarta as described by Dayananda. Rama's alleged birthplace, however, became the site of a mosque said to have been constructed on the orders of Babur, the first Moghul emperor, after a visit to the city in 1528. In 1949, two years after independence, local worshippers eported the miraculous appearance of Rama's image in the building. (Muslims, more sceptically, believed it had been put there by local Hindu activists.) An outbreak of communal rioting persuaded the local magistrate to close the building-but he allowed Hindu worshippers to visit it once a year on the anniversary of the image's appearance. The build-up to the crisis started in earnest in 1986 when a local court allowed the building to be opened for Hindu worship. in the ensuing riots bombs were set off, shops were burned, and at least twenty people died.

By 1989 the confrontation had became a major national issue, with an all-India campaign by Hindu activists to construct a new temple at the site. Small donations were sought from millions of ordinary people; villagers from all over India collaborated in making bricks for the temple's construction. Tensions escalated throughout the summer, with increasing communal rioting taking place as the elections approached. The government's efforts at mediation were unsuccessful, and in November the Congress faction led by Indira's son Rajiv Gandhi was defeated at the polls. His successor proved no more successful at defusing the tension. In December 1992, in defiance of the courts and their own religious leaders, a group of Hindu hotheads demolished the mosque during a ceremony for the dedication of the new temple, many of them using their bare hands. In an action that infuriated India's Muslims (and would have wide repercussions in Pakistan) the 13,000 police and militiamen who had been drafted to protect

the site failed to intervene. The subsequent riots in Bombay and other cities were the worst since India's independence in 1947. In a series of pogroms thousands of innocent Muslims lost their lives: even in Bombay's affluent Colobar district where real estate prices rival those of Tokyo and New York, middle-class Muslims found it necessary to remove their names from lists of residents on apartment blocks, fearing lynching by the mob.

Sri Lanka provides a further example of South Asian religious nationalism. Here, in a situation that bears a certain resemblance to Ireland, the demand for recognition of its separate status by an island minority linked by religion and ethnicity to its larger neighbour (in this case Hindu Tamils of southern India) is perceived by members of the majority community-Sinhalese Buddhists-as a threat to the nation's integrity. Like Irish Catholicism the Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka has developed into a nationalist ideology in which religion has become a marker of communal identity. The reasons are largely historical. Sri Lankan Buddhists regard themselves as the survivors of the great Buddhist empire founded in India by King Asoka in the third century BCE. While in mainland India Buddhism eventually disappeared as society relapsed into the multiform patterns of worship which came to be known as Hinduism, the Sinhalese held to the Buddhist faith which eventually became politicized. In Sri Lanka (as in Burma), Buddhism provided the stirrings of anti-colonial sentiment by offering 'the only universally acceptable king who rescued Buddhism and our nationalism from oblivion.'

In 1956, the year of Britain's Suez debacle, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, leader of the opposition Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP), was able to win power on a proBuddhist, pro-Sinhalese ticket, replacing the upper-class, English-educated liberals of the United National Party who had governed the country since independence. The SLFP benefited hugely from celebration of the 25ooth anniversary of the Buddha's birth (Buddha Jayanti) the following year and from the previous publication of a report detailing the suppression of Buddhism under the British. The Jayanti enlarged upon and celebrated the national myth bonding the Buddhist faith to the land and the Sinhalese nation which 'had come into being with the blessing of the Buddha as a "chosen race" with a divine mission to fulfil, and now stands on the threshold of a new era leading to its "great destiny"'. The SLFP was aggressively supported by the United Monks' Front, which rejected the concept of secular nationhood in terms very similar to those that would be used by Ayatollah Khomeini in his famous Najaf lectures.

The 'Buddhisization' of Sri Lankan politics had the inevitable consequence of making non-Buddhists (Tamils and Muslims) feel excluded from the nation, provoking demands by Tamil separatists for a state of their own. The Tamil Tigers-as the activists called themselves-were concerned not only with securing political rights, but more importantly with maintaining a cultural, ethnic, and religious identity which had been suppressed or alienated as Sinhalese nationalism became increasingly reliant on Buddhist symbols. More than 60,000 people from both communities lost their lives in the ensuing civil war that lasted nearly two decades. In the late ig8os the Tigers resorted increasingly to the novel tactic-pioneered by the Shii Hezbollah in Lebanon-of suicide bombing. More often than not the victims were civilians. A steady campaign of assassinations (including that of the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in iggi, by a female bomber) and indiscriminate murder was kept up through the 1990’s. In 1996, 91 people died, and 1,400 were wounded, in the suicide bombing of Colombo's Central Bank; 18 were killed in the destruction of the twin-towered World Trade Centre in Colombo in 1997; 16 died in the suicidal attack on a Buddhist shrine in Kandy in 1998. Some, though not all, the Tigers were practising Hindus, who dedicated themselves to Shiva before sacrificing themselves-and others.

The example of Buddhism in Sri Lanka clearly demonstrates that none of the major religious traditions is immune from 'fundamentalism', to which violence is closely linked-though it might be better in this, as in most other contexts, to describe the process as the 'nationalization' or secularization of religion. Donald Swearer argues that by 'homogenizing' the Buddhist tradition and reducing it to a simplified core teaching along with a moralistic programme of right living linked to Sinhalese Buddhist identity, Bandaranaike (and his later successor President Jayawardine) 'ignored the polar dynamic between the transmundane and the mundane, a distinction basic not only to traditional Theravada Buddhism but to the other great historical religions as well. The absolutism of fundamentalism stems from this basic transformation of the religious worldview.' The narrowly ideological nature of 'fundamentalism', Swearer concludes, means that it is 'not religious in the classical sense of that term but rather a variant of a secular faith couched in religious language'. In this process traditional religious symbols are 'stripped of their symbolic power to evoke a multiplicity of meanings'. Like Juergensmeyer, Swearer sees nationalism as triumphing over religion, rather than the reverse: 'Religions thus harnessed to nationalism are often regarded as more pure and orthodox than the traditional forms they seek to supplant; in turn nationalism readily takes on the character of a fervid, absolutistic revival of religion. In the case of Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, the search for national identity is prior and conditions the fundamentalism of the religion(s) incorporated into nationalism.'

The heart of the fundamentalist project, in line with this analysis, lies not in religion but in the essentially modern agenda of extending or consolidating the power of the national state-or, to use the term preferred by the Israeli sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt, the revolutionary 'Jacobin' state that appeared with the French Revolution and the movements that surfaced in its wake, including communism and fascism (though he tactfully avoids mentioning Zionism). According to Eisenstadt, the fundamentalists appropriated some of the 'central aspects of the political program of modernity', including its 'participatory, totalistic and egalitarian orientations' while reject of a former state director-general of police and official of the VHP affiliated to the RSS: 'We feel that what we are doing is good for the country. After all what is good for 82 per cent of the country is good for the rest of the country, isn't it? The 'Fundamental Rights' guaranteeing 'freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation or religion' under article 25 of the Constitution would remain highly problematic in a society as religious as India's. As T. N. Madan points out, 'secularism does not mean in India that religion is privatized: such an idea is alien to the indigenous religious traditions, which are holistic in character and do not recognize such dualistic categories as sacred versus profane, religious versus secular, or public versus private.'

One of the severest tests facing India's secular constitutional arrangements has come from the 'fundamentalist', or rather nationalist, movement within the minority Sikh community. Space does not allow an adequate description of Sikh fundamentalism. However T. N. Madan's account in Fundamentalisms Observed makes it abundantly clear that the Sikh movement led by the charismatic preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947-84) fits the pattern of movements in other religious traditions that have turned to, or ended in, violence. A relatively young religion founded in the Punjab during the sixteenth century, Sikhism constantly faced the possibility of being reabsorbed into the Hindu mainstream from which it originally sprang. Its distinctive identity was buttressed by the ing the Enlightenment values embedded in Jacobinism, including the sovereignty and autonomy of reason and the perfectibility of man.

'The basic structure or phenomenology of their vision and action', he concludes, 'is in many crucial and seemingly paradoxical ways a modern one, just as was the case with the totalitarian movements of the twenties and thirties. These movements bear within themselves the seeds of very intensive and virulent revolutionary sectarian, utopian Jacobinism, seeds which can, under appropriate circumstances, come to full-blown fruition.' Such movements have always had violent repercussions: before developing its modern meaning of freelance or irregular military action, the word 'terrorist' was applied to the Jacobin revolutionaries in France who used the power of the state to inflict terror on their enemies.

