The ultra-Orthodox are often referred to in Hebrew as Haredim, or “those who tremble” in the presence of God (because they are God-fearing). Unlike the Orthodox, the ultra-Orthodox continue to reject Zionism—at least in principle—as blasphemous. In practice, the rejection of Zionism has led to the emergence of a wide variety of groups, ranging from the Neturei Karta (Aramaic: “Guardians of the City”), which does not recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel, to the political parties of the Haredim, which occasionally determine which of Israel’s major parties is able to form a government. It is important to distinguish between the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox and the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox. The term Ashkenazi (plural Ashkenazim) originally referred to Jews from Germany, and Sephardi (plural Sephardim) originally referred to Jews from Spain and Portugal. But in Israel the terms are often used to designate Jews of northern European origin on the one hand and Jews of Middle Eastern origin on the other.
The Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox
The Ashkenazi Haredi political parties have concentrated primarily on obtaining funding for their communities and on enforcing strict conformity to their interpretation of Jewish religious law concerning issues such as observance of Shabbat, conversion, kosher dietary laws, and, in their view, the desecration of the dead by archaeologists. Since the Six-Day War, however, most Ashkenazi Haredim have tended to support the position of the militant religious Zionists against “land for peace,” despite their continued theoretical opposition to Zionism and the state it produced.
Shas and the Sephardi underclass
The third major form of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel is represented by the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox and their political party, Shas—Shas being a Hebrew acronym for Sephardi Torah Guardians. The Sephardim, in the broad sense of Jews of Middle Eastern origin, are, by and large, less well-educated and less prosperous than the Ashkenazim, and many of them feel that they are discriminated against. Indeed, the Sephardim who vote for Shas tend to be motivated less by belief in the party’s program of strict conformity to Jewish religious law than by frustration and resentment caused by their perceived second-class status in Israeli society. Shas is thus an excellent illustration of the fact that fundamentalist movements often owe their success to political and social grievances rather than to strictly religious ones. In addition to its religious and cultural platform, Shas provides schools and other social services for poor Sephardim; in this respect it is similar to some Islamic fundamentalist movements.
Islamic fundamentalism
Because the term fundamentalism is Christian in origin, because it carries negative connotations, and because its use in an Islamic context emphasizes the religious roots of the phenomenon while neglecting the nationalistic and social grievances that underlie it, many scholars prefer to call Islamic fundamentalists “Islamists” and to speak of “Islamist movements” instead of Islamic fundamentalism. (The members of these movements refer to themselves simply as Muslims.) Nevertheless, the term Islamic fundamentalism has been current in both popular and scholarly literature since the late 20th century. This article, therefore, will occasionally follow this common usage.
The subject of Islamic fundamentalism attracted a great deal of attention in the West after the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79—which deposed Iran’s ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919–80), and established an Islamic republic—and especially after the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 by al-Qaeda, an international Islamist terrorist network. The spectacular nature of these events may have lent plausibility to the common but mistaken belief in the West that Islam and Islamic fundamentalism are closely connected, if not identical. In fact, however, not all Muslims believe that the Qurʾān is the literal and inerrant word of God, nor do all of them believe that Islam requires strict conformity to all the religious and moral precepts in the Qurʾān. More important, unlike genuine Islamic fundamentalists, most Muslims are not ideologically committed to the idea of a state and society based on Islamic religious law.
The character of Islamist movements varies greatly throughout the world. Some Islamists resort to terrorism, and some do not. Some espouse leftist political and economic programs, borrowing ideas from Marxism and other varieties of socialism, while others are more conservative. Most Islamists, however, insist on conformity to a code of conduct based on a literal interpretation of sacred scripture. They also insist that religion encompasses all aspects of life and hence that religion and politics cannot be separated. Like most fundamentalists, they generally have a Manichaean (dualistic) worldview: they believe that they are engaged in a holy war, or jihad, against their evil enemies, whom they often portray as pawns of Jewish and Masonic conspiracies in terms taken directly from the anti-Semitic literature of 20th-century Europe. Messianism, which plays an important role in Christian, Jewish, and Shīʿite Islamic fundamentalism, is less important in the fundamentalism of the Sunni branch of Islam.
Islamist movements have been politically significant in most Muslim countries primarily because they articulate political and social grievances better than do the established secular parties, some of which (the leftist parties) were discredited following the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1990–91. Although the governments of Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf region have represented themselves as conforming strictly to Islamic law, they continue to face internal opposition from Islamist movements for their pro-Western political and economic policies, the extreme concentration of their countries’ wealth in the hands of the ruling families, and, in the Islamists’ view, the rulers’ immoral lifestyles.
To some extent, the Islamists’ hostility toward the West is symptomatic of the rejection of modernity attributed to all fundamentalist movements, since much of what is modern is derived from the West. (It should be noted, however, that Islamists do not reject modern technology.) But it would be a mistake to reduce all such hostility to a reactionary rejection of all that is new; it would also be a mistake to attribute it entirely to xenophobia, though this is certainly an influence. Another important factor is the Islamists’ resentment of Western political and economic domination of the Middle East. This is well illustrated by the writings of Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of al-Qaeda, which repeatedly condemn the United States for enabling the dispossession of the Palestinians, for orchestrating international sanctions on Iraq that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens in the 1990s, and for maintaining a military “occupation” of Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91). Bin Laden also condemned the Saudi regime and most other governments of the Middle East for serving the interests of the United States rather than those of the Islamic world. Thus, the fundamentalist dimension of bin Laden’s worldview is interwoven with resentment of Western domination.
