The Western media often give the impression that the embattled
and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as
"fundamentalism" is a purely Islamic phenomenon. This is
not the case. Fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced
in every major faith in response to the problems of our
modernity. There is fundamentalist Judaism, fundamentalist
Christianity, fundamentalist Hinduism, fundamentalist Buddhism,
fundamentalist Sikhism and even fundamentalist
Confucianism. This type of faith surfaced first in the Christian
world in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth
century. This was not accidental. Fundamentalism is not
a monolithic movement; each form of fundamentalism, even
within the same tradition, develops independently and has its
own symbols and enthusiasms, but its different manifestations
all bear a family resemblance. It has been noted that a fundamentalist
movement does not arise immediately, as a kneejerk
response to the advent of Western modernity, but only
takes shape when the modernization process is quite far advanced.
At first religious people try to reform their traditions
and effect a marriage between them and modern culture, as
we have seen the Muslim reformers do. But when these moderate
measures are found to be of no avail, some people resort
to more extreme methods, and a fundamentalist movement is
born. With hindsight, we can see that it was only to be expected
that fundamentalism should first make itself known in
the United States, the showcase of modernity, and only appear
in other parts of the world at a later date. Of the three
monotheistic religions, Islam was in fact the last to develop a
fundamentalist strain, when modern culture began to take
root in the Muslim world in the late 1960s and 1970s. By this
date, fundamentalism was quite well established among
Christians and Jews, who had had a longer exposure to the
modern experience.
