After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism, Islamic fundamentalism is widely portrayed as the next great adversary of the West. The American missile strikes could fit into this picture. But Karen Armstrong, who is writing a book about fundamentalism, thinks this is a caricature of the truth. THE recent spate of bombings in East Africa has been attributed to Muslim fundamentalists. It seems yet another instance of the Islamic threat to which the media constantly directs our attention. Fundamentalism is often depicted as a wholly Muslim phenomenon, even though the term cannot usefully be translated in this connection into Arabic. In fact, fundamentalism has erupted in all the major faiths. There is now fundamentalist Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and even fundamentalist Confucianism. Fundamentalism in the modern sense first appeared in the West at the turn of the century, when some American Protestants coined the term as a badge of pride to describe their reformist movement.

Nor is fundamentalism inherently violent. Those fundamentalists who do resort to acts of terror, in each faith, constitute only a tiny minority. Most fundamentalists are peacefully trying to live a religious life in an increasingly secularised world. Why has this form of religiosity become so prevalent during the second half of the twentieth century and what are fundamentalists trying to achieve?

Fundamentalism is essentially a reaction against secular modernity. That is why it first surfaced in the United States, the showcase of modernity and the first modern nation to separate religion and politics in its Constitution. For many people all over the globe, such a secularising polity is blasphemous. Religion, they feel, demands total commitment and application; it cannot be privatised and reduced to such a marginal position in society. Fundamentalists in all the major faiths also have problems with democracy, even in the United States: government is not supposed to be by and for the people; this is a usurpation of the sovereignty of God.

Accordingly, all over the world, as our Western modernity has spread to other parts of the globe, religious fundamentalist movements have sprung up alongside it. Hence fundamentalism is not a passing phase; it is part of the modern scene and will go with us into the next millennium. It can be seen as one of those post-modern movements, such as environmentalism and feminism, which try to correct some of the imbalances of modernity. As they have watched their faith being relegated to the wings, fundamentalists have fought to bring it back to the centre stage. In this they have been remarkably successful.

During the 1960s, it was generally assumed that religion would never again play a leading role in public affairs. Secularism seemed the irreversible trend. This changed dramatically during the 1970s. The decade saw the rise of the Christian right in the United States, now temporarily in eclipse but certain to make a comeback. Jewish fundamentalism erupted in Israel and has become increasingly powerful, whether we refer to the Orthodox parties whose support is now essential for any Israeli government, or the religious Zionists in the illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. In 1979 the world watched in astonishment as an obscure Iranian mullah brought down what seemed to be the most stable and progressive regime in the Middle East.

Fundamentalist movements are political but they are not simply obsessed with power. Politics is just part of their battle for God; they are also deeply concerned with private morality and spirituality. Some engage actively in politics, but others withdraw from what they see as the contamination of the modern world to create an enclave of pure faith, as a first step towards the reclamation of society. Obvious examples of this trend are the Bob Jones Fundamentalist University in the United States, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in New York and Tel Aviv, and the group known as the Takfir w'al hijra in Egypt during the presidency of Anwar al-Sadat.

Fundamentalisms may oppose aspects of modernity, but it would be a great mistake to imagine that they are archaic movements. Like any reformers, fundamentalists often hark back to the inspiration of a lost Golden Age: to the early Church; to the pre-Holocaust Jewish communities in Eastern Europe; to the era of the Prophet Muhammad. But it is never possible to reproduce the past exactly. Fundamentalisms are essentially innovative forms of faith that could have come into being in no time other than our own.

Thus Ayatollah Khomeini was not a throwback to the Middle Ages, as the press often assumed. His brand of Shiite Islam was so innovative that many mullahs found it shocking. His transformation of Shiism from a quietist to a revolutionary, political faith overturned centuries of most sacred tradition. If one can imagine the Pope abolishing the Mass, one gets some idea of how radical this was. The Ayatollah was essentially a man of the twentieth century and, unless and until we have grasped this, we will fail to understand our own times.

Similarly, those Protestants who oppose the teaching of evolution in the United States because it contradicts Genesis are reading their bibles in a new and wholly modern way. In the pre-modern world, Christians, Jews and Muslims all permitted and even relished highly allegorical and adventurous exegesis. Now Protestants are reading Scripture according to the canons of Western scientific modernity, when we expect clearly expressed information from a text. In part this new literalism was a frightened response to the uncertainties of modernity, which allowed questions to remain indefinitely open and which even suggested that all our knowledge was inherently and inescapably subjective. Protestants evolved their doctrine of the infallibility and literal truth of Scripture during the late nineteenth century, at exactly the same time and for the same reasons as Catholics made obligatory their doctrine of papal infallibility. All wanted a point of absolute certainty in a world of bewildering confusion and ambiguity.

This brings us a to a very important point. Fundamentalisms are not simply pragmatic, cerebral movements. They are inspired by deep fears, anxieties and disappointment. Ours is a particularly difficult modernity. It took us nearly 400 years of revolution, bloodshed, alienation and exploitation before we were able to implement it in the West. We should remember this when we decry, as we sometimes do, the inability of Islamic countries to create democratic, secularised and rational societies. Modernity has not only been a recent arrival in the Islamic world, but it has been imposed by the colonial West and is experienced as alien, foreign, oppressive and contemptuous of local tradition.

EVEN in the West, modernity fills many religious people with rage and despair. We can see this in the apocalyptic rhetoric of those Protestant fundamentalists who expect an imminent End-of-Days. They see the United Nations as a satanic body, the European Union as the abode of foreign influence. Those Christian militiamen responsible for the Oklahoma bombing see the United States government as an evil empire. The fact that such major modern institutions fill so many with such dread shows how deeply alienated fundamentalists feel from the world they live in.

In all the Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalist movements I have studied, there is a terror of annihilation. Religious people feel that they are being wiped out by their secular governments or by their more liberal co-religionists. No culture can afford to ignore such deep-rooted anxieties. It is crucial that we both acknowledge and try to assuage such fears, which can, very easily, modulate into violence. So far we have not done very well. In my research I have also noted that fundamentalism develops in symbiotic relationship with an aggressively secularising force. It developed, for example, among those Muslim Brothers who were incarcerated in Jemal Abdul Nasser's concentration camps in Egypt, and among those imprisoned and tortured by Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran.

Dismissing fundamentalism as the preserve of a few crazies is inappropriate, therefore: it reveals profound dissatisfactions with our society which it is dangerous to ignore. Attempting to suppress it is also counter-productive. When the Shah's soldiers used their bayonets to remove women's veils, women donned Islamic dress on principle. People who have experienced secularism as an invasive force, whether it is imposed upon them by their own people or an imperial power, will fight hard to preserve a religious identity that gives meaning to their lives in an increasingly alien world.

But, as the recent bombings show, it is also a mistake to exploit fundamentalists for our own ends. This was the mistake of President al-Sadat, who tried to use the Islamists as a political power base: they became a Frankensteinian monster that killed him. Similarly the Israeli government initially courted Hamas to undermine the PLO. In the same way, the Americans were happy to arm and encourage the Islamists of Aghanistan against the Soviets during the Cold War; the people they call terrorists today were then called freedom-fighters. Unless we learn to treat fundamentalists with more respect, we will drive some to still more desperate measures.

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