In Our Time - Fundamentalism

Episode Date: April 22, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the roots and the consequences of religious fundamentalism. It still surprises many Western liberal intellectuals that religion survives at all. That fundamentalism flourishes is even more of a mystery. And if we shift the reach of fundamentalism to include the baser totalitarianisms, then the 20th century stands as sad and tragic exemplar of the power and the violence of what often begins as a belief in wholeness, oneness and fundamental values. The latter half of the 20th century particularly has seen the surprising and unexpected rise of religious fundamentalism - in all the major faiths. Violent acts have been done in the name of these forms of religion - suicide missions by Moslem extremists; attacks on abortion clinics by Protestant fundamentalists in the USA; killings at the Hebron mosque by a member of a Far Right Jewish religious group. Not surprisingly, the rise of religious fundamentalism is commonly seen as one of the most threatening forces now. But is it? With Karen Armstrong, writer on the history of religious ideas and author of A History of God: From Abraham to the Present; Tariq Ali, film-maker, writer and author of The Book of Saladin.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the latter half of the 20th century has seen the surprising and unexpected rise of religious fundamentalism in all the major faiths. Violent acts have been done in the name of these forms of religion,

suicide missions by Muslim extremists, attacks on abortion clinics by Protestant fundamentalists in the USA, killings at the Hebron mosque by members of a far-right Jewish religious group. Not surprisingly, the rise of religious fundamentalism is commonly seen as one of the most threatening forces now, but is it? Joining me is one of today's leading religious thinkers Karen Armstrong, a prolific writer on the history of religious ideas. She's currently finishing a book on fundamentalism in the world's three main religions. It'll be published next year.

I'm also joined by Tariq Ali, known for his Marxism in the 16th. these days he's better known as a filmmaker and writer of over half a dozen books on world history and politics. His latest book, a novel called The Book of Saladin, is the second in a quartet on the encounter between Islam and Christianity. Karen Armstrong, you wrote in a recent article, in the 50s and 6thes, religion seemed to be an increasingly marginal activity. But in the 70s and 80s, religion started to dominate the headlines in an inconceivable way. Why do you think that came about? The religious resurgence of the 1970s, 1980s had long been simmering, long been preparing. But religious people had finally decided that they had the power to fight back against the secularist establishment.

It was a movement that sprang from great terror, great fear. Every single fundamentalist movement that I've studied has been convinced that they were about to be wiped out by the secularist or liberal establishment. It usually begins as a response to an attack by secularism and liberals. Now, this seems odd to us because we have certainly experienced in this country, secularism is a very liberating thing. But this has not always been the case in such places as the Middle East, for example, where secularism is often experienced as an assault upon religion.

If you think of the Ataturk, for example, suppressing Sufi orders, closing madrasas, taking away funds, the Shah of Iran. Some of the most extreme forms of Sunni fundamentalism in the Islamic world came to birth in the concentration camps in which Nasser had interred members of the Muslim Brotherhood. So secularism has been experienced as an assault, but there are also huge. huge fears raised by modernity itself, by our modern culture, by our modern society, which is very difficult. And there's a real rift going right the way through our polarised societies. So it's very difficult for liberals and secularists and fundamentalists to see things from the same point of view. It's been, it's one of the extraordinary things that when you look at the way a fundamentalist will look at the world,

they look at it with the kind of horror that we might feel when we contemplate the Auschwitz death camp. And there's also an element in this that you think the spiritual part of the nature of Homo sapiens and you prefer to think of homo-religiosis. The spiritual part has been damped down, has been suppressed, has been brutalized. I think, yes, brutalised is perhaps a bit hard, a bit hard,

but our rational modernity, our scientific rationalism, has been so successful in the Western world that around about the 18th century, we decided that reason alone was the avenue to truth. Now, in the more traditional societies, reason was always seen as complementary to what they used to call myth, which was another way of looking at reality in a more spiritual, intuitive, mystical way.

rather the kind of truth we experience from art, for example, which can't necessarily, you can't say what a Beethoven quartet is about or prove why it works, but it is telling you something, it is affirming something, and religion at its best, myth at its best was like that. Now, when you start looking at religious doctrines and religious beliefs in a rational way, then it's impossible because reason and science

doesn't really address questions of meaning, ultimate meaning. It doesn't help us really when we look at absolute tragedy. When we experience tragedy, we are very likely to go off and listen to a poem or listen to a great piece of music or look at a sunset or go to a friend and weep. But reason has nothing to say when faced with Auschwitz. So I think there has been a void in modern culture, which many people find that they can find no ultimate means. meaning in life. And so the religious are trying to fight back, trying to bring God back, trying to find meaning back. Fundamentalism is one of those attempts. But it's a misguided attempt.

Well, thank you. It's given us a lot to unravel there, Karen. Terry, let's take on the first part of Karen Armstrong's proposition there, that fundamentalism has grown in strength and intensity over the last, let's say, 50 years, because it feels itself threatened. what's your reaction to that? Well, I'm not sure I agree with that, actually. I think that the examples Karen has given, the example of Ataturk in Turkey, where he made a very revolutionary attempt to weed religion out and to modernize that country, succeeded for a whole period.

And it's only in recent years of the last 20 years that the failure of the time, Turkish regime to democratize properly, in my opinion, and to use all sorts of anti-democratic measures to keep the fundamentalist groups out of power. That's what creates the problem. And I think the same can be said about Nasr's Egypt or parts of the Middle East today, that in these countries where you tend to have rulers, authoritarian rulers, who do not permit opposing views of any sort, then the fundamentalists or whoever else, the people on the left were also victimized by NASA, creates a lot of problems. So I don't think that the problem lay exclusively in the hostility to fundamentalist religion.

I think the problem also lay and still does in quite a lot of Middle Eastern countries in the inability of these countries to establish a democratic structure. Yes, I would agree with you. I mean, in some countries such as Iran, there was no other means for the people to express their opposition to the regime of the Pahlavi's. But of course, it's very difficult to establish democratic institutions and structures overnight. It took us hundreds of years to develop these institutions in the West,

to develop a democratic, secular, pluralist society. And these countries are having to do it in, like yesterday. No, but the interesting thing is that quite, a lot of the modernizing elites in these countries who are quite happy to mimic the West in various other ways are very reluctant to mimic the good things, which are a civil society, which are democracy, which are regular elections, which are a free press, which are the right to publish what you want, the right to say what you want. And that, I think, creates a very big problem. I mean, a classic case, an example, is Algerian.

today where you had a government, dictatorial government, bureaucratic, one-party state-type government, they opened it up, they began to have elections, the religious opposition emerged, the religious opposition won the general election, and the second round of the election was cancelled several years ago because they were fearful that they would win.

And so what we've had in Algeria is a civil war. I think I'd like to tighten it back to the original question. I don't know quite whether you've answered, It wasn't a question I asked you, actually, but I would like to ask the same question I asked Karen. She's given an explanation for why she thinks this fundamentalism has grown in intensity. Now, let's assume that on the whole it has. What would your explanation be for it?

My explanation would be that they're different explanations for different parts of the world. I think in the United States, where we've talked about Protestant fundamentalism, I think it is groups of people, the fundamentalists, I'm saying, are groups of people who have a very clear political and social agenda and who use religion to try and implement that agenda and who use terrorist forms like the bombing of abortion clinics to try and implement that agenda and who declare that gays and homosexuality are forbidden

by the scriptures and that people who are homosexuals are beyond redemption. So there is here a very clear. clear-cut political social agenda to reverse many of the reforms which most of the Western countries went through in the 60s and 70s. Yes, it's quite interesting, though, when you look at the case of American Protestant fundamentalism that at the beginning of the century, when their movement was just taking off, American Protestantism was the first form of modern fundamentalism to surface in about 1910, fundamentalists were quite often on the left of the political spectrum. It was after they'd been

ridiculed by the liberal establishment that they moved to the right and became more reaction. You remember that famous trial about evolution in 1925 when John Scopes challenged the ruling, forbidding evolution to be taught in the schools? And the fundamentalist with try to defend the ruling against evolution. And the media really took them to town and talked about them in a, because liberals feel threatened by fundamentalists as much as fundamentalists feel threatened by liberals. Can I move it on slightly here? You argue that fundamentalism, Karen Armstrong,

that fundamentalism can be seen as innovative, modern and highly adaptive, as I understand from New York. Could you give us some reasons for this claim, which might strike people as rather odd? Then we tend to think that these are throwbacks to the Middle Ages. People thought of Ayatollah Khomeini as a sort of going back to a medieval form of Islam. In fact, what he was doing for the Shia was as revolutionary as though the Pope were to abolish the mass. He was overturning centuries of Shiite thought, which had insisted on the separation of religion and politics,

and said that a cleric could rule. And many of these fundamentalist movements are profoundly affected by modernity. They are making something. They're looking at religion in an entirely new way. The way that Protestant fundamentalists read scripture in a literal way, as though it was scientific fact, is a product of modernity. People didn't read the scriptures in this literal way before. They read it in a more mystical, allegorical way.

so that these are modern, but they also are helping people to adapt to modern life. That's often been the case, if you look back in history, that a messianic movement has very often helped people to adapt to major change in a religious way. Very few people could understand the philosophy of Kant or Locke, for example. But if these ideas were presented to them by John Wesley, talking about, or George Fox, as an inner enlightenment in a spiritual term, which was familiar to them, then they could cope with it.

And similarly, I think, if you look at Iran, the revolution helped to usher in representational forms of government that Iran had never really succeeded in getting before. But just to take a, not such a mundane, but take a particular example, you claim that the women taking on the veil, which a lot of people in the West think this is, Going back to the Middle Ages, this is subjugation, this is putting women in their place,

and you've written very strongly about women. You argue that this is actually a form of countering modernity. This is a form of liberation for them in a way. Well, I think that there's nothing sacred about Western dress per se, and a lot of women in Islamic countries are trying to return to a pre-colonial form of living. and these women are often, if you examine the views of these women who have gone back to the veil in a country such as Egypt, they are not adopting typical gender views.

They don't have traditional views about the subjugation of women. They have surprisingly liberal views. What these women are doing is many of them have come from a rural, pre-modern background. They have coming to the university. in a modern city such as Cairo and the veil and an Islamic lifestyle is a sort of gives them a sort of capsule

of familiarity to help them to make that right of passage from a pre-modern rural society into the modern era. What's your... All the Muslim women I know and meet and talk to all over the Muslim world would challenge that very, very seriously.

They would feel, for instance, in Iran, it was not a voluntary act putting on the veil. I mean, I personally believe people can dress any way they want. I don't believe there should be laws to stop people, whether they want to cross-dress or put veils on their head or be transvestites. It's sort of utterly irrelevant to me. It's their civil right. Where I do object is when governments force people and force women that you cannot appear in public unless you are properly dressed. A classic case now is the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Now, Afghanistan is a country where religion was not ever imposed like that prior to the victory of the Mujahideen. The Taliban now more or less force women to clothe themselves from head to foot and say there's only should be one hole through which women can be seen. So whole swathes of women are not allowed onto the streets unless they're dressed like that and they're not allowed to teach in schools. So one has to be careful.

when one talks about the liberating effects and the liberating impact of things such as the veil, it's very, very different. Also, you will find that in virtually all the Muslim countries, historically, this is not a hark back to the medieval time, because in the medieval time, very few women actually war veils. It's a 20th century interpretation of what religion was, and in the peasantry and in the countryside, women are very rarely veiled. To this day.

That's absolutely true. And of course, coercion of any sort, whether it's by a fundamentalist government or a secularising government, is bad. I mean, the Shars used to take the women's veils off with bayonets in the street and rip them up. So then you get a backlash for the male. And I quite agree with you. When a fundamentalist government comes to power, it's often very easy for them to suppress women and to give men a chance to exercise some control. over their women at home when things aren't going so well on the political spectrum.

