Beyond Theology: Toward an Anthropology of "Fundamentalism"

JUDITH NAGATADepartment of AnthropologyYork UniversityToronto, Ontario M3J 1P3Canada

Beyond Theology: Toward an Anthropology of "Fundamentalism"

Once considered exclusively a matter of religion, theology, or scriptural correctness, use of the term fundamentalism hasrecently undergone metaphorical expansion into other domains and, depending on whose voice is being heard, maybe applied to extreme forms of nationalism, certain socioreligious (especially Islamist) movements, and other forms of ex-tremist ideological expression. An anthropological approach seeks the common elements amid these apparently diversecases and, taking into account the hermeneutical problems of exegesis by multiple constituencies, proposes that most "fun-damentalisms" involve special forms of identity politics, meaning, and labeling, characterized by a quest for certainty,exclusiveness, and unambiguous boundaries, where the "Other" is the enemy demonized. It also reflects a mind-set un-compromising and antirelativist, as one response to the openness and uncertainties of a cosmopolitan world, and to chart amorally black and white path out of the gray zones of intimidating cultural and religious complexity, [fundamentalism,religion, hermeneutics, Islam]

Introduction: ProblematiqueOver the past two decades, a word with apocalyptic im-

plications has invaded both the scholarly lexicon and popu-lar imagination. Fundamentalism is fast becoming themetaphor of choice in a quest to assign meaning to an ever-widening range of ideas and behaviors, and it has recentlymigrated from its original narrow religious reference bandto other domains. However, the meaning and uses of theterm vary substantially in different constituencies, whileanthropologists may add their own exegeses. In fact, theexpanding hermeneutical range of the word is part of theproblem. Historically, for some constituencies, fundamen-talism connotes an attachment to a set of irreducible beliefsor a theology that forestalls further questions. For anythinking anthropologist, of course, this is exactly where thequestioning should begin. It is a question of attempting tounderstand, not only the substance and content of beliefs,but also their context, source, and application.

One irony here is that few anthropologists (and fewother scholars or media trendsetters for that matter), arethemselves self-declared "fundamentalists," yet these arethe people with the greatest opportunity and power to de-fine and propagate definitions and worldviews. For themost part, fundamentalists are talked about; rarely do theyspeak for themselves. It is evident that several levels of dis-course are occurring simultaneously but rarely engagingwith one another in direct dialogue. The hermeneuticalfield is further complicated by the fact that the fundamen-talist label has undergone inflation in its sometimes indis-

criminate application to broader zones of political move-ments and other ideologies, to the point where it runs a riskof spinning out of control and losing specificity and ex-planatory power. This has been the fate of such concepts as"culture" and "diaspora." Now that the fundamentalist ge-nie is out of the bottle and into the public domain, the taskremains, first, to trace its genealogy across disciplines, andthen to attempt to tease out some common themes and thelogic underlying its metaphorical use and emotional ap-peal.

In an effort to draw together, or at least juxtapose, someof the different approaches to the topic of fundamentalism,I shuttle between scholarly, popular, believer, and anthro-pological constituencies. Comparative and critical reviewsof existing studies of fundamentalism are supplemented byillustrations from field material and experience, focusingon problems of managing the differing voices of field-worker, other local observers, outside media commenta-tors, and the rhetoric of demagogues, in contrast with thoseof the insiders themselves. Field encounters help to estab-lish in whose minds the quest for fundamentals lieswhose problem?and how these problems are communi-cated. Later, I track some of the more expansive and cava-lier uses of fundamentalist imagery and reflect on how farthese reveal or add to our understanding of a generic "fun-damentalist" mind-set, or whether such semantic excur-sions stretch the term beyond any utility. Finally, is there,as some broadband thinkers are beginning to suggest, somemore general human concern for ultimate values and

American Anthropologist 103(2):481-498. Copyright 2001, American Anthropological Association

482 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST VOL. 103, No. 2 JUNE 2001

meanings in a fast-changing world, whether within con-ventional religions or beyond them? It may be no coinci-dence that fundamentalism has been added to the academicand public lexicon at a time when the global (dis)order,with its attendant transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, plu-ralisms, relativisms, and movement of people and ideasacross the world has contributed to an obsessive concernwith identity, authenticity, and ultimate valuesthe funda-mentals of existence. These conditions, characterized byparadox, creolizations, crossing of once forbidden bounda-ries in the face of bewildering choice, it may be argued,precipitate a renewed quest for guiding principles, forgreater ideological certainty. For those with low tolerancefor ambiguity, the attractions of a prescriptive fundamen-talist solution are evident. In a sense, the one set of proc-esses feeds on the other, in a kind of dialectic.

A Genealogy of FundamentalismTaking inspiration from a Foucauldian notion of "gene-

alogy," as turned, for example, to the history of "capital"(Pasquino 1991:105 ff.), I highlight the principal episodesin the rise and uses of the term fundamentalism over thepast century. This approach is paraphrased by Bartelson:"how to write a history of something lacking a stablemeaning and reference, and which does not exist, exceptby being known," a "history of an unthought part of ourown . . . understanding," which must be a "history ofepistemic discontinuities" (1995). Thus the idea of funda-mentalism may be presented in the form of a series of "epi-sodes," as examples of moments from the past, rather thanas a narrative history (of the past as) a linear sequence ofevents.

From its original roots in a particular style of turn-of-the-century American Christianity ("the mother of all fun-damentalisms"?), to its inductive application in other relig-ions and situations, and partly through the indiscriminateimages of the contemporary media, fundamentalism hasundergone several reincarnations. Nevertheless, its resid-ual Christian baggage lingers on in many popular images.

Retrospectively, those who write about early Christianfundamentalisms situate them in the "ideological vacuumof modernity" (cf. Van Vucht Tijssen et al. 1995:16), astate characterized by its distance from the totalistic relig-ious worldview of medieval Christendom. Under the ef-fects of post-Enlightenment modernity, as epitomized inVoltaire's "ecrasez 1'infame," both religion and meaningwere crushed simultaneously, and ideas of progress gravi-tated from the spiritual to the material. Central to the"modernity" crisis lies a basic problem over the nature ofsecularism. Since the Enlightenment, the sacred is sup-posed to have been detached from the rest of life, puttingscientists (and social scientists) in charge of fundamentalexplanations and life paradigms. One consequence is thatreligion has been demoted from its foundational position as

the ultimate repository of meaning, answering the ques-tions of why as well as how, which the sciences have notbeen entirely able to fill. To Western scholars, the assertionthat "religion is a way of life" (leaving little space for thesecular), is intuitively acceptable from a field informantfrom a "tribal" or "ancestral" type of religion, or frommembers of other faiths (eg., most Muslims), but for West-ern Christianity, this is largely expected only from a mar-ginal minority, who are thereby "othered," (cf. Harding1991).

Until the past few decades, moreover, the question ofstudying believing Christians or Christian millenarians athome has been delicate (although not always consciouslyacknowledged), while an ambivalence over measuring ab-solute truths and the sacred with secular tools may reflect alingering sense of the sacredness of the topic itself and aconcession to more public sensitivities.

