Fundamentalism

Description

Essays considering how global fundamentalism influences our understanding of modern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

Thirty years after the Iranian Revolution and more than a decade since the events of 2001, the time is right to examine what the discourse on fundamentalism has achieved and where it might head from here. In this volume editors Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt offer eleven interdisciplinary perspectives framed by the debate between advocates and critics of the concept of fundamentalism that investigate it with regard to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The essays are integrated through engagement with a common selection of texts on fundamentalism and a common set of questions about the utility and disadvantages of the term, its varied application by scholars of particular groups, and the extent to which the term can encompass a cross-cultural set of religious responses to modernity.

Although the notion of fundamentalism as a global phenomenon dates from around 1980, the term itself originated in North American Protestantism approximately six decades earlier and acquired pejorative connotations within five years of its invention. Since the early 1990s, however, many scholars have endorsed the view that the notion of fundamentalism—as relying on literalist interpretations of the scriptures, firm commitment to patriarchy, or refusal to confine religious matters to the private sphere—facilitates our understanding of modern religion by enabling us to identify and label structurally analogous developments in different religions. Critics of the term have identified problems with it, above all that the idea of global fundamentalism confuses more than it clarifies and unjustifiably overlooks, downplays, or homogenizes difference more than it identifies a genuine homogeny.

The editor's rigorous exploration of both the usefulness and the limitations of the concept make it an excellent counterpoint to the many books that have a great deal to say about the former and very little to say about the latter. It will also serve as an ideal text for religious studies, history, and anthropology courses that explore the complex interface between religion and modernity as well as courses on theory and method in religious studies.

Contributors
Margaret Bendroth
Khalid Yahya Blankinship
Jean Axelrad Cahan
Lynda Clarke
Dan D. Crawford
David L. Johnston
Shaul Magid
Gordon D. Newby
Florian Pohl
David Harrington Watt
Simon A. Wood

Sujets

• Comparative Religion
• Essays
• Philosophie et théologie
• Infiel
• Yihad
• The Fundamentalism Project
• Ahl al-Hadith
• Risalah (fiqh)
• Usuli
• Muhammad Abduh
• Pan-Islamism
• Islamic terrorism
• Fideism
• Islamic fundamentalism
• Wahhabi
• Fundamentalist Christianity
• Christian right
• Shia Islam
• Jihad
• Ad hominem
• Mahdi
• Usulisme
• Religion
• Djihad
• Mohamed Abduh
• Muhammadiyah
• Kafir
• Argumentum ad hominem

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 26 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611173550
• Langue: English

Extrait

FUNDAMENTALISM
Studies in Comparative Religion Frederick M. Denny, Series Editor
FUNDAMENTALISM
Perspectives on a Contested History
::
Edited by Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt

The University of South Carolina Press
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fundamentalism : perspectives on a contested history / edited by Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt.
pages cm.-(Studies in comparative religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-354-3 (hardbound : alk. paper)-ISBN 978-1-61117-355-0 (ebook)
1. Religious fundamentalism-History. I. Wood, Simon A. II. Watt, David Harrington.
BL238.F825 2014
200-dc232013042689
Contents
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt
Fundamentalists of the 1920s and 1930s
David Harrington Watt
The Idea of Militancy in American Fundamentalism
Dan D. Crawford
Fundamentalism and Christianity
Margaret Bendroth
America Is No Different, America Is Different -Is There an American Jewish Fundamentalism? Part I. American Habad
Shaul Magid
America Is No Different, America Is Different -Is There an American Jewish Fundamentalism? Part II. American Satmar
Shaul Magid
The Jewish Settler Movement and the Concept of Fundamentalism
Jean Axelrad Cahan
The Concept of Global Fundamentalism: A Short Critique
Simon A. Wood
Muslim Fundamentalism, Salafism, Sufism, and Other Trends
Khalid Yahya Blankinship
Fundamentalism and Shiism
Lynda Clarke
Fundamentalism, Khomeinism, and the Islamic Republic of Iran
Lynda Clarke
Fundamentalism Diluted: From Enclave to Globalism in Conservative Muslim Ecological Discourse
David L. Johnston
Islamic Education and the Limitations of Fundamentalism as an Analytical Category
Florian Pohl
Conclusion
Gordon D. Newby
Afterword
Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Series Editor s Preface
As series editor of Studies in Comparative Religion and as a religious studies professor who has addressed fundamentalism for many years in courses and discussions with students and colleagues, I am confident that this book will take the extensive, diverse, and often passionate discourses on fundamentalism to a newer and higher level as we think of the concept globally and comparatively. As editors Wood and Watt remarked early in discussing their proposal with the press: Originally embedded in American Protestantism, fundamentalism was subsequently applied to Islam and thence to Judaism and world religions generally. Here Islam is the critical pivot in the development of a genuinely global concept and hence the attention paid to it. Audience was also a consideration, seminars on Islam being one of the course categories for which our book is designed.
I am pleased to add that this book will in itself be valued as a major study in comparative religion, not only with respect to theories and methods but equally with respect to deeper understandings of actual brand name religious traditions in their own spaces and times. I am confident that the book will be received as a solid contribution to advanced scholarship as well as an accessible guide for college-and graduate-level students in a variety of humanities and social science courses beyond religious studies as well as thoughtful readers outside academe generally and in a wide range of religious traditions and organizations.
Frederick M. Denny
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful for the generous support we have received from the Harris Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the American Academy of Religion, the Midwestern Political Science Association, Columbia University, and Monash University all gave us opportunities to try out our ideas about fundamentalism before intelligent, generous, and critical audiences. We are grateful to them.
We would also like express our gratitude to the many scholars and others who have helped propel this project along. Jim Denton, Mahmoud Ayoub, Laura Levitt, Sidnie Crawford, Julia Keown, G. Antony Wood, Marco Abel, Deborah Ruigh, Joel Carpenter, Jennifer Hammer, and Matthew Brittingham deserve special mention. We are particularly indebted to them for all the help that they have given us. Finally, thanks go to our three anonymous readers for their extremely helpful comments.
Introduction
Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt
This book explores the ways in which the concept of fundamentalism does and does not illuminate developments in modern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. For reasons elaborated below, Asian religions are not examined in detail. At issue is whether the word fundamentalism captures something important that is not captured-or not as well-by some other word. Readers will quickly discover that in exploring this issue, as Gordon D. Newby observes in the conclusion, the book is at war with itself. This is intentional. We have self-consciously created a book in which there is a range of voices. This is reflective of a spectrum of views that scholars have offered on the topic. This includes the views of those who find the concept not merely helpful but important as well, those who have concerns about it but do not reject it, those who find that it has been misapplied in critical instances, and those who simply find it unhelpful. While there are, then, many more than two perspectives on the topic, one may identify two very broad groups of scholars, one at each end of the spectrum: those who find the concept illuminating and those who do not. We take the latter position but have not privileged that here, as the selection of essays and the conclusion reflect.
It would be a considerable understatement to characterize the literature on fundamentalism as extensive. The production of books and articles grew exponentially during the last two decades of the previous century and continues at a prolific rate. In view of this circumstance, one might speculate whether there can be any ground left to explore that has not been thoroughly covered already. 1 Yet the rubric of fundamentalism clearly continues to provide a venue for important discussions about the nature of religion in the modern world. The essays in this book do not survey all of these discussions, but they do engage a variety of works arguing for and against the claim that fundamentalism is a helpful term. Taking the literature as a whole, scholarly and popular, the affirmative position is ascendant. Within the humanities the picture is less clear, with dissenting voices both numerous and prominent. The most prominent scholars arguing that use of the word fundamentalism facilitates our understanding of religion in the modern world are probably Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, who edited the well-known multivolume Fundamentalism Project (University of Chicago Press, 1991-1995). With various refinements, Marty and Appleby have continued to advance this argument in a variety of venues, scholarly and nonscholarly. Among various publications, one may cite Appleby s 2003 book, coauthored by Gabriel A. Almond and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World , 2 which is the final installment in the Fundamentalism Project, his encyclopedia article, 3 and Marty s foreword to The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History. 4
Many others who have argued for the usefulness and importance of the term include Bruce Lawrence, Youssef M. Choueiri, Malise Ruthven, Karen Armstrong, Richard Antoun, Brenda Brasher, Laurence J. Silberstein, and Ian Lustick. Lawrence s Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age is a seminal work on the topic. Choueiri s Islamic Fundamentalism: The Story of Islamist Movements is now in its third edition. Ruthven s Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction is a telling indication of the extent to which many find that the term has taken hold. His very short introduction is published in an Oxford University Press series alongside scores of introductions to topics such as humanism, capitalism, socialism, communism, nationalism, and fascism. The inclusion of fundamentalism here might be taken as evidence that the argument for the usefulness of the term has been won. While Armstrong does not write in the same vein of academic scholarship as the other writers mentioned, she has made an important contribution to the discussion. Her book The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism is a New York Times best seller and has been an assigned textbook in numerous university courses in the English-speaking world. Thousands of undergraduate students have been influenced by her interpretation of fundamentalism, one that draws on the work of Marty and Appleby. 5
How, in a nutshell, do these scholars see the word fundamentalism as illuminating? They find that, in Charles B. Strozier s representative wording, something important has been happening in the world during the last several decades that is not captured by words such as traditionalism, conservatism , and orthodoxy. 6 The word fundamentalism captures this important something, and nothing is to be gained by using an alternative term. Indeed, alternative terms are likely to be more misleading than fundamentalism , if not simply inaccurate. 7 The important something is real: