Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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however, the Reverend Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority in collaboration with important mainstream conservatives in the Republican party to defend religious Christian values. This marked the emergence of the ‘New Christian Right,’ which has become an important factor in American pilitics. Falwell, like most fundamentalists and some other Americans, felt that the feminist movement, the prohibition of school-sponsored prayer in public schools, the teaching of sex education, the gay rights movement, and the legalization of abortion all represented a process of moral decay that had to be halted. While most liberal intellectuals would see opposition to these developments as a rejection of secular ‘modernity’, most religious conservatives would see them as a fight to save their nation’s moral integrity.
The federal government’s attempt to deny the tax-exempt status of many Christian schools founded to circumvent the federally mandated racial integration of public schools was also one of the reasons for the formation of the Moral Majority, but in the 1980s many southern Christian fundamentalists disavowed their earlier opposition to civil rights. The Christian Right nevertheless remained an overwhelmingly white movement that was viewed with suspicion by most African Americans.
While it is true that Christian fundamentalism in the US has often been linked to religious bigotry, by the late twentieth century, Christian fundamentalists worked closely with conservative Catholics, Mormons, and sometimes even Orthodox Jews on moral issues such as abortion, prayer in schools, homosexuality, and the teaching of ‘creationism’ or ‘intelligent design’. They saw themselves as defending their values in the face of the onslaught of liberal and secular values in American society rather than as trying to impose their values on others.
Politicized Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel
Three politicized forms of Orthodox Judaism in Israel (and elsewhere) have often been called ‘fundamentalist’: militant religious Zionism, Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodoxy, and the Shas party, which represents Jews of Middle Eastern origin. These groups are called ‘fundamentalist’ by their critics, not their supporters (Aran 1991; Heilman and Friedman 1991; Hirschberg 1999; Lustick 1988; Sprinzak 1991, 1999; Viorst 2007; see also Munson 2008).
Since the fall of Jerusalem’s second temple in ce 70, most Jews have lived in the diaspora, that is, dispersed far from the Land of Israel promised by God to the Jewish people according to the Hebrew Bible. During their prolonged ‘exile’ (galut) from the Land of Israel, Jews all over the world prayed daily for the coming of the Messiah who would bring the Jews back to the Land of Israel and deliver them from their gentile oppressors. Zionism secularized this traditional messianic theme. Instead of waiting for God and the Messiah to bring the Jews back to the Land of Israel, Zionists argued that Jews should take it upon themselves to return to this land.
Most Orthodox rabbis opposed Zionism on the grounds that it involved humans doing what only God and the Messiah could do. In traditional Judaism, the return to the Land of Israel was inseparable from the messianic redemption of the people of Israel. For humans to return to this land and create a state there was to defy God’s will and postpone the real redemption and the real ingathering of the exiles. Another reason for Orthodox hostility to Zionism was that most of the early Zionist leaders were clearly not interested in a state based on strict conformity to Jewish religious law.
In speaking of Orthodox Judaism, we should distinguish between the ‘modern Orthodox’ and the ‘ultra-Orthodox’. (The ultra-Orthodox themselves generally object to the latter term.) The modern Orthodox insist on strict conformity to Jewish law, but they have
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nonetheless devised ways to participate in modern society in both the diaspora and Israel. The ultra-Orthodox are more traditional and insist on strict separation from gentile society as well as separation from Jews who do not follow Jewish law as strictly as they do. Hostility toward Zionism prevailed among both modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox rabbis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it virtually disappeared among the former when the Holocaust appeared to confirm the Zionist argument that Jews could only be safe in their own state.