The use of violence, whether by revolutionaries who seize control of the state, or by freelancers who challenge the government, is neither arbitrary nor meaningless. Studies of religious conflicts in Europe and South Asia reveal similar patterns of violence. Examining religious riots in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis discovered 'rites of violence' that bore many of the hallmarks of religious activity. 'Even extreme ways of defiling corpses-dragging bodies through the streets and throwing them to the dogs, dismembering genitalia and selling them in mock commerce-and desecrating religious objects' had 'perverse connections' with such religious concepts as 'pollution and purification, heresy and blasphemy'. In his analysis of religious violence in South Asia Stanley Tambiah reaches similar conclusions. For example, in cases where innocent bystanders were burned alive by the crowd, the defenceless and terrified victims were murdered ritualistically in 'mock imitation of both the self-immolation of (Buddhist] conscientious objectors and the terminal rite of cremation'.

If there is a common theme to the foregoing, as well as to the many more instances that must remain unmentioned, it may be found in the way that religion has become secularized in many parts of the world, even among people who claim to be resisting secularism. The mythical images of cosmic struggle which form part of the religious repertoire of the great traditions are being actualized or brought down to earth. 'The cosmic struggle is understood to be occurring in this world rather than in a mythical setting. Believers identify personally with the struggle.' All religions affirm the primacy of meaning and order over chaos; hence in treating of death and violence, religions strive to contain them within an overarching, benign cosmic frame. In the Baghavad Cita the god Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that he must submit to his destiny in fighting against his own kinsmen. in so doing, he assents to the disorder of the world, although the contestants know that in the grander sense, 'this disorder is corrected by a cosmic order that is beyond killing and being killed'.

Similarly the Koran contains many allusions to the Prophet Muhammad's battles, which are set in the wider context of a moral order deemed to be upheld by an allseeing benevolent God. For Christians, Jesus's heroism in allowing himself to endure an excruciatingly painful death is seen as 'a monumental act of redemption for humankind, tipping the balance of power and allowing the struggle for order to succeed'.

Religious images and texts provide ways in which violence, pain,. and death are overcome symbolically. Human suffering is made more durable by the idea that death and pain are not pointless, that lives are not wasted needlessly, but are part of a grander scheme in which divinely constituted order reigns supreme above the chaos and disorder of the world. In such a context the horrors and chaos of wars, as described in the Mahabharata and the Book of Joshua, as debated in the Baghavad Gita, as predicted in the Book of Revelation, and as alluded to in the Koran, are subsumed within an order seen to be meaningful and ultimately benign. The reading and recitation of such texts, like the performance of ancient Greek tragedies, doubtless had a cartbartic function, purging people of anger and rage, inducing pity and fear, reducing actual conflict, upholding social harmony. By its rejection of symbolic interpretations fundamentalism (at least in its politically militant versions) releases the violence contained in the text. Fundamentalism is religion materialized, the word made flesh, as it were, with the flesh rendered, all too often, into shattered body parts by the forces of holy rage.

Fundamentalisms differ from 'cults' or New Religious Movements by their commitment to textual scripturalism. For example, the focus of the Rajneesh community in Oregon and Poona was on the person of Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, a charismatic 'cult' leader who drew eclectically on a wide variety of sources from Hinduism, Buddhism, Christian, and Islamic mysticism, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy, as well as personal spiritual experience, in his teachings. A Christian fundamentalist such as Jerry Falwell, by contrast, sticks closely to the 'inerrant' text of the Bible in his sermons. This distinction, however, should not be drawn too sharply. David Koresh, the 'prophet' of the Branch Davidian sect of Seventh Day Adventism who perished along with dozens of his followers at Waco Texas in April 1993, when his compound was attacked by US federal agents, was a 'textual fundamentalist' as well as a charismatic leader who availed himself of the sexual services of his female followers in order to 'spread his seed'. Far from being the result of 'brain-washing' or 'mind-control' techniques, the charismatic power he exercised over his followers was the result of their conviction that he was a divinely inspired interpreter of biblical passages (particularly the Book of Revelation) that are central to the Seventh Day Adventist tradition. During the prolonged negotiations preceding the federal attack on the Waco compound after a 5i-day siege, the FBI negotiators dismissed Koresh's sermonizing as mere 'Bible babble'. To his followers, however, his discourses on the Christian apocalypse were both meaningful and pregnant with religious insight.

As these and many other examples suggest, it is not just religious movements designated as 'fundamentalist' which have come to challenge the secularization thesis so confidently proclaimed by Harvey Cox in the 1960's when he was professor of Divinity at Harvard. According to Anson Shupe and Jeffrey Hadden, the forces of secularization, rather than being unidirectional, are part of a dialectical process: 'the economic and secular forces of socalled "modernization" contain the very seeds of a reaction that brings religion back into the heart of concerns about public policy. There is an abundance of evidence to support this view in North America, where the New Christian Right is actively engaged in Republican politics. The same dialectical logic, however, also limits potential of fundamentalists to transform society in the direction they want. As Steve Bruce has noted, in order to maximize its electoral appeal the NCR has to compartmentalize its approach and form alliances with other conservative religious groups such as Mormons, Catholics, and conservative Jews. This not only dilutes the religious aspect of the message, which is to convert non-believers; the very act of compartmentalization-of separating the religious from the political-undermines the fundamentalist agenda of 'bringing back God into politics'.

A similar logic applies to television, the most conspicuous of the technologies used by fundamentalists in America. By means of television, 'televangelists' such as Pat Robertson seek to challenge the secular order, by 're-enchanting' the world with divine interventions and supernatural events. Robertson and the late Oral Roberts have performed healings on camera, even claiming to heal viewers through their sets. In such programmes the sacred is reaffirmed, after being banished from secular networks, or at best restricted to the realm of fiction. The process of modernization described by Weber in his famous phrase 'the disenchantment of the world' is reversed. Through television the world is re-enchanted and resacralized.

At the same time the counter-attack on secular values mounted through religious television may prove subject to the law of diminishing returns. Through television the sacred and supernatural are domesticated, and ultimately banalized. In the end, disenchantment continues under the guise of the new religiosity. In the studio the charismatic leader who speaks for God must put himself under the control of the director and camera crew. Sacred words may disappear on the cutting-room floor. The structure of authority becomes ambiguous.

Television, mixing fact and fiction within a common format, collapses mythos and logos, especially in cultures where the conventions of theatre and fiction have recently been imported. In India movie stars who played divine beings in religious epics have turned themselves into politicians. The Ayodhya agitation referred to in Chapter 6 was boosted by television showings of the Ramayana; in cdar fudlowecC, ffmcfu and A/fusfirn agitators stirred up mutual hostility by showing videos of their co-religionists under attack. (In Brazil, actors, carrying drama into real life, have been known to kill each other offstage.) But over-exposure on television can lead God's spokespersons to become parodies of themselves. In America, where television preachers are well into the second generation, Christian broadcasting is also Christian'camp'.

In the 700 Club the supernatural is not just appropriated: it is routinized and domesticated, formatted into a regular 15-20-minute slots. In normal parlance a supernatural event is by definition unpredictable and aweinspiring, since natural laws have been suspended or superseded. Yet on the 700 Club healings and other supernatural interventions, in which the divine is presumed to have acted on matter by the invocation of the Holy Spirit through prayer, occur so frequently as to be almost banal. To the outsider Walsh's remark about the need for a miracle on her hair seems an outrageous put-down-both of the healed woman's pain, and of her divinely arranged release from it. But the studio audience-and, one suspects, the average 700 Club viewer-take it quite differently. For those born-again Christians miracles are routine occurrences-something to make in-group jokes about. in the community of the saved, as exhibited on CBN, God routinely suspends natural laws and processes. The miraculous is thus not so much a manifestation of the inexplicable Power of the Almighty, as the ritual confirmation of a belief-system that challenges the conventions of secular medical science. Like the Bible itself, the miraculous acts as a shibboleth or totem, reinforcing the identity of the group.

Everywhere religious programming is becoming more self-conscious as religious leaders try to get their messages across to increasingly sophisticated audiences. A study of Syrian broadcasts during the holy month of Ramadan in 1995 and 1996 shows that like Christmas in Western countries, Ramadan is a time when families get together and watch a considerable amount of television, much of it entertainment. The religious broadcasts, according to the scholar Andreas Christmann, subtly interweave Ramadan hymns and prayers with images that would seem 'to contradict the rather sparse and iconoclastic visual language of orthodox Islam', with the traditional repertoire of hymns and prayers accompanied by images of prayer halls, minarets, calligraphies, meditating Muslims, and 'romanticised pictures of the Syrian landscape as well as pages from the Quran, slotted in as graphic cards'. The overall effect presents Islam as a national religion, rather as the BBC's Songs of Praise-where professionally sung hymns are accompanied by shots that pay homage to the beauties of Britain's landscape and its magnificent cathedrals-celebrates the glories of Britain's national Church (with space, of course, given to non-Anglican communions). After a thorough viewing of two seasons' Ramadan programmes it became clear to Christmann that they 'attempt to reinforce the notion of belonging to one nation regardless of denomination, ethnicity, class and gender. With strong appeal to the unification of the national community, the main appeal of the televisual message is to harmonize divergent interests and orientations.'