Puritanical revivalist movements calling for a return to the pristine Islam of the Prophet Muhammad have occurred periodically throughout Islamic history. During the period of European colonial rule in the 19th and 20th centuries, however, these movements began to take on a polemical, apologetic character. Muslim reformists such as Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) and Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1838–97) stressed that a return to the “rationalist” Islam of Muhammad—which was not incompatible, in their view, with science and democracy—was essential if Muslims were to free themselves from European domination. This argument was subsequently adopted by some Islamic fundamentalists, though many others condemned democracy on the grounds that only God’s laws are legitimate. Some Jewish and Christian fundamentalists have rejected democracy for the same reason.
Among the Islamist movements that have attracted the most attention in the West is the Palestinian movement Hamas, which was founded in 1987. Its name, which means “zeal” in Arabic, is an acronym of the name Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmiyyah (“Islamic Resistance Movement”). Hamas was created primarily to resist what most Palestinians viewed as the occupation of their land by Israel. There is thus a clearly nationalist dimension to this movement, though it is also committed to the creation of a strictly Islamic state. Hamas opposed the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and insisted on fighting a jihad to expel the Israelis from all of Palestine—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean and from Lebanon to Egypt. It justified its terrorist attacks on Israelis as legitimate acts of war against an occupying power. Like some other Islamist movements in the Middle East, Hamas provides basic social services—including schools, clinics, and food for the unemployed—that are not provided, or are inadequately provided, by local authorities. These charitable activities are an important source of its appeal among the Palestinian population.
In January 2006 Hamas was the victor by a wide margin in elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, and it was asked to form a government. This development led to much speculation among political observers about whether Hamas could evolve into a moderate nonviolent political party, as many other terrorist groups have done (e.g., Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang in Israel and the Irish Republican Army in Ireland). Since the 2006 elections, leaders of Hamas have repeatedly stated their willingness to support a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders. This willingness was enshrined in the 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies.
Sikh fundamentalism
Sikh fundamentalism first attracted attention in the West in 1978, when the fiery preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale reportedly led a march to break up a gathering of the Sikh Nirankari movement (from Punjabi nirankar, “formless,” reflecting the movement’s belief in the nature of God), which orthodox Sikhs considered heretical. Bhindranwale, like other fundamentalists, stressed the need for conformity to a sacred text (the Adi Granth) and for the creation of a Sikh state governed according to sacred law. But, as in the case of the Protestants of Northern Ireland, such fundamentalist concerns were subordinated to nationalistic ones. Sikh fundamentalists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries sought to create an independent Sikh state in the Indian province of Punjab. Although images of holy war pervaded their rhetoric, their primary enemy was the Hindu state of India rather than secularism per se. Sikh fundamentalism was thus primarily a nationalistic separatist movement.
In June 1984, Indian troops stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar and killed Bhindranwale and hundreds of his armed supporters. The assassination, as well as what Sikhs considered the desecration of their holiest shrine, infuriated the Sikh community and led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister, by two of her Sikh bodyguards in October 1984. This in turn sparked riots in which Hindu mobs killed more than 2,000 Sikhs. By the early 1990s, the central government had succeeded in crushing Sikh militancy in India.
Hindu fundamentalism
What is usually called “Hindu fundamentalism” in India has been influenced more by nationalism than by religion, in part because Hinduism does not have a specific sacred text to which conformity can be demanded. Moreover, conformity to a religious code has never been of particular importance to Hindu groups such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For the members of such groups, Hinduism is above all a symbol of national identity rather than a set of rules to be obeyed.
The nationalistic orientation of the BJP is reflected in its name, which means “the Party of the Indian People.” Similarly, the name of the Rashtriya Swayamesevak Sangh (RSS), a “self-defense” force associated with the BJP, means “National Volunteers Corps.” Neither the BJP nor the RSS advocates the creation of a Hindu state. The principal concern of both groups is the danger posed to “the Hindu nation” by Islamic proselytization among the Scheduled Castes (formerly untouchables) and lower-caste Hindus; both groups have also vehemently opposed Christian proselytization in India for the same reason. In RSS tracts, there is little reference to specific Hindu beliefs, and its members acknowledge that they are not themselves religious.
The nationalism of the BJP and the RSS is also reflected in their religious and moral demands; in this respect they differ significantly from Christian fundamentalist groups in the United States. In a notorious incident in 1992, the Babri Masjid (“Mosque of Bābur”) at Ayodhya was demolished by a mob of Hindu nationalists; the subsequent rioting led to the deaths of more than 1,000 people. Although there was real religious fervour associated with the belief that the site of the mosque was the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama and the location of an ancient Hindu temple, the attack was above all a reflection of the Hindu nationalists’ belief in the essentially Hindu character of India and their perception of Muslims as inherently alien. The fact that Hindu nationalism is sometimes called “Hindu fundamentalism” illustrates how indiscriminately the term fundamentalism has been used outside its original American Protestant context. Following periodic victories in national elections beginning in 1996, the BJP succeeded in forming several governments of India, though some were short-lived.
Conclusion
Although the terms fundamentalism and fundamentalist have entered common parlance and are now broadly applied, it should not be forgotten that the myriad movements so designated vary greatly in their origins, character, and outlook. Thus, Islamic fundamentalist movements differ from their Christian and Jewish counterparts in having begun as essentially defensive responses to European colonial domination. Early Islamic fundamentalists were reformers who wished to affirm the value of their religion by returning to what they sought to portray as its pristine original form; their movements only gradually acquired the militancy characteristic of much religious fundamentalism today. On the other hand, these movements share with Christian and Jewish fundamentalism an antipathy to secularism, an emphasis on the importance of traditional religiosity as their members understand it, and a strict adherence to sacred texts and the moral codes built upon them. Although these and other common features are important as sources of insight, each fundamentalist movement is in fact unique and is best understood when viewed in its own historical and cultural context.
Henry Munson