Some modern Orthodox rabbis sought to legitimate Orthodox participation in the Zionist movement by severing it from the idea of the Messiah. Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines (1839–1915), who founded the Mizrahi religious Zionist movement in 1902, agreed with the ultra-Orthodox that Jews should not try to ‘force the End’ on their own initiative. He embraced the traditional belief that Jews should passively await the coming of the Messiah, but, unlike the ultra-Orthodox, he argued that the Zionist settlement of the Land of Israel had nothing to do with the future messianic redemption of the Jews and thus did not constitute a heretical defiance of God’s will. This form of religious Zionism was soon displaced by a radically different view, namely that Zionism was itself part of the gradual messianic redemption of the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. The secular Zionists were doing the work of God and the Messiah but they did not yet know it. This argument was made by Rabbi Avraham Kook (1865–1935), and it has remained a basic theme in religious Zionism (Ravitzky 1996).
Religious Zionists are usually referred to as the ‘national religious’ (datim le’umim) in Hebrew. This term captures the fusion of modern Orthodoxy and nationalism that has generally characterized religious Zionism. Many religious Zionists saw the Six-Day War of 1967 as a miracle and as a major step forward on the way toward the messianic redemption of the Jewish people. East Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, Judea, the very heart of ancient Israel, were now once again in Jewish hands. To return any of this land to the Arabs would be to defy God. The religious Zionists who felt this way began to settle in the territories occupied, or as they saw it, liberated, in the Six-Day War. There is also a religious Zionist peace movement, known as Meimad, which advocates giving up much of the territory won in 1967 in return for peace.
For the militant religious Zionists in the settler movement, settling the land won in 1967 and preventing the government from withdrawing from it took priority over anything else. These militant religious Zionists do advocate the creation of a state based on strict conformity to what they consider the laws of God and they did conform strictly to these laws in their everyday lives. But their political activities have focused primarily on settling and retaining the land won in 1967 rather than on creating a state and society based on strict conformity to religious law. Thus, while one can speak of militant religious Zionism as having a ‘fundamentalist’ dimension, it is also essential to remember its nationalist dimension. Militant religious Zionists tap some basic themes in mainstream Zionism, notably the idea that the goal of Zionism is to create a new Jew who will never submit to oppression. For militant religious Zionists, this involves a return to the Judaism of the Maccabees who fought Hellenism in the second century bce much as religious Zionists fight decadent secularism today (Munson 2003b). Mainstream Zionism has always downplayed the religious and ‘fundamentalist’ dimensions of the Maccabean revolt while stressing its nationalistic aspect.
The ultra-Orthodox are often referred to in Hebrew as Haredim, or ‘those who tremble’ in the presence of God because they are ‘God-fearing’. Unlike the modern Orthodox, who are virtually all religious Zionists, the ultra-Orthodox continue to reject Zionism, in principle at
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least, as a blasphemous attempt to bring about the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel by human means when God intended this to be effected by the Messiah. In practice, this rejection of Zionism results in a variety of different political positions ranging from that of the politically insignificant Neturei Karta to Haredi political parties that sometimes determine which of Israel’s major parties gets to govern. (Israel’s major parties often have to make concessions to small religious parties to win the support of a majority of the members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and thereby form a government.)
The Ashkenazi Haredim, that is, the ultra-Orthodox of eastern European origin, differ from the ultra-Orthodox of Middle Eastern origin, who will be discussed below. Unlike the religious Zionists, whose political activities since 1967 have focused primarily on settling and preventing withdrawal from the territories occupied in the Six-Day War, the Haredi (ultraOrthodox) political parties have continued to concentrate primarily on obtaining funding for their community and on enforcing strict conformity to their interpretation of Jewish religious law with respect to issues like observance of the Sabbath, conversion, Kosher dietary laws, and the desecration of the dead by archaeologists. Such issues clearly involve the defense of traditional religious values rather than nationalism. Since the Six-Day War, however, most Ashkenazi Haredim have tended to support the hard-line position of the militant religious Zionists regarding ‘land-for-peace’ despite their continued theoretical opposition to Zionism and the state it produced. This is a striking example of how changing social and political contexts can affect religious beliefs.
