Fundamentalism

I really could not have chosen more appropriate texts for my feminist theories course this fall if I had full knowledge of the events that were to happen on September 11. I had no idea that the reading assigned for September 11 would be Joanna Kadi’s Thinking Class, examining the issue of anti-Arab discrimination and violence in the United States. And as debates began to swirl around Islamic fundamentalism, my class was trying to generate a working definition of fundamentalism in the context of Uma Narayan’s Dislocating Cultures. We learned that the term ‘fundamentalism’ has specific origins related to Protestant Evangelicism in the United States in the early twentieth century. In this context, fundamentalism meant taking the bible as the literal word of God, subject to no interpretation. It called for a return to the fundamentals or foundations of Christianity. Some scholars also saw fundamentalism as a response to modernity, and the challenges this was taken to pose to the fundamentals. Of course, these fundamentals are taken to be in the category of Given or Unchanging or Absolute. And this, as my students and I decided, is the decisive move in the conjuring trick. It is exactly this move that escapes notice.

Clearly, the term ‘fundamentalism’ has escaped its original meaning. As Wittgenstein might say, it has broken out of its original language-game. The term is now most frequently applied to the Arab/Muslim/Islam (with no distinction between these appellations) Other.

In order to understand the term ‘fundamentalism’ I encouraged my students to examine its uses: who uses it? To whom is it applied and by whom? Under what circumstances and in what conditions is it applied? Is it ever a matter of self-ascription? My students and I struggled with these questions, both on an intellectual level and an emotional one. We came to the tentative conclusion, subject to being revisited, that the term ‘fundamentalism’ is used as a kind of shorthand that serves two related purposes. First, it is used to demarcate a category of people who are radically different from and other than us (in this case the us of the US). This radical Otherness then provides some kind of explanation of the events of September 11that has the form "they did this because they are fundamentalists." On this view, that is all we need to know or can know. We can know fundamentalism, but we can’t know Them.

In examining how far the term ‘fundamentalism’ has moved from its origins, students began to question whether the term can be meaningfully applied to belief systems and practices that do not have a religious basis. Can one be a political radical fundamentalist? Or more worrisome for some students was the possibility of a patriotic fundamentalism that advocates the return to the intentions of the framers of the Constitution which would call for a major scaling back of social services provided by the Federal government. This question of patriotic/Constitutional fundamentalism is a very interesting one, one which might well achieve more visibility in the coming months, most directly in the context of antiterrorism legislation that curtails civil liberties and freedoms as such legislation wends its way through Congress.