In contrast to Robertson, who seeks to restore the God who intervenes supernaturally by means of the airwaves, Syrian television seeks to integrate popular religiosity with the modernist reformism of the Salafi tradition, with the media canalizing 'popular spirituality away from mystical pantheism into more monotheistic spiritual forms'. The invocations played during the popular Iftar programmes transmitted during the fast-breaking meal at sundown contain no references to the guardian spirits or to the efficacy of amulets and talismans, or to visits to the tombs of local saints or leaders of mystical orders. By conceiving God as non-manipulative and more abstract, television has brought popular religion into closer conformity with Islam's official monotheistic ideals.' Sufi dances, when shown, are rather stiff and low-key. Nothing is shown on television that is suggestive of 'excess, exaggeration or trance'.

The increase in religious militancy, occurring in many traditions in defiance of the secularization thesis, may be related to the increasing power and accessibility of audiovisual media, but the long-term consequences are ambiguous. In the first instance the fundamentalist impulse in many traditions has been a reaction to the invasive quality of film and television, which exposes 'sacred areas' like sexual relations to public gaze, transgressive images bringing them into the home. During the Islamist campaign in Algeria technicians had their throats slit for fitting satellite dishes that would bring into Muslim homes images of the 'satanic West', including semi-pornographic material from Italy and the Netherlands as well as factual news channels. In America 'televangelists' such as Falwell and Robertson 'fought back' against the perceived secularization of the culture by creating their own religious programmes and television networks. With the development of satellite networks such as the al-jazeera channel based in Qatar, state-funded broadcasting monopolies are losing their ability to impose censorship and control information. In the least-developed regions even more radical forces for change are at work, as the audio-visual revolution undercuts the authority of the literate elites. Societies such as Iran and India where levels of literacy have been low have moved from the oral to the audio-visual era without experiencing the revolution in literacy that generated both Protestantism and the Enlightenment in Europe.

Clearly the revolution in communications has a bearing on the failure of the secularization thesis as promulgated by Berger, Cox, and others. Where levels of literacy are low the audio and video cassette have enabled charismatic religious figures such as Sheikh Kishk in Egypt and the late Ayatollah Khomeini to acquire massive followings. Osama bin Laden's carefully crafted videos disseminated by al-Jazeera have contributed to his image as the archetypical Islamic hero. Audio-visual technologies restore the power of word and gesture-traditional province of religion-to a new type of leader, undercutting the hegemony of bureaucrats and the traditional religious professionals whose source of information and power was the written word. When relayed on tape or television, the power of orality and the languages of ritual and gesture retain their potency. 'Insult'-perceived through claims made on television rather than in The Satanic Versestriggered the anti-Rushdie agitation in Britain and South Asia.

The Ayodhya dispute, which had festered in the courts for decades, only became a national issue in India when everyone could see what was happening. With television the processes whereby village- or family-based identities break down are accelerated, leaving an emotional vacuum to be filled by iconic, charismatic figures such as Bin Laden. Literacy has ceased to be the prerequisite for entering the political realm as it was in the past.

Fundamentalisms have benefited from the revolution in communications in two ways. First, radio broadcasts and television images, which are now accessible to the majority of people on this planet, make people much more aware of issues with which they can identify than was the case in the past. They increase the political temperature and add to perceptions of cultural conflict. An obvious example is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with viewers throughout the Muslim world enraged by the sight of Israeli soldiers killing and humiliating Palestinians, while viewers in the West, shocked and dismayed by the carnage inflicted by suicide bombers, are liable to have anti-Arab or anti-Muslim prejudices confirmed. As numerous media theorists have pointed out, television is not the same as propaganda. It does not have a unidirectional or homogenizing impact on viewers. Most viewers bring pre-existing knowledge to what they see and hear on television, 'decoding images' according to their prejudices. In the Muslim world images of Israeli oppression may be reinforced by perceived differences in lifestyles.

For example the explicit sexual interactions to be seen on Tel Aviv beach may add to Islamist perceptions that Palestinians are facing not just a 'racist' enemy that discriminates against them, but one that is wholly evil because of its 'pagan' Yahili) social attitudes. Secondly, as explained already, fundamentalists benefit from the 'para-personal', electronically amplified relationships between charismatic leaders and their audiences. Nasser and Hitler were both beneficiaries of the new medium of radio; both Khomeini and Bin Laden were iconically impressive figures able to convey the solemnity, gravitas, nobility, and asceticism Muslims associate with the aniconic image of the Prophet Muhammad.

But if fundamentalist movements benefit from the media revolution, they are also liable to be among its casualties. The development of satellite television and increasing access to the Internet is bringing an end to the information monopolies on which fundamentalists-like other authoritarian movements-depend. In certain contexts, such as Israel- Palestine and Iraq after the AngloAmerican invasion, armed resistance to an externally imposed authority, publicized by the media, is regarded as legitimate by a significant number of people. Under such circumstances (which usually fit the category of religious nationalism, rather than 'pure' fundamentalism) the terrorists or martyrs may become heroes. But where religious radicals have tried to impose their will by violence, as in Egypt, the publicity they court by indulging in the 'propaganda of the deed' may result in popular revulsion, especially in the pious middle-class constituencies on which they depend for support. After an exhaustive analysis of modern Islamist movements from Morocco to Indonesia the French political analyst Gilles Kepel has concluded that terrorism is really a sign of failure, deployed when political mobilization has failed.

The recurrent violence of the 1990's, the attacks on tourists in Egypt, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the war in Chechnya, the violence in France, the attacks on US targets in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and East Africa culminating in '9/11' is 'above all a reflection of the movement's structural weakness, not its growing strength'.-o The decline in the movement's capacity for political mobilization explains why 'such spectacular and devastating new forms of terrorism' were visited on America itself. Kepel's book was published before Islamist parties took power in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province following elections imposed by Washington on the Musharraf government. Rumours of the death of Islamism in this area are certainly premature. On a broader canvas, Kepel's analysis may still hold good, but there are frightening dangers along the way. Where Islamists have succeeded in taking power, as in Iran, satellite technology tells against them, since it becomes impossible for them to sustain their monopoly over the religious discourse. Religious texts such as the Koran have endured because they transcend ideologies, speaking to the human condition in language that is always open to alternative interpretations.

Recently Iranian opposition forces, with explicit verbal support from the American president, where demonstrating against the clerical leadership whom they accuse of blocking the reformist agenda of President Khatami and the parliament. The demonstrators have been sustained by satellite channels run by Iranian exiles in the United States. Mindful of the fate of the Baathist regime in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Iranian regime appears to be succumbing to international pressure, backed by the United States, to open up its nuclear programme to United Nations weapons inspectors. Libya, once a pariah state, has announced that it is abandoning weapons of mass destruction, a policy aimed at the lifting of United Nations sanctions.

The future is nonetheless precarious. Soon two Islamist regimes, Iran and Pakistan, could be armed with nuclear weapons, a prospect made more dangerous by the strand of apocalyptic fantasy that excites and inspires the children of Abraham. In Israel-Palestine Jewish fundamentalists, backed by the Israeli army and with support from the Falwellites and other Protestant extremists in America resist US pressure to relinquish control of occupied Palestine, in ironic collusion with the Islamist militants of Harnas and Islamic Jihad. Within three years, at this writing, an Iranian regime with nuclear capacity could be supporting the Palestinians in the next round of the intifada against Israel. Since the latter already has its nuclear weapons, the stage will be set for the Armageddon predicted and welcomed by premilliennialists as the necessary prelude to the return of Christ.

The gloomy prognosis might be applied, a fortiori, to Pakistan, an economic and social disaster zone when compared with its rival, the 'polytheist' or 'pagan' India. More ominously even than in Israel- Palestine, the apocalyptic mood in Pakistan centres on the 'Islamic bomb', to which there are now flower-decked shrines in major cities. Like the attacks on New York and Washington, which like other cities in the Satanic West face the prospect of terrorist attacks with 'dirty bombs' (conventional explosives containing radioactive materials capable of spreading radiation over a large area), Pakistani bomb-worship may be a manifestation of nihilistic theological despair. 'Polytheist' India flourishes compared with rightly-guided Pakistan. So do infidel places by adding 'scientific creationism' to the curriculum. They inconvenience some women-especially poor women with limited access to travel-by making abortion illegal in certain states. On a planetary level they are selfish, greedy, and stupid, damaging the environment by the excessive use of energy and lobbying against environmental controls. What is the point of saving the planet, they argue, if Jesus is arriving tomorrow?

American fundamentalists are a headache, a thorn in flesh of the bien-pensant liberals, the subject of bemused concern to 'Old Europeans' who have experienced too many real catastrophes to yearn for Armageddon. Given that premillennialism and its associated theologies are significant components of American policy, especially under Republican administrations, it seems fair to state that Protestant fundamentalism is a dangerous religion. Whatever spiritual benefits individuals may have gained by taking Jesus as their 'personal saviour' the apocalyptic fantasies harboured by born-again Christians have a negative impact on public policy. Because of its impact on the environment and its baleful role in the Middle East, America's religiosity is a problem.

But the solution is also American. The constitutional separation of church and state is as fundamental to American democracy as the Bible is to fundamentalists. The hard line preached by televangelists such as Falwell and Robertson is protected by the First Amendment, but it is also limited by it. Though fundamentalists can influence policy, they cannot control it. The same considerations apply, by and large, to fundamentalists in Israel, Sri Lanka, and India, who are constrained by the pluralistic and democratic political systems in which they operate.

The Islamic situation is different, because for historical and sociological reasons too complex to explain in this book, very few Muslim political cultures have developed along democratic lines. In their ruthless drive to power, Islamists have succeeded in taking control of the state temporarily in Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and permanently in Saudi Arabia and (under different sectarian colours) in Iran. Where the Islamist tide has receded or been checked (as in Pakistan, Egypt, and Algeria) it has been ruthless action by the military rather than the constraints of democratic institutions that have protected secular government. The association of religious pluralism and secularism with militarism (as in Syria, Pakistan, and Turkey) rather than with democracy has been an important element in the Islamist rhetorical armory.

Where the military governs along secular lines, as in Algeria or in Turkey during periods of army intervention, Islamists can plausibly appeal to democratic feelings. But where Islamists actually hold power, as in Iran, they resist democratic change as being contrary to the will of God. There are ways out of this vicious spiral, but they require fine political tuning. One example is offered by Turkey, where in order to win democratically Islamists have had to abandon their more strident demands for 're-islamizing' society. Another is offered by Jordan, which allows Islam ists; to win parliamentary seats, exposing them to the cut and thrust of political debate.

Despite these very real problems, the call for freedom, even when polluted by the suspicion that it is being exploited by commercial interests, still runs with the grain of popular aspirations. Islamism, like other fundamentalisms, works best in opposition. In power it proves no less susceptible to corruption or manipulation than the ideologies and systems it seeks to supplant. For the foreseeable future Muslim nationalists will doubtless continue to resist American global hegemony, along with Russian imperialism in Transcaucasia and the Israeli subjugation of Palestine. But in other respects the power of modern technology may be working in America's direction. In the age of satellite broadcasting and the internet, pluralism and diversity of choice are no longer aspirations. They are dynamic realities.

Religious/Political Economy

Although many religious activists (especially the evengelical movements within Christianity and Islam) believe they have a universal mission to transform or convert the world, all religious traditions must face the problematic of their parochial origins, the embarrassing fact that saviours and prophets uttered divine words in particular languages to relatively small groups of people at particular historical junctures.

Although both Hindutva and Islamic resurgence provide total alternatives in political terms, religious resurgence fits nicely into the neoliberal worldview. The presumed weakness or failure of the state legitimates resurgence and its call for inverting modernization. Hindu nationalists found few noticeable difficulties cuddling up to neoliberalism, although the lure of state power admittedly may have been an important enticement, given India's changing relation to the global political economy.

The attitude of Islamists toward neoliberalism in Pakistan remains untested, but the actual practice of reliance on a market-based civil society in the areas of self-help, welfare, education, and banking suggests few political contradictions between Islamism and neoliberalism there. For the most part, contestation lies in the cultural domain: in ideals and practices of the family, the regulation of sexual relations, and Westernization. Here, too, a changed attitude is conspicuous. The ideal family now is not the communalized institution of extended blood ties but is increasingly a nuclear arrangement liberated from larger societal curbs . This shift in the idealized nature of the family is more patriarchal than its historical predecessor in Muslim society. It is inherently bourgeois in a lumpen sense-privatized and vulnerable to masculine whim. Veiling and segregation become more explicable within (lumpen) bourgeois notions of family and private property than as cultural pathologies of a traditional society.

The relation between religious resurgence and Westernization is more complicated. The former has no trouble embracing the technical and instrumental aspects of Western modernity. Their rejection of the West is confined mainly to its cultural expressions, a phenomenon not uncommon to relations of exchange under conditions of differential power. Furthermore, and especially in view of cultural hierarchies drawn by language and privi

ideologies of Marxist-Leninism, National Socialism, and anti-colonialism as the principal challenge to a world order based on the hegemonic power of the liberal capitalist West. Just as the contradictions within liberalism (between, for example, the universal rights of man and the pursuit of imperial trade) gave rise to the anti-colonial movements of the post-Second World War era, so the earliest shoots of fundamentalism (semantically, if not as an age-old phenomenon) came to fruition in the United States-in the very heart of the capitalist West.

Since 9/11 one year after I first presented part 1 and 2 of the term Fundamentalism has been frequently used for groups that in some cases are even  New Religious Movements (NMRs in academic jargon) and in others should really be called  “Reform Movements” as I did in part one. For the sake of a general understanding  and since this is an improved transcript placed on the internet end 2003, we will term them “Modernist Religions”. In contrast the word ‘Fundamentalism” was coined more then  two centuries ago in context of a  Protestant setting.

For example Islamic scholars argue that since all observant Muslims believe the Koran-the divine text of Islam-to be the unmediated Word of God, all are committed to a doctrine of scriptural inerrancy, whereas for Protestants biblical inerrancy is one of the hallmarks that distinguishes fundamentalists from liberals. If all believ­ing Muslims are `fundamentalists' in this sense of the word, then the term is meaningless, because it fails to distinguish between the hard-edged militant who seeks to `Islamize' his society and the quietist who avoids politics completely. `Higher criticism of the Bible' based on close textual study-the original cause of the Protestant fundamentalist revolt against liberalism and modernism challenged traditional teachings by claiming, for example, that the Book of Isaiah has more than one author and that the Pentateuch-the first five books of the Old Testament-was not authored by Moses himself. `Higher criticism' of the Koran, by contrast, which would challenge the belief that every word contained in the text was dictated to Muhammad by God through the agency of the Angel Gabriel, has not been a major issue in the Muslim world to date, though it may become so in due course, as literary critical theories gain ground in academic circles. The concerns of most Muslim `fundamentalists' especially following  9/11 are largely of a different order: the removal of governments deemed corrupt or too pro-Western and the replacement of laws imported from the West by the indigenous Sharia code derived from the Koran and the sunna (custom) of the Prophet Muhammad.

Parallel concerns may be found among the 'funda­mentalist' New Religious Movements (NRMs) in Japan, where the Allied Occupation in 1945 imposed compre­hensive and far-reaching changes in the country's civil code. On slightly different grounds scholars of Judaism point out that `fundamentalist' is much too broad a term when applied both to ultra-orthodox groups known as Haredim (some of which still refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel) and the religious settlers of Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful) who place more emphasis on holding onto the Land of Israel than on observing the Halakha (Jewish law).

`Fundamentalism', according to its critics, is just a dirty fourteen-letter word. It is a term of abuse levelled by liberals and Enlightenment rationalists against any group, not just to the rational mind, with fundamentalists expos­ing what one anthropologist calls `the hubris of reason's pretence in trying to take over religion's role'.'

Words have a life and energy of their own that will usually defy the exacting demands of scholars. The F-word has long since escaped from the Protestant closet in which it began its semantic career around the turn of the twentieth century.