I agree with you. It can be extremely badly exploited. Sorry, excuse me. We've talked about politics one way and another. But in religious terms, hasn't religious fundamentalism, as it were, spiked its own message by being so vehement and... Yes. It's become a complete distortion of religion. All the great world faiths insist that the one litmus test of any religiosity, any spiritual idea, any theology, is that it issues in practical compassion. Now, the fundamentalisms have become theologies of rage and resentment and revenge.

And once you have this, then you have a complete travesty of religion. Religion, you can use religion, you can abuse it, and this is becoming, this is an abuse. It's also true that very often what's happened is that fundamentalists have have turned the extremely complex mythology of their faith into an ideology that is so simplistic and so reductive that it actually distorts the faith. Terry Carly, do you have a sense that fundamentalism has specific historical roots in Western society? Let us say that the Crusades, where we had Christianity, Islam and Judaism involved, but Christianity in Islam principally,

was a crucible out of which a great deal that has followed in the last 900 years has come. Or is it something inherent in monotheisms themselves that will always come back and come back and come back. Well, I think one can't be too a historical about this. I think one has to place these movements in the context of their history. And I think the crusades were both ideological in the sense of rescuing the holy,

lands from the infidel and also had a very clear function, which was the conquest of more territory. There was an imperial aim to the Crusades. But of course, I think the effect of the Crusades in that part of the world was catastrophic. And it's interesting that the Pope now wants to make a public apology to the Muslims and Jews for what the Crusaders did when they occupied Jerusalem for the first time in the 11th century. But I think a lot can be traced to that open assault by the crusading fundamentalists of that period against other religions and an attempt to wipe them out is what happened. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the scars of the Crusades to this day are felt in the Middle East.

Crusades made anti-Semitism, a chronic disease in Europe. Very often crusaders would begin their journey to the Holy Land by killing Jews at home. and today fundamentalists in Egypt, for example, refer to Christianity as Al-Salibia, Crusade. It is curious that we use the word in an admiring fashion. A crusading journalist is a good crusading journalist who fights for rights. Indeed, and he chose that at some level in the West we've somehow internalized and accepted crusading, I think, even though that is an interesting point. Do you think, Tarakale, that fundamentalism is the word fundamentalism, and what Karen Armstrong has been talking about, and you've been talking about, necessarily briefly,

but there we go. Do you think that can apply as well to political ideologies in this century, which has been a century of great violence often held together, funneled through characterized by great political, in the sense of big political ideologies? Do you think the same things apply? I think they have very similar tendencies, Melvin. I mean, if you look at two ideologies, which, created enormous suffering in the 20th century.

One is, of course, fascism, which ruled Germany in Italy. And that was an extreme form of political fundamentalism, and the other was, of course, Stalinism. And the Goulags, another extreme perversion of an ideal, which went very wrong. And I'm afraid I have an awful feeling. that now, even as we speak, we are seeing the birth of a new fundamentalism,

a human rights fundamentalism, which says go to war to defend the human rights of one group and don't mind about the human rights of another group. I think there is, fundamentalism is in the air today. Yes. Can you take Tarragali's point on Karen? Do you see similarities between fascism,

and the fundamentalisms of the religions? This has been a century of genocide from start to finish. And I think that fundamentalist fantasies are very often picked up on genocidal tendencies. And I think that ideologies always, very often, go to the same core ideas in a society, in a culture. And so, you know, I think definitely that there's a huge similarity between the religious fundamentalists and the political ones, very often almost self-consciously.

done because some of the Muslim-fund ideologues wanted to make Islam an ideology that could take on modern ideologies, so they modelled themselves on this. But how would this fit in? I'm going to ask Tariq this, although I'd come back to you, how this fit in Tarik, with Karen's very

convincing description earlier in the programme that fundamentalisms in religion grew because they felt threatened. They felt that the secular world was deriding them and out to get them. But surely these have been the other things you're talking about fascism and silence

and have been threatening, not threatened. Well, I don't accept, carousy on that. I don't think that modern fundamentalisms arise because people feel threatened. I think modern fundamentalisms arise because groups of people, some very intelligent, decide that the only way they can fight against what they don't like is by wearing the mask of religion.

