This is something I have been thinking about for a while.
The correctly maligned Samuel Huntington seems to blame Islamic fundamentalism on a “Muslim youth bulge” in the Maghreb especially but also in other Islamic countries, and says as if by way of explanation, “young people are the protagonists of protest, instability, reform and revolution.” Otherwise, he blames “urbanisation, social mobilisation, higher levels of literacy and education,intensified communication and media consumption, and expanded interaction with Western and other cultures.” Huntington argues that this has undermined traditional village and clan ties and created alienation. He has quite a convoluted knot of an explanation as to why these factors had a different impact in Islamic countries as opposed to the West.
This websiteagrees with Huntington, in a more succinct fashion:
At first I wasn’t satisfied with this explanation, and went looking elsewhere. Bernard Lewis questions the designation “fundamentalism”, as an inadequate way of describing militant Islamists. He seems to think that it is attributable to a sense of loss of greatness and resentment at the West. His explanation was a bit…wishy-washy.
But other cultures and religions have faced Western interference, and haven’t reacted in the same way.
It brought me back to the idea that a population explosion and widespread education was in fact the answer. In Europe there is a low population growth and an aging population, which has been seen as a reason for why a united Germany was no military threat. But what about education? It seems counter-intuitive that education is a reason for militancy. Is it really a mix of youth and education which is so volatile?
One cause is fear of change. Read Karen Armstrong’s “The Battle for God” and you’ll learn a lot about why many religious fundamentalist become militant (and she does not confine her work to Muslims).
I know this is a hijack, but I wouldn’t call Huntington “correctly maligned”. He’s the grand old man of the Comparative Political Science community in America, and he’s justifiably well respected. His book “The Soldier and the State” was extremely well received, and the first real look at millitary-civilian conflicts in a society. It actually spawned an entire subfield in Political Science dealing with that.
“Political Order in Changing Societies”, even though it’s a controversial thesis, (that economic growth is tied to political liberalization) is well argued, and pretty well respected.
In fact, almost all of his stuff is pretty widely respected in the field. The only work of his that’s been reviewed pretty negatively is his latest article (which he expanded into book form) “The Clash of Civilizations”. I remember the controversy when it came out, because it’s so unlike any of his other work, and generally contradicts everything he’s been saying for the past 50 years, and, even though I can’t defend that book, I can and do defend Huntington.
How about the simple fact that Islam has existed for as many centuries as it has?
Look at the history of Christianity (in the USA alone)–I’d say regular bouts of fundamentalism are pretty much inevitable with any long-lived religion.
Yeah, but you haven’t seen such widespread fundamentalism in the West for centuries, and that seems to be tied to education. There are exceptions and pockets, such as the Bible Belt in the U.S., but in the Western world education, and later industrialization, seems to have stymied the influence of fundamentalist religious views. Nor do such views and their popular appeal appear to be a cyclical or phase aspect of religion and its effect on society, instead their preponderance in the past seems to have been based upon ignorance of subjective populations.
Alcibiades: Actually I think all of the above can be implicated to varying degrees, depending on the where and how.
I’ll throw out this essay again, which I think is a reasonable introduction to the subject ( though I’d probably delve back a little farther than he does to the late Ottoman period to discuss some of the conservative backlash against the ‘Young Ottoman’ and ‘Young Turk’ reformists ):
Their are also a number of decent books on the topic ( or some facet of it ). Just off the top of my head, Nikki Keddie ( Iran ), Gilles Kepel, and John Esposito are all worth checking out ( they all have their academic biases, Esposito in particular, but their command of the facts seem pretty solid ).
Asylum, still, Political Christian Fundamentalism had a spectacular rise in political, social, and cultural influence in the USA in the last quarter of the 20th Century – in the middle of the greatest prosperity and expansion of social-welfare programs and after the opening up of higher education (GIBill and Pell Grants). Didn’t get as materially militant as Islamism, probably because in the US, they start already having a stake in preserving important aspects of the “establishment” (specially, the prosperous economy and the US’s position as Hegemon) and, importantly, said “establishment” provides the means for their doing better by working “within the system” (no exiling of Falwell or driving Robertson into the underground); they DID make and continue to make a big push to gain dominance of policy decisions (Christian Coalition, Moral Majority, etc.), attracting followers to a great degree based on that the brave new world that the “intellectual elites” were building was (a) not benefitting the common folk and (b) contrary to the Faith’s traditional values “that made us great once”.
The rise in influence of fundamentalist Christianity in the last quarter of the twentieth century always struck me as being attributable to politics, and I don’t see its grip extending too far beyond that into other people’s psyches.
The South was a Democratic stronghold for decades and the Republicans saw that there was a large fundamentalist segment there that was becoming disenfranchised with the Democratic Party. By altering their platform to include “moral values” the Republicans brought in a large voting block to their party which simultaneously hurt the Democratic Party, weakening their grip in the south (this is an overly simplified version of events). However there are still a large number of Republicans who distance themselves from some of the more extreme stances of the Religious Right and the Religious Right’s thinking and philosophies don’t seem to have spread too far out of the South, only their influence on policies has.
IOW, fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S. has seen an upswing in power and influence, but I don’t think that the actual number of people who are fundamentalists or their locations have increased or spread, and their increase in influence is simply because one of the major political parties caters to them for an increased power base. This distinction is why I’m not sure that we can get an even comparison between them and fundamentalist Muslims in the Middle East who have seen their numbers and locations increase and spread as well as their influence.
Thanks Tamerlane - a quick skim indicates its hard going, so I’ll take some time to read it properly.
SisterCoyote - I am part way through Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, and wasn’t aware of the other book, so thanks.
Captain Amazing - I’m aware of Huntington’s credibility before “Clash of Civilisations”, but some of the views he expresses in that book are demonstrably unfair and biased in order to support his theory: further, I have noticed anecdotally, the theory has become an excuse for xenophobia.
Asylum and JRDelirious: doesn’t the abrupt rise (both in militancy and acceptance) in Christian fundamentalism in the US co-incide with the baby boom?