The applications or meanings attached to words can­not be confined to the context in which they originate: if one limits `fundamentalism' to its original meaning one might as well do the same for words like `nationalism' and `secularization' which also appeared in the post Enlightenment West before being applied to movements or processes in non-Western societies. Applying the same restrictive logic, ore should not speak of Judaism or Christianity as `religions' because that originally Latin word is found in neither Old nor New Testaments. 'Fundamentalism' may indeed be a `Western linguistic encroach­ment' on other traditions, but the phenomenon (or rather, the phenomena) it describes exists, although no single definition will ever be uncontested. Put at its broadest, it may be described as a `religious way of being' that mani­fests itself in a strategy by which beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identity as a people or group in the face of modernity and secularization.

Bruce Lawrence, a scholar who does, believes that the F-word can be extended beyond its original Protestant matrix, sees its connection with modernity as crucial: 'Funda­mentalism is a multifocal phenomenon precisely because the modernist hegemony, though originating in some parts of the West, was not limited to Protestant Christianity' (emphasis added). The Enlightenment influenced significant numbers of Jews, and because of the colonization of much of Africa and Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it touched the lives and destinies of many Muslims.- According to this view the `modernist hegemony' did not end with the attainment of political independence by so-called Third World countries. Indeed, given the far-reaching consequences of the scientific revolution that flowed from the Enlightenment, the modern predicament against which fundamentalists everywhere are reacting has been extended to cover virtually every corner of the planet.

Rather than quibbling about the usefulness of 'fundamentalism' as an analytic term, I propose in this book to explore its ambiguities, to unpack some of its meanings. The term may be less than wholly satisfactory, but the phenomena it encompasses deserve to be analysed. Whether or not we like the phrase, fundamentalist or fundamentalist-like movements appear to be erupting in many parts of the world, from the Americas to South-East Asia. No one would claim that these movements, which occur in most of the world's great religious traditions, are identical. But all of them exhibit what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called `family resemblances'. In  explaining his analogy Wittgenstein took the example of games-board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic Games, and so forth. Instead of assuming that all must have a single, defining feature because of the common name applied to them, games should be examined for similarities and relationships. Such an examination, said Wittgenstein, would reveal 'a complicated network of simi­larities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail' such as one finds in different members of the same family, in which 'build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament et cetera overlap and criss-cross in the same way'.

Before proceeding to explore these resemblances, it would be useful to recapitulate the history of the word and its burgeoning semantic career. Its origins are quite reveal­ing. Although the wordhas acquired negative connotations in much of the world, it did not begin as a term of abuse or even criticism. It appeared early in the twentieth century not, as might be expected, in the 'Bible Belt' of the Old South, but in southern California, one of America's most rapidly developing regions (in the same area and at about the same time that one of fundamentalism's principal bug­bears, the Hollywood film industry, made its appearance).  Milton and Lyman Stewart, two devout Christian brothers who had made their fortune in the California oil business, embarked on a five-year programme of sponsorship for a series of pamphlets which were sent free of charge to 'English-speaking Protestant pastors, evangelists, missionaries, theological professors, theological students, YMCA secretaries, Sunday School superintendents, religious lay workers, and editors of religious publications throughout the world'. Entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth, the tracts, written by a number of leading conservative American and British theologians, were aimed at stopping the erosion of what the brothers and their editors considered to be the `fundamental' beliefs of Protestantism: the inerrancy of the Bible; the direct creation of the world, and humanity, ex nihilo by God (in contrast to Darwinian evolution); the authenticity of miracles; the virgin birth of Jesus, his Crucifixion and bodily resurrection; the substitutionary atonement (the doctrine that Christ died to redeem the sins of humanity); and (for some but not all believers) his imminent return to judge and rule over the world.

Like many conservative American Protestants, who are technically known as premillennial dispensationalists, the Stewart brothers believed that the End Times prophesies contained in the scriptures, notably the Old Testament books of Ezekiel and Daniel, and the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of St John, referred to real (not symbolic) events that were shortly due to happen on the plane of human history. Drawing on a tradition of prophecy interpretation developed by an English clergyman, John Nelson Darby (18oo-8a), they argued that since many Old Testament prophecies about the coming Messiah were fulfilled with the coming of Christ as documented in the New Testament, other predictions, con­cerning the End Times, would soon come to pass. Expect­ing the world to end at any moment they saw it as their duty to save as many people as possible before the coming catastrophe when sinners would perish horribly and the saved would be 'raptured' into the presence of Christ.

Being successful businessmen, the Stewarts wanted, and expected, results. As Lyman wrote to Milton after learning that the American Tobacco Company was spend­ing millions of dollars distributing free cigarettes in order to give people a taste for them: `Christians should learn from the wisdom of the world.'

Theological motives were complemented by business competition. Lyman's 'organizing principle' in the oil business was fighting his rival John D. Rockefeller's attempts to monopolize the industry. It may or may not be coincidental that one of the first preachers he hired came to his attention after preaching against `something that one of those infidel professors in Chicago University had published'. Chicago Divinity School, a hotbed of liberalism, had been founded and endowed by John D. Rockefeller.

Some three million copies of The Fundamentals were circulated, on both sides of the Atlantic. The -ist was added in 192o by Curtis Lee Laws, a conservative Baptist editor: `Fundamentalists', he declared, `were those who were ready to do battle royal for The Fundamentals.' The previ­ous year William B. Riley, a leader of the militant dispen­sationalist premillennialist party among the Northern Baptists, had organized the non-denominational World Christian Fundamentals Association. Although premillen­nialist ideas do not loom as large in The Fundamentals as they would in later fundamentalist discourse, there is no doubt that the Stewart brothers approved. About half the American contributors to The Fundamentals, including such leading lights as Reuben Torrey and Cyrus Ignatius Scofield, were premillennialists. Before endowing The Fundamentals, Lyman Stewart had been a major sponsor of Scofield's reference Bible, first published in 1909, and still the preferred commentary of American premillennialists.

The belief that Jesus would return to rule over an earthly kingdom of the righteous after defeating the Anti- christ dates back to the earliest phase of Christianity, when the apostles lived in the daily expectation of his promised return. Dismayed by its revolutionary potential, which challenged the renovated imperial cults, common to both Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism, that con­ferred divine legitimacy on the Holy Roman and Byzantine emperors, the early church fathers, notably St Augustine (354-430) allegorized and spiritualized the coming King­dom of God. Christian apocalyptic became `part of the everyday fabric of Christian life and belief, and to that extent reinforced eschatological awareness by embedding it in liturgy and preaching' while distancing Catholic thought from literalistic readings of prophesy and espe­cially notions of an earthly millennium.5 The seal on Augustine's teaching was set by the Council of Ephesus in 431 which condemned millennialism and expurgated works of earlier church fathers thought to be tainted with the doctrine. After the Reformation loosened the Church's grip on Christian teaching, millennialist ideas resurfaced in such apocalyptic movements as the Anabaptists of Munster in Germany and Fifth Monarchy Men who took part in the English Revolution (1649-60). Transplanted to America, where constitutional separation of church and state encourages religious innovation, millennialist ideas took root in fertile soil.

Belief in the coming physical millennium lies at the basis of at least three of the new world religions founded in the United States since 18oo-Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, and.the Jehova's Witnesses. The number of premillennialist Protestants (who believe that the Second Coming will be followed by the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth) has been estimated conservatively at eight million. Not all the early fundamentalists were premillennialists. But it is interesting to note George W. Dollar, a leading premillennialist, drew a sharp distinction between true fundamentalism based only on scriptural interpret­ation and `orthodoxy', which he considered based in the often syncretistic views of the church fathers and the classic creeds. Noting that there was very little in The Fundamentals that taught premillennialism, he concluded that they should really be `hailed as the Fundamentals of Orthodoxy'.

The fundamentalist myth of a golden age, whether set in the past or projected into the future, will be explored in the next chapter. Here it is enough to point out that the `F-word', however constructed, should never be taken at face value: even at its origin, in The Fundamentals, its meaning was contested. In no tradition does one find a complete consensus, even among conservatives, about what the `fundamentals' of the faith really are. Funda­mentalists are nothing if not selective about the texts they use and their mode of interpretation. They are also much more innovative in the way they interpret the texts they select than is often supposed. In this respect they may be contrasted with traditionalists.

`Tradition', like `fundamental', can also be understood in more than one way. Among Roman Catholics, Angli­cans, and other religious communities, the word conveys the sense of a cumulative body of ritual, behaviour, and thought that reaches back to the time of origins. In Catholicism especially, tradition embodying the accumu­lated experience and knowledge of the Church is seen as a source of authority equal to scripture. Tied to the exclusive authority of the Church, tradition was affirmed at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, the Church's official response to the challenge posed by the sola scriptura doctrine of the Protestant reformers. In a sense Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other Reformation leaders could be described as `fundamentalists' many centuries before the term was coined, while the Council of Trent can be seen as a `fundamentalist' or 'integralist' response.

