Fundamentalism

The image of bearded clerics ruling a heretofore avowedly secular and Western-friendly Islamic country sent shock waves through the West and the Muslim world. Of particular concern among political commentators and scholars was the power of religion to contribute to the kind of revolutionary political transformation that students of history had come to associate only with modern forces like nationalism and Marxism. A revolution in the name of religion suggested to many a reassertion of premodern thinking and hence a step backward in Iran's development. Much the same view surrounded the rise to prominence of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, which occurred against the backdrop of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Indeed, for many Western liberals, the two events had obvious dangerous parallels: a religious takeover of politics, retrograde attitudes and policies toward women, religious intolerance, and suppression of dissent. These very themes received popular treatment in Margaret Atwood's 1986 novel The Handmaid's Tale, which portrays the United States as a theocratic fundamentalist nation along the lines of postrevolution Iran.

To explain the revolutionary turn in Iran, scholars of the region drew on traditional social-movement theory, especially the work of Max Weber (1864–1920), whose interpretive connection to fundamentalism remained at the time unarticulated. In fact, it was in the course of analyzing the Islamic revolution in Iran, and less dramatic but equally worrying events elsewhere in the Middle East (e.g., Egypt, Algeria, and Syria), that such connections began to emerge. Scholars largely agreed (1) that the cause of the Islamic revolution lay in a crisis of cultural authenticity brought about by the Shah's failed attempts at political and social modernization; (2) that the response to this crisis was the molding of traditional Shii ideas and symbols into an ideological force for change; and (3) that the ideological formulation of Islam exhibited in the Islamic revolution was part of a larger pattern of political religion common throughout the Middle East and the larger Muslim world. Not all scholars viewed fundamentalism as a useful tool for explaining this trend, and among those who did, there were various definitions of fundamentalism proffered. Two important interrelated questions, however, informed the general debate about this trend that some called "fundamentalism." First, is it a uniquely modern phenomenon? Or is it part of a cyclic pattern of social response that can be found throughout Islamic or world history? Second, is it a progressive movement, one that will allow developing Muslim countries to move forward along the modernization path? Or is it in fact a regressive revolutionary force, one that will impede hopeful advances that had already begun to reshape Muslim societies?

Scholars divided over the modern-versus-perennial question, but, like the academic debate about the nation, a consensus pointed to a modern point of origin for fundamentalism. Scholars also disagreed about fundamentalism's potential to contribute positively to the challenges of developing nations, but, once again, the tendency was to emphasize the backward-looking and thus retarding nature of the movement. Those who advocated a fundamentalist paradigm for understanding the Islamic revolution recognized that the distinction between developing and developed nations prevented direct comparisons between Iran and America. Instead, they proposed a general set of characteristics that defined fundamentalism across social and cultural boundaries, the two most common of which were a totalizing worldview—subsuming every aspect of life under religion—and scripturalism—a devotion to the inerrancy and immutability of sacred Scripture. Fundamentalists, then, rooted in the sole authority of sacred Scripture, approached the world in uncomplicated and uncompromising terms, ordering their lives and their communities (however limited or expansive based on their power) according to a strict set of God-ordained guidelines that separated the saved from the damned.