The earliest scholarly representations of ProtestantChristian fundamentalism were by sociologists and histori-ans, who addressed themselves squarely to the social andmaterial conditions of modernity. The roots of this funda-mentalism are situated in the self-righteously moralistic,revivalist strains brewing among assorted Protestants in thesocial, economic, and existential turmoil of industrializing,urbanizing, immigrant America, evolving in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century. The uncertainties and expe-riences of alienation, as chronicled by Marsden (1980),have much in common with what are today presented asthe conditions of multiculturalism and modernity, in anearly form of globalization. Out of these emerged a seriesof religious revivals, characterized by intense experientialexpressions of faith and renewed evangelism, the "GreatAwakening." The emphasis by these revivalists on beingthe "chosen" defenders of spiritual boundaries and of theauthentic, original Christianity of the apostles in a cosmicstruggle against the satanic Other, led them to reject "lib-eral" mainline Christians who allegedly treated their scrip-tures as historical texts rather than the Word of God. Thesemovements led to a series of publications affirming the"fundamentals" of the faith as a guide to those who had losttheir way. Although there was never total consensus onthese, at minimum, they included five basic beliefs in thevirgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the physical resurrectionof the body, substitutionary atonement, and the inerrancyof the scriptures.1 It is this last item, and a preoccupationwith texts, that has created some of the greatest obfusca-tions in dealing with fundamentalisms in general.

For many Christians caught in this ferment, salvationwas framed in a millenarianism inspired by the Book ofRevelation and a belief in the inevitable Second Coming,with its defeat of false religions, prophets, and the pope.Postmillennialists believed they were entering the last mil-lennium in the present era, after which would follow thereign of Christ (cf. Marsden 1980:49 ff.). Beginning in the1870s, a variant form of premillennialism concentrated

NAGATA / BEYOND THEOLOGY 483

more on the spiritual details of the original "primitive"Christianity and on preparation for a more imminent ful-fillment of the prophecies. The sources and keys to theseends were to be found in a literal interpretation of the scrip-tures, as the Word of God, immune to reinterpretation.

Some heirs to Protestant premillenarianism still flourishin an assortment of radical religious movements in NorthAmerica today, including the "Christian identity" family(Kaplan 1997), and the B'nai Noah and Church of Israel,respectively, for whom the Jewish covenant and genealogyprovide essential millennial ingredients. Here, the funda-mentals hinge on the ineluctable rootedness of Christianityin Judaism and on the eventual apocalypse whose epicen-ter will be Jerusalem (Kaplan 1997). These movements re-ject the general trend toward secularism, whereby mostchurches seemed to be accommodating too enthusiasticallyto the "world," as well as all forms of civil religion. Formillennialists too, extending the social gospel to the spiri-tually unprepared was seen as too indiscriminately inclu-sivist.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Protes-tant fundamentalism took on a more political mission,turning American secular nationalism in the direction of amoral crusade, an exemplar of Christian leadership in theworld. This type of "spiritual warfare" (Diamond 1990)has continued in various moral rearmament and moral ma-jority movements, through the candidacy of Pat Buchananfor the U.S. presidency, marking a contested intrusion ofreligion into the political life of a country where it is consti-tutionally a private matter, from schools to politics. TheGod in whom most Americans trust is a nondenomina-tional/inclusive deity, far removed from the more judg-mental, wrathful Judge of the (self-defined) elect.

The Protestant version of fundamentalism was mostmemorably epitomized in the 1925 Scopes ("Monkey")trial, which pitted fundamentalist Christians against thescientific and intellectual establishment. The defendant,J. T. Scopes, was a Tennessee biology teacher, brought tocourt by fundamentalists for teaching the theory of evolu-tion and thereby contravening biblical authority. The pro-file was sharpened when U.S. Democrat William JenningsBryant took the fundamentalist side, while the other wasrepresented by lawyer Clarence Darrow and a sympatheticnews reporter, H. L. Mencken. One outcome of this highlydramatized case, which the fundamentalists technicallywon, turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. It left an indelibleimage in the public mind of fundamentalist Christians asanachronistic, anti-intellectual and antiscience, one thathas been widely extrapolated as a generic feature of so-labeled fundamentalisms everywhere. When paired with theobsessive scriptural literalism and antihermeneutic quali-ties mentioned, the caricature as a yardstick for measuringfundamentalisms across the world was established. Never-

theless, by and large, it is only a minority of Christians whowear the fundamentalist badge with pride.

A more panoptic view reveals that a term that can betraced to a specific Protestant Christian prototype has pro-gressively shed its religious clothing and insinuated itselfinto forms of nationalism and other powerful ideologies.Fundamentalism has also shifted its emphasis from scrip-tures and textual casuistry to association with social andpolitical movements to particular styles of Othering. Itleads to quests for certainty, and a mind-set immune to dia-logue or alternatives, a denial of relativism. Given thisvolatility, it is essential to clarify who uses the term, andwith what intent. Scenarios of such events as the bombingsof New York's World Trade Center and of the governmentbuildings in Oklahoma City evoke the witch-hunting, de-monizing, stereotyping, and uncompromising mind-setseeking the certainty and satisfaction of emotional closure,and provide testimony to the power of fundamentalistways of labeling and knowing.

Fundamentalisms in Other Faiths:A Metaphor Whose Time Has Come

As the fundamentalist gaze moves beyond Christianity,its referents have also shifted, to new scenes and goals. In-itially, the generalization of fundamentalism to other scrip-tural faiths, principally those with a strong textual tradition,was in the hands and heads of scholars with a Western,usually Judeo-Christian, background. For them the centralissue was credal or doctrinal, where the measure was thecontent of belief and its apparent faithfulness to a specificsacred canon or original Word. In the case of a Catholicvariant, integrisme, launched at the beginning of the twen-tieth century by a Vatican official, Msgr. Bernini, as a formof counterattack against the growing modernism, intellec-tualism, and liberalism of the Church, the fundamentals tobe defended were sacramental and papal rather than bibli-cal infallibility (Coleman 1992). On this level, fundamen-talism remained a theological problem, best left to theolo-gians, although some social scientists, too, still see therelationship between adherence to a sacred text and praxisas its most distinctive feature (cf. Lawrence 1995; BhikkhuParekh 1994). In Gellner's hands (cf. 1992), the textualmeasure led to similar conclusions, though by a differentroute. For Gellner, the hegemony of the (written) divineword is inherently antirational, anti-Enlightenment, andleads inevitably to categorical or formulaic thinking, "re-pudiating modernism." It is a development he observes insome Islams, and does not shrink from excoriating (1992:2). Gellner's analysis of the belief and discourse of the fun-damentalism of the Other is critical and judgmental, fromwhich he distances himself, as an outsider for whom ra-tionality is the supreme virtue. In a personal and ironictwist to the argument, Gellner commits himself to theschool of "rationalist fundamentalism," far from the


"substantive absolutization of . . . post-Axial world relig-ions, [instead] prostrating himself before the universal pro-cedural principles of knowledge," (1992:80), namely thescientific method. But in so doing, Gellner implicitly andironically acknowledges the potency of the fundamentalistlabel, in his own totalizing commitment to an absolute(scholastic) value, as a distinctive mind-set and worldviewin its own right. I return to this question below.

The above arguments apply principally to those scrip-tural faiths where preoccupation with doctrine and creedhave historically taken the form of debates, commentaries,interpretations, and casuistry, namely the Abrahamic relig-ions, as opposed to Buddhism and Hinduism, although aswill be seen, Sikhism may be an intermediate case here.Such is the context of the Jewish Talmudic commentariesand of Qur'anic exegeses by Muslim ulama (scholars).Thus amid the diversity of Jewish scriptural interpretationsof the Haredim (literally, "those who tremble before theLord," in Isaiah's injunction), the devotion to the Talmudand Mishnah (code of Jewish law), makes the secular stateof Israel an "abomination," a denial of trust in messianicdeliverance without human political intervention (cf.Marty and Appleby 1992:95).