In the Islamic tradition similar considerations apply: tradition here means the accumulated body of interpret­ation, law, and practice as developed over the centuries by the ulama, the class of `learned men' who constitute Islam's professional religionists or clerics. Throughout Islamic history there have been `renovators' or reformers who, like Luther, challenged the authority of the ulama on the basis of their readings of the Sources of Islam, namely the Koran and the Hadiths (the latter, sometimes con­fusingly translated as `Traditions', are canonized reports about Muhammad's deeds and teachings, based, it is sup­posed, on the oral testimony of his contemporaries and passed down by word of mouth before being collated into written collections). In this sense the medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1326) who ended his life in prison for challenging the authority of the ulama and rulers of his day was a `fundamentalist'. Significantly his writings are extremely popular among today's Islamist militants.

A less specialized meaning of `tradition', however, is also relevant here. In a broader context, tradition is simply what occurs unselfconsciously as part of the natural order of things, an unreflective or unconsidered Weltanschauung (world view). In the words of Martin Marty, `most people who live in a traditional culture do not know they are traditionalists'.5 Tradition, in this sense, consists in not being aware that how one believes or behaves is 'trad­itional', because alternative ways of thinking or living are simply not taken into consideration. In `traditional' societies, including the mainly rural communities that formerly constituted the American Bible Belt, the Bible was seen as comprehensively true, a source of universal wisdom, knowledge, and authority deemed to have been transmitted to humanity by God through the prophets, patriarchs, and apostles who wrote the Bible. The latter was not thought of as a `scientific textbook'; but nor did the ordinary pastor or worshipper consider it `unscientific'. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Bible was considered compatible with reason, or at least with that version of reason conveyed by the 'common­sense' philosophy which spread to North America from Scotland, along with Calvinist theology and more or less democratic forms of church governance.

When Higher Criticism, originating in Germany, began to challenge the received understandings of the Bible, for example by using sophisticated methods of textual analysis to argue that books attributed to Moses or Isaiah show evidence of editorial changes, textual accumulations, and multiple authorship, or that the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ depended on a mistranslation of the original Greek text, unreflective tradition (the `received knowledge' of generations) was converted into reactive defensiveness. From this perspective fundamentalism may be defined as `tradition made self-aware and consequently defensive'. In Samuel Heilman's words, `traditionalism is not funda­mentalism, but a necessary correlate to it'.

In all religions, but especially in Protestantism, the active defence of tradition demands selectivity, since the text of the Bible is too vast and complex to be defended in all its details. Like any military commander, the fundamentalist had to choose the ground on which to do `battle royal' with the forces of liberalism and Higher Criticism. The Fundamentals was part of the process that galvanized this reaction. Hence in America especially it cut across the more democratically organized denominations, including Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, and Methodists. In most of the American denominations it represented the grass roots reaction to the elitism of the seminaries, per­ceived as being out of touch with the culture and beliefs of ordinary believers. Yet, as Marty and Appleby point out, the very idea behind the project revealed the distance that had already been travelled along the path of secularity: `Designating fundamentalisms automatically places the designator at great remove from the time when religion thrived as a whole way of life. To identify any one thing or set of beliefs or practices as essential is to diminish other elements of what was once an organic whole.'?

The most famous of the `battles royal' which tore many American churches apart in the first half of the twentieth century was the `Monkey Trial' in Dayton Tennessee in 1925. As Garry Wills, one of America's best-known commentators has explained, the trial was something of a `put-up job' engineered, in effect, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to challenge an obscure and little used Tennessee state law banning the teaching of evolution in schools.

Many southern states had such laws early in the twentieth century. A biology teacher, John Scopes (who subsequently admitted that he had missed teaching the classes dealing with evolution), `claimed (rather shakily) to have broken the law'.

It was `one of the best early examples of what would later be known as a "media event" ', in which the coverage itself was more important than what actually occurred in court. Hundreds of jour­nalists attended, including the most famous reporter of the day, H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun. Radio lines were brought into the courtroom, and the judge held up proceedings to allow photographers; to get their shots. The fundamentalist defenders of the state law won the trial on points. With a fundamentalist jury, three members of which testified that they read nothing but the Bible, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The state law was upheld but Scopes had his conviction quashed on appeal, which prevented the ACLU from pursuing its original aim of bringing the case to a higher Federal court. He went on to become a geologist after winning a scholarship to the University of Chicago.

Culturally the media battle was a devastating defeat for fundamentalism. In a famous cross-examination before the trial judge William Jennings Bryan, former Secretary of State and three times Democratic candidate for the presidency, suffered public humiliation at the hands of Clarence Darrow, the ACLU lawyer. Cleverly drawing on literalistic interpretations of the Bible approved of by conservatives, Darrow showed that Bryan's knowledge of scripture and fundamentalist principles of interpretation was fatally flawed. Afflicted with diabetes, Bryan died shortly after the trial, a broken man. In the media treatment sight was lost of the moral issues that had been his primary concern.

As a Democrat and populist Bryan believed that German militarism, the ultimate cause of the First World War, had been a by-product of Darwin's theory of natural selection combined with Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas about the human Will to Power. Given the way in which ideas of Social Darwinism were subsequently put to use by the Nazis, he deserves more credit than he has been given. Shortly before the Second World War, Adolf Hitler would state in one of his speeches: `[Anyone] who has pondered on the order of this world realizes that its mean­ing lies in the warlike survival of the fittest.
 

Antievolution laws remained on the statue books of several American states, and indeed were extended in some cases. But for the American public at large fundamentalists were exposed as rural ignoramuses, countryside `hillbillies' out of touch with modern thought. One of the major cultural events of twentieth-century America, the `Monkey Trial', precipitated what might be called the `withdrawal phase' of American fundamentalism-a retreat into the enclaves of churches and private educational institutions, such as Bob Jones University. In the mainstream academies, seminaries, and denominations, liberal theology which accepted evolution as `God's way of doing things' swept the board.
 

`In their theories, story lines, plots, and images, the nation's scholars, journalists, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers most explicitly articulated modern America as a world in which Fundamentalists figured as stigmatized outsiders. The terms of secular modernity were also written into a wide array of laws, court decisions, government policies, decrees, and regulations, codes of etiquette, customs, practices, and commonsense pre­suppositions that structured national public discourses.'

that `at the national level signs of religious partisanship were voluntarily suppressed' though it remained for the most part `incomplete, fragile, and, at times and places, seriously contested'.- Thereafter the `modern secular hegemony' held sway for several decades.

The triumph of liberalism in the mainstream churches was at first tacitly endorsed by the fundamentalists who, for the most part, opted for the strategy of `separation' from the world. Logically premillennialist Christians should not care if `the world' goes from bad to worse, though they are charitably enjoined to rescue as many souls as they can. According to the Book of Revelation the reign of the Antichrist preceding the Second Coming will be accompanied by all sorts of portents and signs of evil. As the `saved remnant' of humanity, true Christians (i.e fundamentalists) should even welcome these signs as proof that salvation is imminent. `The darker the night gets, the lighter my heart gets', wrote Reuben Torrey, one of the editors of The Fundamentals.

The contempt to which fundamentalists were exposed in the popular media after the Scopes trial reinforced the correctness of this view. This does not mean, however, that American fundamentalism remained static. Despite its exclusion from the mainstream, the half-century from 1930 to 1980 saw a steady institutional growth, with numerous (mainly Baptist) churches seceding from national denominations in order to create an impressive national infrastructure of `pastoral networks, parachurch organisations and superchurches, schools and colleges, book and magazine publishing industries, radio, television and direct-mail operations' that built on older institutions created during the nineteenth-century revivals, such as the famous Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Whilst main­.s=e= America, abetted by an increasingly centralized ambitions, American fundamentalists are constrained by this wall which, for historical reasons, they are more likely than not to accept. As refugees from what they conceived to be the `religious tyrannies' of the Old World, the Protestant colonists who founded the United States in 1776 and won its independence from Britain were opposed to any alliance between state power and religious authority. Churches should be self-governing, autonomous insti­tutions free from taxation and government interference. Nevertheless since all of the Founding Fathers were Protestants, modern fundamentalists can reasonably argue that the United States was founded as a Christian-i.e. Protestant-nation. For them the `wall of separation' does not mean that the state is atheist or even secular in the fullest sense of the word: merely that it maintains a posture of neutrality towards the different churches or religious denominations. With waves of Catholic migrants from Ireland arriving from the 183os and Jewish immigration from Eastern and Central Europe from the latter part of the nineteenth century, denominational pluralism was extended beyond what many people (though not Jefferson, who believed in religious freedom `for the infidel of every denomination') would have imagined during the 1780s.