The Ashkenazi Haredim traditionally withdrew from surrounding gentile society in the diaspora and continue to separate themselves from mainstream Israeli society. Yet in the last few decades of the twentieth century, they became increasingly aggressive in trying to incorporate their moral code into Israeli law. Like Christian fundamentalists in the United States, they have been torn between the desire to withdraw from society and the desire to reform it. Because of their high birth rate, their numbers have grown, and this has meant greater electoral power. This has been especially evident in Jerusalem, which elected its first Haredi mayor in 2003. Israelis often use Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as metaphors to symbolize the ‘culture war’ between religious and secular Israelis (Faux 2008: 245–52).
The third major form of Jewish militant Orthodoxy in Israel often called fundamentalist is represented by the Shas party, Shas being an acronym for ‘Sephardim Guardians of the Torah’ in Hebrew. Shas is an interesting example of the fusion of militant religious conservatism with a sense of ethnic grievance. Although the term Sephardim originally referred to Jews of Spanish origin, it has come to be used to refer to Jews of Middle Eastern origin, or Mizrahim (‘Orientals’). The Mizrahim are, by and large, less well educated and less well paid than the Ashkenazim, and many of them feel that Israelis of European origin discriminate against them. In addition to celebrating Sephardi/Mizrahi identity and advocating strict conformity to God’s laws, Shas provides schools and other social services for poor Mizrahim. Shas is similar to some Islamic movements in this respect (Hirschberg 1999; Lehmann and Siebzehner 2006).
One can speak of a fundamentalist dimension to Shas insofar as it consistently supports legislation to enforce strict conformity to Jewish religious law. But much of its popular support is rooted in the frustration, resentment, and even rage of those Jews of Middle Eastern origin who feel they have been discriminated against by the Ashkenazi elite of European origin. Most Mizrahim who vote for Shas do not themselves conform to the strict moral code advocated by the party. Like the strongly nationalistic religious Zionist settlers, Shas demonstrates that movements often called fundamentalist often owe their political success
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to secular grievances as well as strictly religious ones. (Shas has tended to take an increasingly hawkish position on peace talks with the Palestinians.)
Islamic militancy in the Middle East
The term Islamic fundamentalism tends to conjure up images of fanaticism and terrorism. This is one reason most scholars of Islam prefer the more anodyne term Islamist. Islamist movements, like their Christian and Jewish counterparts, come in various forms. There are moderate, non-violent Islamist movements like the AK Party in Turkey. There are violent, extremist groups like al-Qa‘ida (al Qaeda). And there are a number of Islamic movements that articulate specific ethnic and nationalist grievances, such as Hezbollah, which represents the Shi‘a of Lebanon, and Hamas, which meshes Islamic fundamentalism with Palestinian nationalism (see Munson 2003a, 2004, 2008; Norton 2007; Pape 2005; Roy 2003).
Most militant Islamic movements clearly resort to violence far more often than do the Christian and Jewish movements commonly called fundamentalist. It is true that Christian fundamentalists were actively involved in the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups (Wade 1987). It is also true that Christian fundamentalists have been involved in attacking abortion clinics and killing doctors who perform abortions (Juergensmeyer 2000). Similarly, it is true that militant religious Zionists have engaged in some violence, notably Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Palestinians praying in Hebron, Yigal Amir’s assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and regular attacks on Palestinians (Shulman 2007). But Christian and Jewish fundamentalists have not engaged in the same scale of violence as militant Islamic groups like Hizb Allah (Hezbollah), Hamas, and al-Qa’ida.
This does not mean that Islam is inherently more violent than Christianity. One can find many verses extolling the slaughter of the enemy in the name of God in the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity (see Deuteronomy 7: 1–2, 7: 16 and 20: 10–18). The history of Christianity is full of holy wars and massacres of Jews condemned as ‘Christ-killers’ and the Holocaust was of course perpetrated by Christians (Carroll 2001). If violence is more commonly used by militant Islamic movements than by militantly conservative Christian and Jewish movements, this is because of the prevailing social and political situation in the Islamic world, and not because of some immutable trait of Islam (see Munson 2005).