In the case of Islam, particularly since the 1979 Iranianrevolution, some scholars, including anthropologists, havezeroed in on the problems of Qur'anic interpretationamong the ulama and their implications for life in differenthistorical, social, and cultural conditions (cf. Kuran 1993;Nash 1991; Roff 1987; Watt 1988). Using two opposingapproaches to textual exegesis, ijtihad and taqlid, as meas-ures of fundamentalist tendencies, such scholars were, ifunconsciously, bringing to bear certain assumptions fromthe Christian model. Whereas ulama subscribing to the ijti-had school are theologically open to constant reinterpreta-tion (tafsiran) of the Qur'an, in consultation with sourcesfrom the Hadith according to changing times and needs,2followers of the taqlid tradition, by contrast, are less flex-ible and attempt to stay closer to their vision of the original,textual-inspired (Arab) lifestyle and morality, as it had be-come established by the eleventh century of the presentera.

Although the Christian-informed instinct would be todesignate the taqlid style as more "fundamentalist," fromthe Muslim perspective, however, parallels with the Chris-tian experience may not be appropriate, and Muslims dis-tance themselves from this perceived Christian bias. In dis-cussion, the position taken is that no Muslim questions therevealed, unchanging (fundamental) status of the Qur'an,hence sees no reason to differentiate some parts as morefundamental than others. To the extent that scriptural fun-damentals (usul) are a givencentral to the study of Is-lamic jurisprudence (usuliyyah)scriptural literalness isnot an issue here. Modernists and traditionalists equally ac-cept textual authority, and in this sense they declare, "weare all fundamentalists." But there is a finer point to be

made here. The infallibility or sacredness of the Qur'an liesin the mode and medium of its transmission as the unal-tered, inimitable Word of God made text, revealed to theProphet in one place at one time and unyielding to histori-cal evidence of alternate versions of Qur'anic texts (cf.Lester 1999). This precludes treating the Qur'an as a his-torical or literary text,3 or even its translation into lan-guages other than the original Arabic. Debates over mean-ing or interpretation may thus be engaged withoutchallenging the foundations or sanctity of the revealedscripture in itself.

In the Muslim experience, as most would insist, there-fore, the fundamentals remain: there is no need to justify orrediscover them, and no need for the misleading term "fun-damentalism." The Malaysian Muslim scholar, ChandraMuzaffar, would reject even such labels as "revivalism,"for its implications of a worldview that is lost or antiquated(1987:2-3). Chandra and followers of local Islamist move-ments prefer to draw attention to the past glories of Islam,for which the appropriate contemporary response shouldbe a "resurgence." To non-Muslim English speakers, thesemay appear as casuistry or semantic trivia: the sensitiveanthropologist, however, would recognize it as a statementof identity in relation to the religious Other, including ob-serving anthropologists. All of these statements are exam-ples of verbal jousting, as part of the great game of self-distancing from followers of other faiths.

In the Islamic scholarly community, therefore, funda-mentalism is not spontaneously claimed nor much debatedinternally. However, for purposes of interreligiousAnter-cultural communication, or when straitjacketed by a world"master language," some variant of the English term maybe used, and this question has been introspectively exam-ined by some Malay Muslims when confronted with theneed to translate between English and another language,such as Malay (e.g., W. Said Al-Mehdi 1992:14-16).When the English term is used, however, it may be in themanner of a reverse orientalism, turned as a weaponagainst other religious enemies, for example, "Zionis fun-damentalis" or "Nasrani/Kristen fundamentalis," or even"Kuasa Buddha fundamentalis" (fundamentalist Buddhistpower), used by Malay Muslims in verbal retaliation forthe alleged persecution by the Burmese government in theearly 1990s of its Muslim Rohingya minority.

The influence of religious cultural crossings in promot-ing the circulation ideas about fundamentalism is evidentfrom the experimentation among some (usually Western-educated or exposed) intellectuals with a defiantly inde-pendent approach to scholarship. Rejection of Westernacademic paradigms, epistemologies, and themes has in-spired attempts to develop alternate schools of (Islamic)social science and economics, based on classic Islamic sourcesand values, of which the most popular among Muslimstudents across the world is that of the Pakistani thinker,Sayyid Maulana Abdul A'la Maududi. Such projects


highlight the constant tension, in an interconnected, trans-parent world, between ideas of a universalistic science asdiffused through Western languages and education, on theone hand, and culturally appropriate (non-Western) alter-natives, on the other. Such ventures, which Western schol-ars often label fundamentalist (cf. Kuran 1993), obviouslyreflect in part a wider political vision and agenda, a bias onboth sides. In fact, both sides are locked in the iron cages oftheir own respective worldviews, with little will to seek anarea of compromise.

One renowned Western scholar of Islam, MontgomeryWatt, acknowledges the inappropriateness of fundamental-ism as a referent in the Muslim context but confesses, "be-cause of popular journalistic usage, it has been thoughtconvenient to retain the term 'fundamentalist' in the title ofthis book [Islamic Fundamentalism and Modernity], eventhough it is incorrect" (emphasis added) (Watt 1988:2).For Watt, following the lead of the anthropologically in-clined Algerian scholar, Mohd Arkoun, true fundamental-ism lies in the inability to imagine or penetrate the "un-thinkable" (impensable) or "unthought" (impense), or toventure into uncharted ideological territory. In effect, it isan attitude of mind as much as the content of a specific the-ology. By this measure, to approach the Qur'an as a his-torical text rather than a sacred canon would be not onlynonfundamentalist but also non-Islamic. As yet, aside froma small minority including Arkoun, there are few Islamicequivalents to Mary Douglas's deconstruction of Jewishand Old Testament worldviews and religious dietary lawsin the Books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus (1966). Schol-ars (such as Arkoun) who attempt to purvey the fine dis-tinction between the sacredness of the scriptural Word andthe possibility of contextualized interpretation of thatWord make little headway among most Muslims.

Insofar as fundamentalism is perceived to be a productof scriptural religions, whether Abrahamic or other, thequestion of textual hermeneutics and casuistry dominateseven the more comprehensive efforts to arrive at a theoryof fundamentalism. Probably the supreme effort in that di-rection is the five-volume magnum opus edited by Martyand Appleby between 1990 and 1994, arising out of theirextensive "fundamentalism project" at the University ofChicago. In their own commentaries, the editors provide aprescriptive checklist of features ("the fundamentals ofnindamentalism") that has lengthened as new cases areadded to their collection, such that no single case is likelyto meet all the requirements. Some studies in the collectionleave the impression of being written to a mandate, so as tomeet the procrustean models created by the editors, (e.g.,Swearer 1991 on Theravada Buddhisms). Throughout thereis confusion between normative and descriptive charac-teristics of fundamentalism. The fundamentalist charac-teristics listed by Marty and Appleby include some thatseem gratuitous, such as the quality of "scandalousness,"

while that of "militancy" may only apply in cases of certainpolitical movements. Other features commonly associatedwith fundamentalism, again directly traceable to its Chris-tian source (and notably the Scopes trial), relate to allegedantiscientism. However, even Marty and Appleby recog-nize, as do many of their contributors and also Caplan(1987), that most of those they designate as fundamental-ists are far from being the proverbial Luddites but ratherturn science and technology to their own chosen ends. Fa-cility with computers, databases, and all forms of media,including televangelism, and use of all modern forms oftransport and even weaponry, is the norm. In today'sworld, mediaeval-robed Islamists operating computers andsaffron-robed swamis and monks jet-setting around theworld are becoming an increasingly familiar sight.

The importance of the Marty and Appleby opus lies inits ambitious and comprehensive scope, in moving beyondthe scriptural to social and political issues. Among themore contentious nontextual fundamentalist characteristicsraised by Marty and Appleby is that of "anti-modernity."This rests on an understanding of "modernity," whichraises as many questions as the (fundamentalist) antithesiswhich rests on it, or worse, runs the risk of generating littlemore than tautologies. Nonmaterial aspects of modernityare hardly measurable and run the gamut from Gellner'sconcern with rationality to involvement with markets andglobalization. However, the attribution of "anti-moder-nity" may reflect a more general critique of modernity asparadigm or fact, evidence of the limits of a universal proc-ess. The existence of the fundamentalist, backward culturalOther helps to secure the hegemonic "modern" point ofview, which is relegated to the margins with other minori-ties (cf. Harding 1991).