A landmark Supreme Court decision in 1961 extended to `secular humanists' (i.e. non-believers) the legal pro­tection accorded to followers of religious faiths. Ironically this is the decision which fundamentalists now use in order to argue that `secular humanism' qualifies as a religion, for example when values associated with it appear in school curricula. It should therefore be curbed by the state, whose responsibility it is to maintain the `wall of separation'. American fundamentalists are therefore con­strained by the pluralistic religious culture in which they must operate. Rather than forming a religious party aimed at taking over the government, they lobby for power and influence within the Republican Party. Legislative successes at state level have included the reinstitution of daily prayers in some public schools, `equal time' rules for the teaching of evolution and creation, and the overturning by a dozen or more states of the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade judgement repealing state bans on abortion. At the local level fundamentalists have lobbied for the banning of books deemed irrelibious from public school libraries or Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and books by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and John Steinbeck, all of which have been seen as promoting the `religion' of secular humanism by question­ing faith in God or portraying religion negatively. These successes, however, have often been reversed by the courts after actions by organizations such as the ACLU and PAW (People for the American Way, a liberal lobby group. At the national level fundamentalism is further constrained by the need to find conservative partners from beyond the ranks of Protestant fundamentalists.

On single issues such as abortion or ERA (the proposed Equal Rights Amendment for women), fundamentalist lobbying can be efficacious. In the wider political domain, however, American fundamentalists are faced with a dilemma. To collaborate with other conservative groups they must suppress or even abandon their theological objections. As Steve Bruce explains: `In the world-view which creates the particular reasons conservative Protest­ants have for resisting modernism, Catholics and Jews are not Christians, and Mormonism is a dangerous cult. But legislative and electoral success requires that fundamen­talists work in alliance with such groups and with secular conservatives.  Outside the pro-Life (anti-abortion) and anti-ERA campaigns, which raise gender issues to which all conservative religionists are particularly sensitive, funda­mentalists have found little support. Given that religious pluralism is the primary enemy of fundamentalist certainty, this is hardly surprising. In the United States the Constitution, the first in the world to make religious pluralism a central article of faith, is the reef on which the aspirations of `pure' Protestant fundamentalism seem destined to founder.

But as Steve Bruce in  The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right ( 1988,p 171),  mentioned, in a letter written in May 1937 by Sir Reader Bullard, British Minister in Jeddah, it already  stated that King Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud `has been coming out strong as a fundamentalist' by condemning women who mix with men `under the cloak of progress'.  Bruce Lawrence next suggested that  the term “Islamic fundamentalism” was `coined' by H. A. R. Gibb, the well-known orientalist, in his book Mohammedanism (later retitled Islam) with reference to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the pan Islamic reformer ‘Egyptian Rite’ Freemason , plus political activist.

Afghani (who traveled to India the same month as Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky as I described in The Matrix of Modernist Religions and Nationalism P.21), was a masterful conspirator, polemicist, and political activist, can in the current context thus also be seen as the founder of ‘Islamic`fundamentalism'.

Far from unequivocally opposing the Enlightenment (one of the family traits ascribed to most fundamentalist movements) however, Afghani's attitude to modernity was thoroughly ambiguous. Hating imperialism, he nevertheless acknowledged the need for wholescale reforms of the `Muslim religion', which he saw as decadent, decayed, and corrupt. Thus this spirit is much closer to that of Martin Luther than to, say, a contemporary scriptural literalist such as Jerry Falwell, hence I called it a “Religious Reform Movement” in p.1.

A journal which Afghani founded in Paris with his disciple Muhammad Abduh, was the leading reformist journal of its time. Despite its short duration, it remained an abiding influence on the modernist movement in Islam. The inclusion of Afghani under the 'fundamentalist' label therefore expands our definition not just because Islam is different from Christianity but because what is `fundamental' to both faiths has been construed differently. Islamic fundamentalism or Islamism, to use an English word that corresponds more closely to the term adopted by contemporary Muslim activists, thus  is not countermodernist in the way that fundamentalist Christianity has been described as being. Far from challenging the basic premisses of the Enlightenment, the movement launched by Afghani and Abduh in the 1870s, known as the Salafiyya, after the `pious ancestors' or Prophet's Companions, absorbed the modernist spirit to the point where Abduh broke with Afghani and collaborated with the British power in Egypt to further his reformist agenda. Unlike Christian fundamentalism, Salafism cannot be described as anti-modernist, although the word salafi is sometimes used for `fundamentalist' in Arabic. An alternative Arabic term, usuli from usul (roots), corresponds more closely to the F-word in English.

A complicating factor here, however, is the specific usage it has acquired in the religious history of Shiism, the minority tradition in Islam which, like Catholicism, balances adherence to scripture with an emphasis on religious leadership. In the nineteenth century the Shii ulama divided into two major schools, the usulis and the akhbaris.

Though described in the Western media as a `fundamentalist', the leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, belonged to the usuli school and upheld its tenets against those of his more conservative or `fundamentalism', akhbari rivals. Though presenting him­self as the defender of Islamic `fundamentalism', Khomeini was a radical innovator in Shii religious and political thought. Despite his frequent denunciations of Marxism, he incorporated a good deal of Marxist thinking into his discourse.

The problems of definition are compounded when socalled Jewish fundamentalism is taken into account. As with Arabic there is no indigenous Hebrew word for `fundamentalism'. The term usually employed for Jewish extremists by the Israeli media is yamina dati, the 'religious right'.

Far from rejecting modernity, fundamentalists of the religious right such as Gush Emunim (GE), the Bloc of the Faithful, are religious innovators. Whereas the traditionalist or orthodox groups known as the Haredim regarded the establishment of Israel as an impious pre-empting of the Messiah's role, Gush Emunim and other right-wing religious Zionists see the secular state as a `stage' towards Redemption. For them the whole Land of Palestine (including the territories captured in the 1967 Arab-Israel war) belongs to the Jewish people and must be held in trust for the coming Messiah. The Haredi groups such as Neturei Karta (NK), the `Guardians of the City', are much more strict in their adherence to the Halakha, Jewish religious law, than Gush Emunim. The most orthodox or `fundamentalist' among them do not even recognize the State of Israel: for them the condition of exile is an existential one, fundamental to the very concept of Jewishness. If Jewish `fundamentalism' can embrace such divergent alternatives as NK and GE, can the term be meaningful or useful?

The question, of course, is theoretical. By now it should be clear that the meanings, or possible applications, of the F-word have strayed far beyond the umbrella of the 'Abrahamic' monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Sikh `fundamentalists' took control of the Golden Temple of Amritsar, and when Indira Gandhi sent the troops in, they murdered her in revenge. Hindu 'funda­mentalists' demolished the Babri Masjid Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992, believing it to be the site of the birthplace of the deity Rama, setting off communal rioting that led to thousands of deaths. Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have taken up arms against Tamil separatists, breaking with centuries of pacifism. For their part the Tamils, who pioneered the suicide bomb a decade before Lebanese squads to take an oath to the Hindu god Shiva.

So if `Fundamentalism' it encompasses many types of activity, not all of them religious. The wing of the Scottish National Party least disposed to cooperate with other parties in the Scottish parliament has been described as `fundamentalist' by its oponents. ane Kelsey a New market policies adopted by the Labour government in the late 1980s and named after the Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas, as `Economic Fundamentalism'. `The "fundamentals" of the programme'-market liberalization and free trade, limited government, a narrow monetarist policy, a deregulated labour market and fiscal restraint­ were systematically embedded against change'. Like holy writ they were assumed to be `givens', based on common sense and consensus, and beyond challenge.

In Germany members of the Green Party who supported Joskha Fischer in joining Gerhard Schroeder's 'Red-Green coalition' are described as 'realos' (realists), in contrast to the 'fundis' (fundamentalists) who hold true to the party's ideology of pacifism, opposition to nuclear power, and radical `Green' environmentalisms. The tension between  the two wings was brought to breaking-point when Fischer, as Germany's foreign minister, supported the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 while his Green Party colleague, environment minister Jurgen Trittin, was pressured into abandoning a scheme to make auto manu­facturers pay for the cost of recycling old cars, and forced to make painful compromises in his plans for phasing out nuclear power'?

