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The Rise and Fall of Fundamentalism
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11897 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1987 |
3,389 Words |
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Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr
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For the past decade, the Islamic world has appeared to be on the verge of an explosion that could set a billion people on a collision course with the West, disrupt the flow of trade and resources, and engulf the world in terrorism and war.
With so much political ferment caused by the tidal wave of fundamentalism, there has been much speculation as to whether the worst has passed or whether Islamic religious zealotry will continue to grow in power and appeal. "Whither Islamic fundamentalism?" continues to be the paramount question in the minds of statesmen and scholars alike - Muslim as well as non-Muslim.
Although the ideas that produced Islamic fundamentalism have been espoused since the 1950s, its first manifestations occurred in 1977. In that year, the fall of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan from power under pressure from the religious alliance Nizam-i Mustafa (Order of the Prophet) and the abduction and subsequent execution of the Egyptian minister of religious endowments by the Takfir wa'l Hijra (Condemnation and Migration) fundamentalist group ushered in an era of politicized religious dissent and activism.
The trend that began in Egypt and Pakistan in 1977 reached its zenith with the religiously inspired 1979 revolution in Iran. The success of a fundamentalist movement in toppling one of the most stable and formidable Muslim states resulted in the proliferation of fundamentalism across the Islamic world. The Iranian revolution was not only a source of great encouragement to other religious activists but also provided fundamentalists with material resources and bases of operations, which facilitated their greater assertiveness. The euphoria of the revolution and the "domino-like" collapse of monarchies and republics alike before the onslaught of fundamentalist movements dealt a heavy blow to the morale of the regimes in power, rendering them susceptible to agitation by religious activists.
In the years following the Iranian revolution, much has happened to give credence to these fears. Sporadic uprisings, civil strife, war, terrorism, and general political catharsis, associated with an array of Islamic fundamentalist movements, have shocked the stability of the global order from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Notable disturbances have occurred in Indonesia, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain, disrupting the conduct of statecraft and raising the specter of war. Pakistan and Sudan voluntarily succumbed to the gauntlet of Islamic activism and became "Islamized" from within. The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, the burning of the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan in the same year, the capturing of U.S. hostages in Iran for 444 days in 1979, the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and the 1983 bombing massacre of 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French soldiers in Lebanon all served notice as to the prospects and perils of Islamic fundamentalism.
The danger of the consistent prominence of fundamentalism in the politics of Muslim societies becomes compounded by the serious nature of the political, social, and economic problems gripping those societies. Although the kind of stresses and structural inadequacies that exist in Muslim countries also typify modernizing societies the world over, in recent years an array of external as well as internal factors have coalesced to create particularly volatile situations in Muslim
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