One feature that distinguishes Islamism from conservative Christian and Jewish militancy is its anti-imperial dimension. When the European empires subjugated the Islamic world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslims perceived their wars against European imperialism as forms of jihad, or holy war. The distinction between Muslim and infidel became intertwined with the distinctions between the colonized and the colonizer and the oppressed and the oppressor. Thus traditional hostility toward the unbeliever as an unbeliever was now infused with new meaning. This had unfortunate consequences for religious minorities in the Islamic world (much as Irish Protestants suffered from sharing the religion of England).
This anti-imperial dimension persisted in the Islamist movements of the late twentieth century. On February 19, 1978, on the fortieth day of mourning for the ‘martyrs’ who had died in the first protests that eventually mushroomed into Iran’s Islamic revolution, the revolution’s leader the Ayatollah Khomeini declared, ‘As for America, a signatory to the Declaration of Human Rights, it imposed this shah upon us, a worthy successor to his father. During the period he has ruled, this creature has transformed Iran into an official colony of America’ (Khomeini 1981: 215). When Khomeini landed at Tehran airport on February 1, 1979, after fourteen and a half years of exile, he declared: ‘Our triumph will come when all
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forms of foreign control have been brought to an end and all roots of the monarchy have been plucked out of the soil of our land’ (1981: 252). On September 12, 1980, Khomeini told the Iranian pilgrims to Mecca, ‘For more than fifty years, the Pahlavi puppet [the shah] has dragged our country down, filling the pockets of foreigners – particularly Britain and America
– with the abundant wealth of our land …’ (1981: 303).
All these fiery denunciations of the Western domination of ‘our land’ demonstrate that there was a nationalist dimension to Khomeini’s militancy. We see this also in many of the slogans chanted during the marches that eventually coalesced into Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1978–9: ‘We will destroy Yankee power in Iran! Death to the American dog! Shah held on a leash by the Americans! Hang this American king!’ (Munson 1988: 63, 123). Iran’s Islamic revolution was, among other things, a Ânationalist revolution against American domination.
For Khomeini, the goal of creating a strictly Islamic state and society based exclusively on Islamic law was inextricably intertwined with the goal of overcoming foreign domination. In 1972, he declared:
If the Muslim states and peoples had relied on Islam and its inherent capabilities and powers instead of depending on the East (the Soviet Union) and the West, and if they had placed the enlightened and liberating precepts of the Quran before their eyes and put them into practice, then they would not today be captive slaves of the Zionist aggressors, terrified victims of the American Phantoms, and toys in the hands of the accommodating policies of the satanic Soviet Union. It is the disregard of the noble Quran by the Islamic countries that has brought the Islamic community to this difficult situation full of misfortunes and reversals and placed its fate in the hands of the imperialism of the left and the right.
(Khomeini 1977: 156–7; Khomeini 1981: 210)
Passages like this are commonplace in the Islamist literature, though we do find some variation in this respect from country to country and group to group. In many cases, the resentment of foreign domination articulated in such passages is expressed in terms of preposterous theories that attempt to blame ‘crusader’ and Jewish plots for all the problems of the Islamic world. As nonsensical as such conspiracy explanations may be, the nationalistic and anti-imperial resentment that spawns them is real. And it is a major source of the appeal of Islamism.
For Islamists like Khomeini, the idea of a ‘return to Islam’ is linked to the goal of overcoming foreign domination as follows: the believers are suffering because they have deviated from the laws of God. To end their suffering, they have to conform to God’s laws. God has allowed the infidels to dominate the believers because they have deviated from His laws. Once they conform, He will grant them victory. Such reasoning is often meshed with more subtle themes, notably that of cultural authenticity. The return to Islam becomes a means of regaining one’s true cultural identity – as opposed to mimicry of the dominant West.
The anti-imperial dimension of Islamic militancy can also be seen in the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden. Given the common assertion, in the United States at any rate, that Bin Laden ‘hates us because of our freedoms’, it is important to note that he became politically active as a result of his resentment of Western domination. From 1979 to 1989, he actively supported armed resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He inevitably saw this struggle as a jihad. He felt it was his duty to help the oppressed believers of Afghanistan to fight the Russian infidels who were oppressing them. Once again, the distinction between