Similar tensions between ideological purists who stick to the `fundamentals' of their cause without compromising their principles, and the political realists who argue that real gains can be achieved through bargaining and compromise, exist in all political and cultural movements; indeed they are the very stuff of democratic politics: the energy of political life is released most often when the ideals of party activists are pitted against the realities of power. Virtually every movement, from animal rights to feminism, will embrace a spectrum ranging from uncompromising radicalism or `extremism' to pragmatic accommodationism.

For feminist ultras such as Andrea Dworkin, all penetrative sex is deemed to be rape. For some animal liberationists, every abbattoir, however humane its procedures, is an extermination camp, while in the rhetoric of radical prolifers such as Pat Robertson, the 43 million foetuses `murdered' since Roev. Wade are an abomination comparable to the Nazi Holocaust.

At the borders of the semantic field it now occupies, the word fundamentalism strays into `extremism', 'sectarian ism', `ideological purism'. It seems doubtful, however, if these non-religious uses of the word are analytically useful. There may be some similarities in political and social psychology between, say, anti=abortionists, animal rightists, Green Party activists, Islamist agitators, and the Six ~1116j

imply kinship. The genetic bond that defines fundamentalism in its more central, and useful, meaning-the 'fundamentalist DNA', as it were-is sharper and more distinctive than `extremism'. The original `Protestant' use of the word anchors it in the responses of individual or collective selfhoods, of personal and group identities, to the scandal or `shock of the Other'.

Although many religious activists (especially the evangelical movements within Christianity and Islam) believe they have a universal mission to transform or convert the world, all religious traditions must face the problematic of their parochial origins, the embarrassing fact that saviours and prophets uttered divine words in particular languages to relatively small groups of people at particular historical junctures.

The Matrix of Al-Quada

Firsth Three major influences: August 26, 1941, Mawlana Mawdudi founds the Islamist party Jam'at-I Islami (Islamic Party) and in 1928 already Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Both where a reaction to Colonialism, and both in fact as I explained in part one, A/B. This second part now will gives for the first time a complete overview of various Islamic groups in a way that can be quickly comprehended without first reading several dozens of book in order to start puzzling these facts together. With every group I give however a recommended reading list for those who want to read more details.

The best book about JI only came out in 2003 written by CNN correspondent Maria A. Ressa,

Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda Newest Center of Operations in Southeast

In fact the Jemaah Islamlyah (Islamic Community) (JI) is Indonesia's leading Islamic extremist group. Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir founded the JI in 1973. Their intent was to build as an Islamic self-governing commune to advance their goal for a strict Islamic society. Sungkar was always political leader while Bashir provide ideological and religious doctrine. Although they started out with only 30 students, activities soon attracted the attention ( authorities of the repressive Suharto regime, and both Sungkar and Bashir were arrested 1978, and they spent nearly four yea jail for passing literature advocating a lamic state for Indonesia. In 1985, Sur and Bashir fled Indonesia and set up in Malaysia. Malaysia was by this time a self-styled Islamic state, so the Islamiyah prospered. Sungkar and B were able to recruit younger Islamic leaders such as the Afghan veteran Hambali.

These new leaders were sent to Afghanistan for military training and to fight the Soviet Union. By the mid-1990s the organizational structure of the JI was complete, with operations controlled by a leadership headed by Hambali and five division chiefs reporting to him.

The goal of the Jernaah Islamiyah was theocratic Islamic state to include Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

Because of this goal, leaders of the JI formed working alliances with Islamic groups the Malaysia Mujahideen Group (KM the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and so on.

In 1998, Sungkar and Bashir move Jernaah Islamiyah's main organizationback to Indonesia. The fall of the Suharto regime gave the JI a chance to expand. Sungka Bashir headed the group in Indonesia Hamball remained in Malaysia. Hambal already developed closer ties with Bin Laden. In 1999, Sungkar died, leaving Bashir in complete control of JI. B recruited members at his religious school Ngruki village in Solo, Central Java.

JI is organized into operation cells, and its cell leaders carry out operations independent of central decision making, thus leaving its leaders deniability. Hambali always operated underground planning and directed large-scale operations against non-Muslims. Training for JI operatives came from a Qaeda training camp in Poso, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Fruits of this training came in a bombing campaign against Christian churches on December 24, 2000. Thirty churches throughout Indonesia were bombed.

The bombing of the Sari Club on Bali's Kuta Beach on October 12, 2002, directed international attention to the Jemaah Islamiyah. Foreign tourists, mostly Australians, were the targets, and 188 were killed and hundreds more wounded in the bombing. For several years, foreign governments, especially the United States, had been pressuring the Indonesian government of Megawati Sukarnoputri to act against the JI. The Indonesian government had been reluctant, because a crackdown on the JI might stir up Islamic opposition to the government. Other governments, however, in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore had arrested JI operatives throughout 2001. Although Bashir continued to deny JI's involvement in the Bali bombing, anti-terrorist experts around the world believed that Hambali and the JI were behind it. In October 2002, the United Stated formally declared it a terrorist organization subject to sanctions.

The Jemaah Islamiyah has been hurt by the arrests of key leaders. Abu Bakar Bashir has been under arrest since 2001, and a jury convicted him on September 4, 2003, of treasonous activity but not that he headed the Jernaah Islamiyah terrorist network. This verdict included a four-year jail term, but a December 2003 appeal reduced his sentence to three years. His imprisonment did not prevent the JI from launching a suicide bombing attack on the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in early August 2003. Increased publicity and police investigations led to the arrest of Hambali on August 12, 2003, in Thailand. The loss of both the spiritual head, Bashir, and the operations expert, Ham has seriously weakened the JI, but there still enough activists left to undertake ter ist operations. From his prison cell B warned in November 2003 that all Mu countries with close ties to the United St were subject to attack. See also Bashir,

Bakar; al-Ghozi, Fathur Rohman; Ham (Riduan Isamuddin): Sharon Behn, "C Warns Muslims Linked to the U.S.," Washington, Times (November 17. 2003), John Bur "Islamic Network 'Is on a Mission' Te Group," Financial Times (London) (Oct. 2002), p. 12; Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qada Global Network of Terror (New York: Colu University Press, 2002); Rohan Gunaratna, " Links That Bind Terror Groups," Guardian ( dou) (October 15, 2002), p. 1; Ellen Nakast and Alan Sipress, "Al Qaeda Figure Seize Thailand," Washington Post (August 15, 2003 p. A1.

Muslim Brotherhood (al-lichwan al-Muslimun) (Egypt) The Muslim Brotherhood has lo leading Islamic fundamentalist tion in Egypt. In 1928, Hassan a schoolteacher and a follower school of Islam, founded th Brothers in Ismaila, Egypt. His tent was for this organization t( leader in the anti-colonial against the British. From the beg leadership of the Muslim Broth nounced both capitalism and N failures and looked toward a re lam. This involvement in politic Muslim Brotherhood in direct to the British. During World W cret organization with the Mus ers, the Special Order, was form out violent attacks against the thorities. British authorities a Banna for anti-British activities war, al-Banna launched a terr paign against what he consid enemies of Islam. On Decembe the Egyptian government banne lim Brotherhood. Leadership of t Brother retaliated with the assas the Egyptian Prime Minister Fahmy el-Nokrashy Pasha on 28, 1948. On February 12, 1949 tian secret police killed al-B-, Cairo street. Despite the bann Muslim Brotherhood and the as of al-Banna, the Egyptian gove lowed the Muslim Brotherhood t tute itself because King Farou advisors wanted to use it as a tween the Egyptian nationalis Communists. Sheikh Hassan almoderate cleric, assumed the post of the Muslim Brotherho( chief rival, Saleh al-Ashmawy cleric, attracted support from radical elements in the Muslim Brotherhood.

The leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood supported the new government of Gamal Abdel Nasser until it became apparent that he had no intention of founding an Islamic government. Both Nasser and his chief assistant, Anwar Sadat, had made contact with the Muslim Brotherhood before their seizure of power in July 1952. By the early 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood had two million members scattered throughout the Muslim world, but most of its political strength remained in Egypt. The leadership formed a terrorist branch, the Secret Organ, to carry out assassinations against political leaders opposing its policies. Nasser's settlement in 1954 of a Suez Canal dispute caused the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood to attempt an assassination of Nasser in Alexandria, Egypt, on October 26, 1954, but they failed. The Egyptian government arrested Hodeibi and other leaders. Several of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were executed and over 4,000 were arrested and imprisoned. After the Nasser government banned the Muslim Brotherhood, both leaders and members went underground. It was at this time that the influence of Sayyid Qutb became the dominant philosophy in the Muslim Brotherhood. In his book, Signposts Along the Road, and other writings, he declared perpetual religious war (iihad) against all religions othe