A parallel question arises over the recent preoccupationwith indigenousness and other "authentic" local traditions,as representatives of a new genre of movements in quest ofmore ultimate fundamentals of culture and identity (cf. vanVucht Tijssen 1995). It may be more productive to seethese as alternative forms of modernity rather than as anti-modern, and as central to identity politics. Each such casehas its own fundamentals or sacred canons, whether land(for Jewish Gush Emunim defenders of the West Bank) orthe unbreachable genealogical ideal of Ultra-OrthodoxJews in their resistance to conversion (Marty and Appleby1992). In fact, as Marty and Appleby and their fellow con-tributors themselves show by their examples, the ultimatefundamental values that seem to animate people to actionand rhetoric often have less to do with scriptures or moder-nity per se than other issues of identity. Emerging from theMarty and Appleby enterprise is a recognition of the "in-ventiveness" (1992:18), of the diversity of the ultimategoals of fundamentalists. In these contributions, manyfrom anthropologists, we hear few voices of fundamental-ists themselves, since the issues that are claimed to move


them are recorded and edited for the reader. Probably themajor weakness of many of the contributions to the Martyand Appleby volumes is their taking for granted whatshould have been demonstrated, and failing to clarify thedistinction between the views of subjects and authors. Thissubtle shift of intellectual gears, from descriptive/ethno-graphic to interpretative and analytical, courts the dangerof confusing the voices. Who is speaking on behalf of theOther, and can the Other speak back? At this juncture, pre-occupation with scriptures, theologies, and values movesinto the zone of powers of representation and identity politics.

From Texts to "Terrorists":Fundamentalisms as Political Movements

Now that the term fundamentalism has become indis-pensable to the descriptive repertoire and explanatory ar-mamentarium of the media and of many political pundits,and with the turn of international events, it has entered anew cycle. The focus has shifted from textual exegesis topolitical activism and even violence, as in Marty and Ap-pleby's axiom that "fundamentalists fight back" (1992:17).This has most popularly been identified with Islam. Morenarrowly, it has fostered a public vision of all Islam as mili-tant, perpetually engaged in jihad (holy war), and politi-cally regressive.

The a priori equation of fundamentalism with terrorismand violence is the theme of an entire volume by MarkJuergensmeyer (2000), which covers a selection of themore outstanding (and media-seductive) events that help toentrench this idea in the world's mind. Under the title, Ter-ror in the Mind of God, he describes with dramatic effectthe assassination of Jewish leaders, Sikh violence, and thebombings in Northern Ireland, on the Tokyo subway, andof the World Trade Center and abortion clinics, as variantsof a single theme. His sensational presentation only servesto reinforce public stereotypes but that does little to ad-vance understanding of fundamentalism as a social phe-nomenon or the nuances of fundamentalist word games.

Since 1979 (the year of the Iranian revolution), aca-demic, political, and public attention has turned toward Is-lam, where most examples of fundamentalism are of so-ciopolitical movements, usually representing challenges tothe elites and regimes in their home states. This view isgenerally accepted also by Islamic scholars (e.g., AshgarAH Engineer 1990; Abdel Sidahmed and Ehteshani 1996;Tibi 1998). Even when couched in theological language,through the invocation of ijtihad by such late-nineteenth-century modernists and "reformists" as Egypt's Jamal al-Afghani and Muhd Abduh,4 in their quest to accommodateIslam to Western modernity, the agenda has been as muchpolitical as religious. Such views and crises have continuedin political form into today's postcolonial states, inspiringassorted movements from West Africa to Southeast Asia.Common themes in most countries where Islamists play a

public role revolve around the legitimacy of politicalauthority, often instigated by a new class of educated, tech-nologically literate young people with substantial Westernexposure and experience, yet few prospects for upwardmobility or political power of their own (cf. Arjomand1995). Modes of contestation range from violent attemptsto seize power or effect revolutionary destabilization, as inEgypt, Afghanistan, and Algeria, to more subtle forms ofcounterhegemonic strategy to co-opt or influence govern-ments by moral and ethical suasion, the choice of most ofMalaysia's dakwah movements (see note 9) (Chandra1987; Hussin 1990; Jomo and Shabery Cheek 1992; Na-gata 1980,1984,1994a, 1997, 1999). Construing "moder-nity" in political terms, in opposing the secular nation-state, these movements would probably fit Marty andAppleby's characterization of "anti-modernity." In fact,these activists are engaged in a bid for power in their ownright, using high technology where necessary, as a versionof alternate modernity.

Of the few alternate ideologies capable of challengingand transcending prevailing nationalisms, Islam possessesa repertoire of powerful symbols and organizational modesreadily adaptable to political action (cf. Rudolph and Pisca-tori 1997). As Sidahmed and Ehteshani (1996:3) observe,however, the theological credentials and textual knowl-edge of most populist Islamist leaders labelled by outsidersas "fundamentalist" are often rather thin, in comparisonwith the traditional religious ulama. In place of detailedscriptural exegeses, they make maximum rhetorical mile-age out of a limited number of carefully selected, crowd-pleasing anecdotes and quotations, often from the Hadith(see note 2), to rally their followers. For urban, literateMuslims, many of these highly condensed but evocativethemes are propagated in the floods of popular pamphletsand paperbacks (the French livres de chevet) in the kiosksof cities in both Muslim countries and the West, which areread as avidly as pulp fiction (cf. Carre 1985; Eickelman1992).

Much is heard among Islamists today about the Islamicstate. This is often elaborated on by statements affirmingthe "inseparability of religion and politics in Islam." It ishard to find consensus on this on the basis of writings onclassical Islam alone (cf. Carre 1985), but an emergingsense today among such scholars as Arkoun is that the ideaof the Islamic state is in large part one response to the na-tion-state, supported by retrospective myths selected fromclassical and Ottoman periods. The argument could thus beadvanced that the ideas of the Islamic state represent yetanother vision of modernity, a view also shared by Euben(1999).

Finally, returning circuitously to the original Protestantfundamentalists, they too have shifted into higher politicalgear. Since World War II, not only has evangelist PatBuchanan made at least two bids for the American presi-dency but the political ventures of some of these evangelical


activists such as Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing inCentral America (eg., Diamond 1990), have become leg-endary. In their political form, such overseas movementsare as much inspired by a particular brand of American na-tionalism, a spiritual armamentarium against communism,and a vision of the role of the United States as an exem-plary moral and political force in the world. This worldwas polarized between friends such as President RiosMontt of Guatemala, a member of the evangelista religiouscommunity, and its enemies, such as the Nicaraguan Sand-inistas, demonized as the great Satan. While it is recog-nized that not all Pentecostalists regard themselves as fun-damentalists, in the fickle and unstable world of label-mongering, they are often popularly so labelled.

The argument that political militancy has supersededconcern over texts in the public and media portrayal of fun-damentalism is supported by the identification of funda-mentalisms in non-Abrahamic religion zones, such asSouth Asia. Into this range fall the Sikhs (Oberoi 1993;Van der Veer 1995); the Hindu Rashtriya SwayamsevakSangh (RSS) and its political wing, the Bharatiya JanataParty (BJP) (Frykenberg 1993; Van der Veer 1994); andthe militant Sinhalese monks of Sri Lanka (Swearer 1991).Close to the surface in all these cases lie transparently po-litical agendas, whose appeal to religious texts is minimal,or subordinated to particular interest groups, even withinthe so-called religious community. While the BJP and RSShave made the defense of a temple to the Hindu God Ramat the sacred site of Ayodhya as their principal cause, theBJP's electoral success5 reveals its political ambitions. Thereligious ideological part of the BJP program includes therewriting of Hindu-centered school history texts and em-bodies a strong streak of anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh exclu-sivism. As with many Islamist movements, the RSS appealsto youth who feel deprived of power and other opportuni-ties, particularly from the upper castes, who resent pre-B JPpolicies of affirmative action favoring the lower castes.Here there may be parallels with politically marginalizedand unemployed youth in Islamist movements elsewhere.

On the situation in Sri Lanka, Swearer, like some othercontributors to the Marty and Appleby enterprise, valiantlyattempts to fit the politically active Sinhalese Buddhistmonks in their resistance to non-Buddhist Tamils into anexternal model of fundamentalism. A contrasting insiders'view, however, indicates that the term is not used locallyand that this is more of an ethnic or nationalist conflict,with roots going back to an earlier protonationalist, anti-Christian movement in the colonial era (Obeyesekere[1966] 1975). These contradictory interpretations are fullyexposed in a locally edited volume on the topic, whereWesterners' characterization of the monks' movement asfundamentalist does not resonate with those of local com-munities, for whom the issue is one of minority identities(Batholomeuz and De Silva 1998). This leaves Sri Lankan

scholars poised uncertainly between outsiders' and indige-nous images.

Recent developments among the Sikhs since the early1980s have seen an intensification of moves for an autono-mous state (Khalistan), and for the recognition of the Sikhsas an ethnonation as well as a religious community. In thiscase, it is one segment of the larger community that hastaken the initiative and, in engaging in militancy, hasdrawn from the writings of its Gurus one particular tradi-tion, previously not so central to Sikh practice (Dietrich1987). This is consummated in the highly politicized DalKhalsa movement that came to life following Indian inde-pendence and led the opposition against Sikhs who sup-ported the Congress Party, and Hindu government forces.Today the Khalsa has become an integral part of Sikh life,with its military corps of males prepared for offensive anddefensive action, the group that gives some Sikhs their"fundamentalist" character today. While Oberoi (1993)notes use of a recent neologism, mulvad, purporting totranslate the idea of fundamentalism into Punjabi, this isacknowledged within the Sikh community to be a responseto dialogue with outsiders. When characterizing internaldifferences in religious and political commitment, Sikhsthemselves merely see "differences"6 (Dusenbery 1988:337). Once they have migrated to Western sites such asVancouver, Canada, however, these "differences," underthe influence of prevailing terminologies (especially of themedia), adopt the "fundamentalist" code.

As the fundamentalist focus has shifted to political ter-rain, the intrusion of different voices appears to multiply,along with the interests and investments of involved andobserving parties. As a result, the fundamentalist idea un-dergoes inflation and risks both being confused and deval-ued, as it is cavalierly applied to a growing motley of high-profile political and ethnic movements where religionappears as but one prominent ingredient.

The Fundamentalist as "Other":The Tyranny of Labels

The propensity in both academic and popular circles tolocate fundamentalisms in Islamic political movements hasthe character of a latter-day variant of orientalism, wherebyconcerns and labels of a non-Muslim Western constituencyare projected onto Other populations. Inevitably, funda-mentalism is shaped by discursive practices that portray re-sponses to the world in a form of cultural critique control-led by those with the greatest opportunity and power toimpose their worldviews. The power to define and controlsituations through labeling was most egregiously shown inthe conclusions "spontaneously" reached over the perpe-trators of bombings on U.S. public buildings at home andin embassies abroad in the late 1990s. In these events, adistinct demonizing or witch-hunting mentality wascrudely apparent. As noted above, Muslims rarely assume


the fundamentalist label themselves, although they mayuse it in crosslinguistic dialogue to facilitate communica-tion, or else reserve it for their own enemies, such as Zion-ists, in a reverse orientalist backlash. Muslim scholars, indiscussing Islamist movements, will allow the term abso-lutism (as used by Said), or even extremism (cf. Ashgar1990), to avoid capitulation to the tyranny of being classi-fied by their Others.

Edward Said, a Palestinian Christian, has asked rhetori-cally (cf. Ashgar 1990:62), "Why was it that politicalevents seemed reducible in so pavlovian a way, to the pe-culiarities of Islam?" He concludes: "mainly because thenews media, as well as governmental and academic ex-perts, seemed to have agreed implicitly not to recognizepolitical developments as political, but to represent them asa cosmic drama pitting the civilized as we like it against theuncivilized 'barbaric' " Jurgensmeyer (1993:1) calls it a"new cold war" but on balance prefers the term "religiousnationalism," for many are cases (cf. also Haynes 1994)where the issues are those of oppressed constituencies, ornascent religious civil society movements against the state(Rudolph and Piscatori 1997). In other cases, entire statesengage in religious rhetoric and intensification as part of ananti-Western agenda.

A "dialogic" model of interpretation is one developedmost effectively by Euben (1999), who locates fundamen-talist discursive language and practices as hermeneutic re-sponses to "different-life worlds." She takes for grantedthat all interpretation is a "fusion of horizons" and may as-sume an agonistic character (1999:36-37). Euben's focusis exclusively on Islam, through a meticulous scrutiny ofthe ideas of "modernists" such as Syed Qutb and "refor-mist" Afghani, as they tried to come to terms with an en-croaching Western world fuelled by Enlightenment princi-ples. Their views are presented as part of a response toEnlightenment values, in which they see (the dark side of)individualism, secularity, and moral relativisms as centralto the crises of modernity. In this hermeneutic, their viewscan be represented as no less rational as those of the En-lightenment they reject (Euben 1999:140-141) and, moredaringly, no less rational than the civilizational clashesprophesied by Samuel Huntington, (Euben 1999:165).Rather than participating in or adding to the war of words,Euben serves as nonjudgmentalAionoppositional porte-parole or mediator.

It is hardly novel to propose that the fundamentalistOther then tends to coincide with the enemy du jour. Thisis one reason why the fundamentalist focus has shiftedacross geographical and religious domains over time. To-day, such shifts are just as likely to be situational. Thishelps to explain how the Afghan mujahiddin, locked incombat with the Soviet enemy in the 1980s, could bepraised as "freedom fighters" by their American backers atthe time, while the present Taliban, viewed, among otherthings, as protectors of American enemy Osama bin

Laden, are unequivocally "fundamentalist." Even the pastPresident of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, otherwiseknown as a pluralist, moderate Muslim, was reported inlate 1999 to have chastised the dissident Acehnese minor-ity as fundamentalist to make a political point. This pointcan be illustrated further by two anecdotes that reveal someof the intricacies and casuistry of the Othering process.Both events occurred at local universities in a large Cana-dian city, the first at a student political meeting, the secondat a multicultural Women's Day celebration.

In one event, the "fundamentalist" label shifted refer-ence several times within the space of an hour. At a 1998student meeting of Canadian Young Socialists, the topicwas billed to explore the question as to why "the westerncapitalist establishment and their governments" so irre-sponsibly use the fundamentalist word in connection withMuslims everywhere, (with the obvious subagenda of dis-paraging the "capitalist" bias in name-calling). This eventhad been well advertised in the university where it washeld and at least half the audience consisted of curiousMuslims, who were not card-carrying socialists. The open-ing statement by one of the young socialists, following thede rigueur denouncement of the capitalist agenda in princi-ple, led up to the advertised argument of the day. This con-cerned the subordination of oppressed non-Western peo-ples under global capitalism, including especially Muslimsand other minorities, as an exploited class in the Marxiansense. In this respect, went the argument, third-world Mus-lims share the same fate and suffer the same disempower-ment as working classes everywhere and hence should beprepared to make common cause with each other and uniteagainst the oppressor. In this exegesis, the fundamentalistterm was glossed as a classic form of linguistic mystifica-tion or false consciousness to prevent their recognition ofshared interests or cooperation on the same front. The ex-ploitation rhetoric obviously resonated with some of theyoung Muslims, until they heard that one of the require-ments of making common cause with the socialists was tokeep religion out of the picture. They learned that there isno room for God in socialist worker activism. This stimu-lated a heated discussion, in which the Muslims were ac-cused by the socialists of being overdependent on religionand suffering from 'false consciousness," while they inturn refused to compromise their religious identity or com-mitment. This created an ideological impasse, when oneexasperated young socialist declared: "well, you are fun-damentalists after all!"

A comparable exchange occurred on the occasion ofInternational Women's Day at a local college in March of1998. Among the assorted booths was one marked by thebanner "Positive Images of Women in Islam," occupied bya pair of women in voluminous gowns and head scarves.In due course, they were approached by a couple of localnon-Muslim women who rather abrasively asked whatIslam had to offer at such an event and suggested that


fundamentalism had no place in a celebration of feminism.Then followed some uncomplimentary comments aboutthe oppressive and fundamentalist nature of Islam in gen-eral, which caused the Muslim women to respond by ask-ing whether it was they or the "radical feminists" harassingthem who were the more fundamentalist.

In these two episodes, "fundamentalist" is an epithet forthe Other, invariably negative, the archenemy, one whoseposition is to be dismissed or vilified, and the goal is de-monization, regardless of ideological, political, religious,or moral substance. The inherently oppositional characterof fundamentalism thus takes the form of a "projection ofhostility, a weapon of ideological conquest" (Barr 1981:341). In this spirit, it has been pressed into service interna-tionally as verbal ammunition in a growing number of con-texts, but it must be remembered, the labelling is usuallyengaged in a one-way direction, the effect of interculturalexchange that is based on a Western understanding of oth-ers (cf. Abaza and Stauth 1990:223). It is this "epistemo-logical privilege" (Paine 1995:59) that allows Westernscholars and public to identify fundamentalisms withoutfull appreciation of local sensibilities. As Paine also re-minds us (1995:59), "inasmuch as the authorial authorityof explorer/missionary/anthropologist across the centuries. . . is that of the eye-witness, [it] will be true to the ob-server, whether or not it is to the observed." Or, as Sax(1998) puts it, the question of labelling is a "hall of mir-rors," one of negotiating credibilities, a stand-off betweensameness and openness. In this sense, the selections inMarty and Appleby's volumes all take advantage of thisepistemological privilege and authorial authority in decid-ing what is Or is not fundamentalist, and none of the con-tributors admitted to being fundamentalist themselves ordeclared a personal position on the issue. This courts thedanger of introducing a teleological character to selectionsand definitions, and takes no account of the fact that suchmovements as Sikhs, Sinhalese monks, and the BJP do not,in their own vernaculars, define themselves or their re-gional enemies as fundamentalists.

Islam in Malaysia:Is Fundamentalism the Issue?

Applying the fundamentalist lens to a specific set ofmovements, experiments, and discourses in Malaysia since1970 provides an aper?u of the changing uses of religiousepithets both about and by Muslims, in changing politicaland social circumstances, and the responses to these bynon-Muslims. From colonial times until the late 1960s, Is-lam was principally just one cultural marker of Malay eth-nic identity and a vehicle through which other (Indian,Arab, or Indonesian) immigrants could acquire Malaystatus (cf. Nagata 1979, 1984,1999). The politics of Islambegan after independence when a constitutionally en-shrined Malay status became the basis for special rights

vis-a-vis the other major (non-Muslim) ethnic communi-ties.7 However, the Malay population was also internallydivided. One major wing formed the foundation of whatwas to become the principal ethnic secular political party tothe present (UMNO), while the other used Islam as a wayof reinforcing and mobilizing a Malay religious ethnicchauvinism and consummated in a religious political party,eventually known as PAS. The latter was commonly de-scribed as religiously "conservative" in orientation, in itsendorsement of a rural, small community, religious school-centered way of life, and in its discouragement of women'sparticipation in public life and modest dress (though neverrequiring full veiling or hijab). In the Malay state of Kelan-tan, where PAS has locally been in power since 1990, it haslong promoted the implementation of full Shari'ah (Is-lamic) law, both personal/civil and criminal (hudud) codesbut has been overridden by the secular federal constitution8(Nagata 1994a).

Nowhere before the mid-1980s, however, was the "fun-damentalist" epithet heard, save in international, English-language exchanges (cf. Chandra 1987). Instead, opposing(UMNO and PAS) party supporters mutually excoriatedeach other, either as kafir (unbelieversa term also widelyused for non-Muslim "infidels"), as haram (religiously for-bidden), or even as murtad (apostates). Historically, nu-merous (Naqsybandiyah) Sufi movements have croppedup regularly in Malay rural communities, leaving localauthorities apprehensive of such displays of alternative re-ligious power. The epithets used by way of official re-sponse usually alternated between "deviationist" (song-sang, menyeleweng) and "Shi'ah." The latter reflectsofficial Malaysian apprehension over Iranian (Shi'ite) Is-lam, or rather over Iran's alleged radical political influenceon young Malays following the Iranian revolution. Thetermfundamentalism had to wait for the events following apolitical crisis and the rise of a new political formation inMalaysia, described below.

During the 1970s and 1980s, partly in response to eventsin Iran, and fueled by contacts through rapidly expandingoverseas student networks, a number of new Islamic (dak-wah)9 movements arose in Malaysia. Grounded in a morecosmopolitan, international Muslim worldview, Malay Is-lam was able to transcend its ethnic base. In the process,the newly energized dakwah followers, many of whom hadreceived secular education, suddenly discovered a need toupgrade their knowledge of Arabic and the Qur'an, and toreassess the quality of Islam as it was popularly practicedlocally (cf. Chandra 1987; Hussin 1990; Nagata 1984; Zai-nah 1987). Viewing their country in terms of a new relig-ious ethic led to a questioning of some of its foundationalnational assumptions, notably the alleged secularism andmaterialism promoted by government development poli-cies and the effects of market globalization. Among the ge-neric dakwah goals was an attempt to find alternatives to the


extremes of such development, and its role in entrenchingelite power and privilege.

One such group was ABIM (an acronym for the IslamicYouth League of Malaysia), founded in 1970 by AnwarIbrahim, a student leader at the University of Malaya. In-itially concerned with Malay language rights and identity,the emphasis soon shifted to religion but was oriented asmuch towards issues of rural poverty and social justice inall ethnic groups. Anwar was rapidly recognized as a for-midable leader, a force to be contained. Prime MinisterMahthir's solution was to co-opt Anwar directly into theUMNO cabinet in 1984, both to offer a religiously correctface to the party and government and its development poli-cies, and to recapture the electoral support of conservativerural Malays from PAS ranks. Anwar's rising political starculminated as deputy prime minister, when in 1998, dis-putes over the economic crisis and corruption, led to hishumiliating sacking, imprisonment, and trial. The dramasurrounding this clash of these political titans did not endwith Anwar's imprisonment. From jail, a series of "prisonnotebooks"-style letters issued by Anwar began the con-struction of the image of a moral hero, ethical and unsul-lied by business cronyism or corruption, which he had al-legedly sought to resist and expose, only to lose finally tohis corrupt and vengeful master.

During his later career, Anwar had attempted to createan image of a more generously inclusive Islam, transcend-ing Malay chauvinism, and finding common ground withthe most progressive ideas in Christianity, Buddhism, Hin-duism, and Confucianism, as a basis for a more unitaryMalaysian identity (cf. Anwar 1996). In part this was a de-liberate riposte to the publication of Huntington's provoca-tive "Clash of Civilizations?" (1993), when Anwar pickedup the gauntlet and tried to prove Huntington's predictionsbaseless. As in so many other cases, ABIM and its succes-sor were as much concerned with identity and political po-sitioning in a changing society. Throughout the saga, thepublic discourse remained one of politics and ethics, withsurprisingly little attention to scriptural reference or exegesis.

The most controversial and visibly distinct of the dakwahmovements was Al (originally Darul) Arqam. Founded in1967 by a traditional religious teacher, Ustaz Asha'ari,with Sufi mystical tendencies, it drew most of its members,like the other dakwah groups, from a geographically, edu-cationally, and professionally mobile constituency of Ma-lay university and technical students. Arqam's lifestylewas an attempt to combine modern professional careerswith a communal life, based on a form of Islamic democ-racy sustained by consultative committees (syura) and re-distribution of resources according to need (ma'ash). Insti-tutionally, Arqam provided a comprehensive alternativeeconomy and society, with its own schools, clinics, pub-lishing houses, and petty commodity manufacturing of ha-lal foods and other items, in the spirit of (Arqam's imageof) a seventh century Arabian moral-religious community.

Arqam's commitment to state-of-the-art technology, in-cluding computer graphics and video production, wasepitomized through images of mediaeval-robed, beardedmen operating the latest hardware, who were certainly notthe Luddites of older Christian fundamentalist stereotypes.Community life revolved around a polygynous family,where each member had their assigned roles and even as-signed spouses, whose women assumed the full purdah(face-veil) attire and submission to male authority. Manyof these women had high educational qualifications andprofessions but turned these to the goals of the mission, de-scribing it as a jihad10 (struggle), not for war, but for peace.The ultimate goal of the Arqam experiment was to serve asa living moral critique, highlighting the allegedly unprinci-pled character of secular national development policy, andas an exemplar of a more ethical alternative.

Eventually, Arqam made itself politically vulnerablethrough the implied claims of Ustaz Asha'ari to be an east-ern mahdi (messianic figure),11 enhanced by his mysticalconnections to deceased religious leaders and even to theProphet Mohammed himself. Inevitably these rumors wereconstrued by the UMNO authorities as signs of danger-ous political aspirations (Nagata 1999). Among his ownfollowers, Asha'ari's personal authority and religious cre-dentials lay less in doctrinal or scriptural exegesis than inhis Sufi-like capacity to inspire his followers through com-munity retreats and chanting rituals (zikir), and through hispersonal leadership. Arqam was as much a social as a relig-ious movement. Intractable to government co-optation, un-like ABIM's Anwar, Arqam was finally banned in 1994,forcing Asha'ari to recant (bertaubat) on public television.

In their way, all the Malay religious and dakwah move-ments represented attempts by the first postcolonial gen-eration of young Malay leaders to chart a path through theuncertainties of cosmopolitanism and globalization, and tomanage the contradiction of roles for which they had norole model. They also raised a significant form of politicaland ethical critique, offering an alternative vision of society.

Given the generally lightweight character of textualanalysis by dakwah leaders, it is instructive to note the caseof Malay Muslim women's movement, Sisters in Islam.This group of highly qualified 61ite professional and aca-demic women are attempting to have their independent andcosmopolitan lifestyle, freedom of appearance in publiclife, recognized as impeccably Islamic to satisfy socialopinion. To this end, the Sisters have invited to Malaysiaexternal religious consultants, experts in Qur'anic exege-sis, in classical Arabic and Islamic law. One of these is theinternationally known Sudanese legal specialist, AbdullahiAn-Naim, and another, a Black American Muslim, Chi-cago-trained linguist, and religious scholar, Amina WadudMuhsin, whose ability to navigate arcane Arabic genderpronouns12 enables her to detect evidence of male bias inscholarly commentaries about women's legal and socialstatus and rights from the Qur'an. Paradoxically, where the


Sisters' way of life would hardly qualify as fundamentalistby most popular measures, their meticulous, obsessive at-tention to the minutiae (usul) of the scriptures would ap-pear fundamentalist by the standards of the original Chris-tian model, albeit with very different social goals. Thecomparison of the Sisters with Arqam thus suggests thattextual literalism may be directed toward different ends.Alone, it does not predict other features often associatedwith fundamentalism. What Arqam and the Sisters have incommon is their respect for the sacredness of the text, buttheir uses and interpretations clearly diverge.

Whether the fundamentalist label is appropriate to anyof the Malay Muslim dakwah movements depends less onthe actual content of local practice or style of Islam, as de-scribed, than on the currency of labels available and the in-ternal politics of the era. It is also influenced by the lan-guage of communication, to what extent a foreign audienceis also intended, and whether or not external scholars ormedia are involved. Whereas local Muslims long rejectedfundamentalism in favor of "resurgence" (cf. Chandra1987, noted above), or sometimes "revivalism" (Zainah1987), and as long as other terms of vilification, such as ex-tremism, fanaticism, kafir, haram, shVah, and murtad suf-ficed, the word was redundant. In certain earlier politicalcontexts too, Islam was sometimes negatively identified ona par with Communism13 as an enemy of the state. Until re-cently, fundamentalism was reserved largely for other re-ligions, for example, Zionists, or for convenience whenparticipating in an international discourse in English. It isonly since the end of the 1990s, and the recent hostilitiesbetween the followers of prime Minister Mahathir and An-war Ibrahim, that issues of corruption and democracy andreform have escalated to a degree where fundamentalismwas brought in to reinforce the verbal armamentarium. Ithas also been used intermittently by outsiders, such asNash (1991), albeit somewhat equivocally, in his contribu-tion to the Marty and Appleby series (whose wider agendamight have prejudged the issue somewhat).

The decline or demise of most of the original dakwahmovements, along with their associated political threat, leftPAS as the major embodiment of a combined religious op-position. Since it is the party most frequently assigned tothe fundamentalist category, at least by outsiders, it isworth examining more closely its record following theouster of Anwar Ibrahim in 1998. Since that date, PAS hasshown several, not always consistent, faces to differentaudiences, as well as exhibiting internal differences of itsown, leaving open the question as to which is the real/fun-damentalist PAS?

Taking advantage of the outrage among many Malay-sians over the humiliating and unprincipled treatment ofAnwar,14 and over the egregious conditions of patronage,nepotism, and corruption in high places that the sackingrevealed, PAS in 1998 joined a newly created multiethnic,

multireligious "justice" political coalition and party(Keadilan), whose other common goal is opposition to theMahathir establishment. Keadilan subsequently joined afull-fledged political multiparty coalition, Barisan Alterna-tif (BA), as a counterpoint to the ruling Alliance coalitionof establishment parties, Barisan Nasional (BN). Themembers of the BA thus came to include a previously uni-magined union of ethnic Chinese and Malays, of socialistand business interests, of religious and secular elements,and of Muslims and non-Muslims, in addition to assortedintellectuals, human rights, and NGO activists of all faiths.

PAS's membership in this coalition has forced the partyto pick an ideological path between its historic Malay-Muslim constituency and the more universalistic ideals ofthe BA, often articulated in the form of human rights, re-form, and justice. As a BA partner, PAS has played on val-ues of ethnic and religious harmony, of its record of cleanand noncorrupt rule at the state level. Its concessions toChinese business, cultural, and religious needs in mattersof Chinese medium schools, temple, and church lands (cf.Harakah, January 31, 2000) even convinced the secretary-general of the Chinese leftish party (DAP) to engage in abilateral process of religious and cultural bridge building toimprove the historically poor relationship between thesetwo solitudes. In these, PAS sometimes replaces referencesto the Islamic state with the less threatening, "Islamic so-cial order" (penyusunan pemerentahan Islam). As a politi-cal party, however, PAS is in a serious quest for power,and to its principal local voting constituency in the Malayheartland of the east coast states of Kelantan and Treng-ganu, it continues to play the issues of an Islamic state.These include regulations over women's dress and restric-tions on their public roles at work or in politics; curtail-ments of tourist cultural performances; and even gender-separate supermarket check-out counters. In this local context,most of PAS's references are to Qur'anic texts, Islamicidentity, and values and relate to local Malay interests, theplatform which outsiders often label fundamentalist.

