Chuck Grimes sez:
>
> Resuscitation in this context is suppose to mean bring
> back to life, revitalize in the here and now. I am not sure I quite
> understand the distinction between fundamentalism as a modern
> response, and fundamentalism as a revitalization of some antique
> order. After all the timing of the response remains modern, or
> contemporary in either case.
Traditionalism or Orthodoxy are a revitalization of some antique order.
Fundamentalism is a modern development that started in the early 20th century.
> I think of resuscitation as a re-enactment or recital.
Totally agree, and that is what fundamentalism is not. The Fundamentalisms Project run by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby involved not just sociologists but scholars from many disciplines. They cranked out a mountain of research.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Complete/Series/FP.html
Check out the last volume Marty, Martin E. and R. Scott Appleby, editors Fundamentalisms Comprehended. Ch. 12: From Orthodoxy to Fundamentalism: A Thousand Years of Islam in South Asia by T. N. Madan
> The US Protestant fundamentalists might be more easily configured as
> modernistic and innovative since they don't have the vast histories
> that Jews and the Muslims have to draw upon. Since the fundamentalist
> protestant crowd seem quite anti-catholic, they have cut themselves
> off from about a thousand years worth of cannon law and dogma---that
> was their protest, wasn't it?.
No! The protest against Catholicism was Luther and the Reformation. The Protestant fundamentalist movement at the beginning of the 20th century was a protest against the mainline Protestant denominations for reaching a compromise with modernity. Just as Islamic fundamentalism is a protest against Islamic states and religious leaders for reaching a compromise with modernity. Same with Jewish fundamentalism which is not congruent with Orthodox Jews but a subset.
Islamic fundamentalists think the Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia are sell-outs to modernity.
At the same time, many traditionalist Muslims think the Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia are zealots.
Here is an excerpt from just such a Muslim writing about spending time in Saudi Arabia with a friend:
= = = =
"Jalal's fate, however, was to don a gas-mask supplied by the Wahhabi sect, which cut him off from the liberating oxygen of normative Islam and slowly asphyxiated him with fumes of human making. At the university, his open-mindedness made him heedless of our counsels about choosing company that would open his heart to the love of his Lord, rather than close it in recriminations and self-exaltation. And this was his undoing."
"As months passed, and Jalal the Arabic student fell under the spell of the shouting sermoniser he insisted on hearing, a shadow crept over his features. Formerly a frequent visitor to Madina, he went less often, troubled by Wahhabi polemic against paying too much attention to God's messengers. His confidence that the sacred could be discerned in nature, in saints and in beauty began to waver, a process that clearly agonised him. At times, when we spoke, he would return for a while to his old self, and talk enthusiastically about architecture, of textiles, of the sacred geography of Muslim cities. But then a cloud would come over his face, and he would almost shudder, as his programming once again took him over, and he parroted the shallow slogans of Wahhabism. I thought, once, of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Jalal was being possessed."
"Prior to my years in Saudi Arabia, I had been puzzled by the vehemence of the traditional ulema's hostility to Wahhabism. Wahhabism, I felt sure, was no more than an overheated Hanbalism, with a naive Bedouin literalism in speaking of a delineated and anthropomorphic God."
"Watching the shadows gather around Jalal, however, convinced me that something more ominous, even infernal, was at work. Wahhabism seemed to be not simply or even primarily a package of ideas; it was an existential condition. It breathed an intensity, a dark radioactivity which could, on prolonged exposure, make me physically weak, or sick. After one intense session with a Wahhabi, whose blindness had veiled from him my own orientation, I had to detoxify myself by taking a long walk, breathing deeply, and repeating thousands of prayers upon the Holy Prophet."
"I once met a Ugandan who lamented the decline of Islam in his country, and laid the blame very bitterly at the Wahhabis' door. Before they came, he said, Islam had been spreading fast, largely through the public and joyful celebrations of Mawlid. Singing with passion and rhythm is the key to the African soul, he told me; and yet the Wahhabis, well-funded and with deadly zeal in their eyes, slowly turned off the taps to the Mawlid, until the entire community became disconsolate, forced awkwardly into a dry type of religion that failed to speak to their condition. With the Muslims browbeaten by an organised anti-tariqa and anti-Mawlid sect, the Christian missionaries, with their Africanised hymns, suddenly found the going much easier."
The Wahhabi who Loved Beauty Kerim Fenari
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/masud/ISLAM/misc/wobb.htm
[and can we pause and savor this wonderful piece of writing as writing?]
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab who created this orthodox and repressive reform movement lived in the 1700s. The Wahhabis are a reform movement almost identical to Martin Luther's reform movement. They actually are not fundamentalists. Theocratic oligarchs, yes.
Fundamentalists are critical of the mainstream religious tradition in which they circulate as critics.
Clerical Fascists invoke totalitarianism and integralism--and create a revolutionary critique with populist themes to urge the overthrow of even the most fundamentalist of regimes.
>
> And as long as I am picking away, the problem I have with the term
> fascism is its easy confusion with the nazis and other European based
> ideologies that were indeed, blatantly modernistic, and blatantly
> fabricated mythologies about the past. I am not sure that either the
> Jewish or Islamic fundamentalists are fabricating a mythology out of
> whole cloth. They don't need to. The history is there in sufficiently
> rich and suggestive form, and in sufficient detail as text, as well as
> in extant culture to not require intentional fabrication and blatant
> manufacture.
The term fascism is easily confused with the Italian and German variety, but there was a third variety of clerical fascists and they are frequently ignored. The very word Fascism comes from the ancient Roman name for the bundle of reeds used in a symbol of authority. Wagner invented Aryan racial mythologies based on old stories which he set to music in The Ring. None of the fascists invented their new mythologies out of whole cloth. All fascist movements draw from ancient symbols and myths--thus the theme of palingenesis or heroic rebirth that Griffin argues for. But the "imagined community" they claim to be reclaiming is in fact a new form. It never existed in the past. Just as the US Christian Right is always claiming to want to return to the "traditional family" that Coontz and others have pointed out never existed.
See: The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz.
>
> The English, French, and German ideologues of the late Nineteenth
> Century didn't have quite the historical record they needed, so they
> just made it up. In this sense then the US fundamentalists are in the
> same dilemma---a lack of historical precedent, and lack of any living
> traditional culture to draw on. So they are in the process of
> fabricating whole sections of thought and custom out of nothing. In
> this particular case they do seem to be fascist in the manufacturing
> (or innovative) sense of the term.
>
But this is why Benedict calls nationalism is the "imagined community." All nations invent mythical pasts.
See: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
>
> It is hard to imagine anything that would join the devout Christian to
> the devout Muslim and Jew faster than their full throated chorus of
> excoriation for Omar in his finest turns.
Probably true. And we are surely representing the Devil on this list.
As for "get a library card" I meant that as a poke at me for always citing books. I know you read because you are always talking about your reading. Someone else on the list had just stung me for always citing books without bringing the text into the online argument. I did that here. So I learn slowly, but I learn. I did not mean it as a jab at you.
In person I make my jokes clear with facial expressions and hand gestures. I have got to learn that they don't work in e-mail. Sorry.
-Chip "slow - learning curve ahead" Berlet