And I think this has been extremely, true in Pakistan today, in Afghanistan, in Iran, it's beginning to crack up already the fundamentalist facade is beginning to be dented by opposition from below. So I think it's a new way of making politics, religious fundamentalism. That is essentially what it is and people have tried other ideologies. They haven't worked and they're now giving religion a world. Briefly, because I'm going to come to a final point. Okay, I think if you look at some of the ideologies, I think think that there is such a degree of neurosis in some of the fantasies, say some of the millennial fantasies of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, for example, huge conspiracy fears,

huge fears of the void, that I think that you've got a huge level of uncontrollable fear and neurosis there, as well as political manipulation. But there you have religion as therapy almost. Yes, but religion is therapy. Which more or less takes me to where I want to finish this on, because one of the things you said in introductory remarks, Karen, was that people felt that the part of themselves, which didn't respond to reason, the part of themselves that could not be addressed by secular thought and by secular, the driver of the secular societies, the consumer society, part of them insisted that this part of them was religious and they would hold to it.

How far do you, Tarrick, how far do you think that's a reason for, part of the reason for the fundamentalist? because we have to say that Karen doesn't, we've spoken of fundamentalism and extremism. Your view is that most fundamentalists are getting on with their business. Yes, they're not all rape bombers and suicide bombers and assassins. No, they're not all that, but they are indulgent towards it. Let's put it like that. Because the mass mobilizations which took place in Iran,

or the scenes of hysteria at Khomeini's funeral, the way in which people went out to fight the war against the Iran-Iraq war, 12-year-old kids, 14-year-old kids, was frightening. Yes. And the... Which is before in Europe, unfortunately. Yeah. And in fact, 12 and 14-year-olds were fighting wars in the borders in the 13th, 14th and 15th century. It isn't new to send out kids when the men get killed.

But I'd like to address this point, do you think there's something in people's lives which secular society is denied? And that is one of the reasons they cleave so strongly to release. I don't believe that, actually. I don't think that that is necessarily the case. I think also something we haven't touched on is that in most of the Muslim countries, fundamentalism has grown with a big decline in material life, in economic standards, in the inability of the state to provide a safety net. And so they move to those groups which offer them some form of safety net. partially spiritual and largely quite a lot of these fundamentalist groups have money and they set up the equivalent of soup kitchens and take over what the state used to do in the old days. I think that's true and I think what fundamentalists very often do is create a counter-sciety, a counterculture, which is a criticism of mainstream society and which often stresses this lack of spirituality. And I think that people do want spirituality, but they're going about it in the wrong way in the fundamentalist groups. It's almost a revolution against the hegemony of scientific rationalism.

Why do you think there isn't any big growth of fundamentalism in Western Europe? It's an interesting thing. You see, I think that we've seen such terrible things in Western Europe in this century, that the simplistic ideas, about God are dying to us. But I think there's a great hunger for spirituality in Western Europe. I've only had a minute or two left. There's only one thing to do and ask the biggest question I can think of,

which is, do you think that it is possible to have an ideology, religious or secular, which does not lend itself to fundamentalism to extremism? No, I would think that that's all, when you're dealing with something as profound as religion, something as potentially explosive as religion, which is touching on the obscure sources of fear, pain and desire, then I think you've always got the possibility of extremity. And religions have to find means of containing this.

Is this the same in politics, Terry? I don't think it has to be the same in politics. I think what is key in politics to prevent this extreme fanaticism is the involvement of the population as much as possible in the most democratic way, in the most accountable way, in participation in the affairs of the state. When that stops happening, then I'm afraid, you do reach for extreme solutions.

So it's democracy and more democracy, is the solution. Yeah, yeah. Would you agree with that? I think democracy is great. Fundamentalists, however, look at democracy with dread and horror. And this is one of the huge gaps between us all. Well, thank you both very much indeed. I enjoyed that. I hope you did.

You who are listening, thanks to Karen Armstrong and Tarragalli. Next week we'll be talking about artificial intelligence. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.