Fundamentalism - A Very Short Introduction.pdf

This book is the fruit of several years’ reflection about the revivals
that seem to be occurring in all the major religious traditions and
the capacity these revivals have for generating highly charged social
and political conflicts in a shrinking globalized world where people
of differing and competing faiths are having to live in close
proximity with each other. While recognizing that fundamentalism
is a fact of life in the 21st century – one that was illustrated in the
most spectacular way on 11 September 2001 – this introduction
seeks to untangle some of the meanings associated with the term,
despite its obvious drawbacks.
Fundamentalism originated in the very specific theological context
of early 20th-century Protestant America, and its applicability
beyond its original matrix is, to put it mildly, problematic.
Nevertheless, as I hope to show through numerous examples and
parallels, there are compelling family resemblances between
militancies or fundamentalisms in different religious traditions.
They may not add up to a coherent ideological alternative to the
triumph of liberal democracy as described by Francis Fukuyama in
his celebrated 1992 essay The End of History and the Last Man. But
they are symptomatic, I believe, of the spiritual dystopias and
dysfunctional cultural relationships that characterize the world of
what some contemporary commentators are choosing to call ‘Late
Capitalism’.
Many people, students, friends, and colleagues, contributed to this
book during its gestation. Students at Dartmouth College,
Aberdeen University, the University of California, San Diego, and at
the Colorado College helped to focus my thinking with their
questions and essays. Academic friends and colleagues, including
the late Jim Thrower, the late Albert Hourani, Hans Penner, Gene
Garthwaite, Philip Khoury, Arthur Droge, Robert Lee, Charles
Tripp, Sami Zubaida, Max Taylor, David Weddle, Ketil Volden,
Efraim Inbar, and Fred Halliday, helped stimulate my thinking by
inviting me to conferences, lectures, and seminars. I would like to
express my thanks to them all, and to Martin Marty and Scott
Appleby for inviting me to two meetings of the Fundamentalism
Project in Chicago in 1990 and 1993 which first aroused my interest
in the subject and gave me the opportunity to meet and talk with
scholars from several disciplines and countries.
Elfi Pallis kindly supplied some of the information on Jewish
fundamentalism that appears in Chapter 6.