Fundamentalist forces seen worldwide
By Rudolf Grimm
HAMBURG (DPA): With the Iranian revolution in 1979, religious fundamentalism made its impact for the first time on the consciousness of the world as an explosive political force.
At the same time, the revolution gave enormous impetus to radical tendencies throughout the Islamic world -- in Arab states, in Turkey and Pakistan, in Indonesia and Black Africa.
In their eyes, a successful "holy war" had been waged in Iran against a westernized ruler. Differences in faith were pushed into the background as Sunni Moslems admired the single- mindedness with which the Shiite Islamic republic went about trying to create political and economic independence.
Radical elements had been becoming more prominent ever since the late 1960s. Their aim was a return to an exemplary "theocracy" of the prophets as well as a resurrection of the strict laws to bring back into the fold societies which had strayed from the true path.
Their fight for influence and hegemony was directed principally at the rulers in various countries.
In Egypt in 1981, President Anwar Sadat was assassinated after a ban had been imposed on radical groups. In Sudan, the fundamentalist National Islamic Front came to power while, in Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front won in 1991 a decisive electoral victory which was annulled by the armed forces.
In Tunisia and Morocco, there has been social unrest with a fundamentalist background. In Afghanistan, the radical Taliban militia now controls most of the country.
In the eyes of the western world, Islamic fundamentalism is characterized by hostage taking and other acts of terror against western organizations and individuals.
U.S. political scientist Samuel P. Huntington said that at the end of the Iranian revolution, a sort of intercultural war between Islam and the west broke out.
In Christianity, especially with North American Protestants, but also among Jews -- above all in Israel -- and Hindus, religious fundamentalism in the past decades has spread and gained momentum.
The origins of the movement at the turn of the last century which aimed at bringing into force the fundamental principles of faith had its origins in the United States. And that is where the widely circulated Protestant writings known as "the Fundamentals" gave their name to the movement worldwide.
There are various explanations to account for the phenomenon. "The Internationale der Unvernunft" (The International of Irrationality) is the sub-title of a book published by German political scientist Thomas Meyer about fundamentalism in the modern world.
A different view is given by his French colleague, Gilles Kepel, who sees in diverse religions a common rejection of the modern: the causes of most maladies -- from materialism and the collapse of the family to crime and drug addiction -- are put down to our era's distance from God.
Other authors place political aspects of fundamentalism in the foreground and turn to social and economic problems as the causes. For the Egyptian Mohammas Said el Ashmawy, the characteristics of Islamic fundamentalism are misleading: the movement is not about a return to the fundamentals of the faith -- the Koran -- but exclusively about politics and ideology.
Another political scientist, Bassam Tibi, who originates from Syria but who teaches political science in Germany, sees no revival of the religion but "a new version of totalitarianism under conditions of global crisis."