As of mid-2000, PAS is clearly a party with a split ideo-logical personality but a more single-minded political goal.One consequence is that its ancient political enemy, theMalay senior party (UMNO) in the ruling BN alliance, hasput its own spin on their rivalry. Now UMNO is raising theIslamic stakes and forcefully driving the public rhetoric ina religious direction. Given that both parties are competingfor the votes of the ethnic Malays, the most fertile zone ofsymbol-mongering and differentiation lies in claims to re-ligious correctness on both sides. PAS promotes the goal ofthe implementation of religious (Shari'ah) law and the Is-lamic state, asserting that the relationship between Islamand politics is as inseparable as that between sweetness andsugar ("kemanisan dan gula tidak boleh dipisahkan") (cf.Exclusif, March 27-April 2, 2000). UMNO, however, in-sists that the opposition is fraudulently using mosques for


political messages, where they provocatively refer toUMNO Malays as Quraisy (infidels), a reference to the op-ponents of the Prophet Mohammed in seventh-centuryMedina (Star, April 12,2000).

UMNO Muslims further portray PAS' Islam as largelyritualistic, citing, as examples, obsessive attention to minutedetails of women's head-covering, men's beards, mixing ofthe sexes in shops, use of prayer at all public and politicalmeetings, separation of proceeds from alcohol sales fromstate revenues, and even questions over use of chopsticksfor eating. Simultaneously, UMNO counters PAS' accusa-tions of secularism by showcasing its own Islamic creden-tials in the domains of religious schools and programs,mosque building. Meanwhile, it continues to implement"anti-deviationist" laws on restive local Malay-Muslimmovements. By contrast with PAS, UMNO's Islam is pre-sented as modern and compassionate, nonfanatical, nonre-gressive, sensitive to women's rights, and, of course, non-fundamentalist. Political competition has finally ledUMNO to shoot the fundamentalist bullet to demonize itspolitical rival and enemy. Reciprocally, one of PAS' im-ages of the prime minister is as a clone of Ataturk, thesecular father of the defiantly nonreligious state of modernTurkey, portrayed as an enemy of Islam. (Harakah, March16-31, 2000). Another popular PAS caricature is ofUMNO as a relic of a feudal age, while PAS embodies thepolitical model of the Four Righteous Caliphs, exemplaryreligious rulers following the death of the Prophet. The twoparties continue the perennial kafir-mengafir war of wordsand mutual vilification in terms of religious observance,which tends to deflect public attention away from other is-sues, such as those of cronyism and corruption among theruling elites. Each party also recruits its own team ofulama, who issue religious rulings (fatwa) in support oftheir political patrons (cf. Exclusif, February 14-20,2000),and each plays "holier-than-thou" games over prayers andaid for their Chechen brothers in Islam.

It is in this climate that words like fundamentalism areplayed for their emotive and narrowly political impactrather than for any correspondence to a consistent body oftheological or social issues. During the 1999 federal elec-tions, marked by the contest between the BN and the newB A, use of the word fundamentalism was added for effect,largely by UMNO leaders, as a supplement to the earlierkafir/murtad name-calling, described above. It was re-sorted to by the prime minister and sometimes picked uprhetorically by PAS Islamists in the spirit and heat of thedebate. Knowing the resonance of the term in the West, theprime minister raised issues of fundamentalism, fanati-cism, and the Islamic state before an international audienceat the September 1999 New York Foreign Relations Tribu-nal as a means of firing up Western emotions and enlistingempathy and support for his own political agenda in the(then) forthcoming elections at home. PAS' own response

was that UMNO is the more fundamentalist, in its stubborndefense of its secular development policies.

Extrapolating from the above events and discourses, it isevident that in Malaysia, fundamentalism is not an indige-nous concept, and has little cultural resonance locally. Infact, there were indigenous terms to do the same job intheir own way. Even the idea of the Islamic state seems tobe a recent response to the intrusive power of the nation-state. Until the crisis surrounding the prime minister andAnwar, fundamentalism was largely limited to communi-cations with English-speaking foreigners, or in reference toforeign demons, such as Zionists. It is sometimes used cal-culatedly as a means to bring to bear overseas pressures ondomestic politics, an example of a growing repertoire of"global" ideas replacing indigenous terms and introducingstandards from offshore. If there is any common theme inits use, it is essentially political, determined by party strat-egy, whether to vilify the immediate competition, or usedsituationally, according to audience. Yet even assumingsome consensus as to what fundamentalism "is," the char-acter of PAS is hard to pin down, given its chameleon-likebehavior and rhetoric in different circumstances, particu-larly following its membership in the BA. Like the dakwahgroups, PAS employs "space-age technology [the Internet]to deliver a mediaeval political message" (Harakah, March16-31, 2000), although in fact, it may not be quite as "me-diaeval" as its visual and ritualistic image suggestscon-trary to the original stereotypes created by and about Chris-tian fundamentalists. Ultimately, PAS is propelled as muchby political goals as theology, to which the latter oftenseem to be accommodated. The discourse may be relig-ious, but the stakes are purely political.

An Anthropological Approach toFundamentalism?

It may be timely to set the fundamentalist question in abroader debate over the transferability of culturally loadedconcepts and keywords, usually from Western sources, toother traditions, what Hefner (1998) calls their "cross-cul-tural possibilities." With globalization, the tendency to ap-ply what are often passed off as universal values and ideashas escalated, largely on the backs of transnational volun-tary, humanitarian, educational, and aid organizations, re-inforced by the United Nations and other covenants andcharters. The use of converging terminologies has the ef-fect of displacing indigenous concepts and of introducingexogenous cultural baggage and judgments from offshore.While such universal ideals may appear self-evident andnot require justification for many intellectuals and activ-ists, less is known about how these are perceived in non-Western settings and how new meanings are locally as-signed. In fact, state authorities in some countries,including Malaysia, regard such ideas as forms of Westerninterference and hegemony and challenge their relevance


to local needs. On the other hand, different constituenciesin the same country may adapt such ideas to different ends,as in matters of civil and human rights (or fundamental-ism). The alien origin of such terms is apparent when trans-lated into local languages, again as is evident in the case of"fundamentalism." As a cautionary tale, the etymologicalfate of "civil society" in certain Asian and East Europeanlanguages has been chronicled by Weller (1998).

In contrast with approaches in other disciplines andsometimes at odds with global activists and ethicists, an-thropology's comparative perspective, with its attention tolocal discourse and action, may temper uncritical accep-tance of such apparent universal trends. Inevitably thispushes the anthropologist in a more pluralist direction andtowards an appreciation of the polysemic qualities of mostpopularly embraced of symbols and ideas. The most pow-erfiilly evocative terms have some meaning for almost eve-ryone but on closer inspection, turn out to mean substan-tially different things to different people, varying bycontext and audience. This is simultaneously their strengthand their weakness. Meaning thus unfolds through actionand debate and hence should not be expected to be com-pletely consistent, to conform to an easy "definition" or setof prescriptions, either within or across cultures.

I have attempted to describe these problems, of contex-tuality, of multivocality, of translation, of mixed local re-ception, of the gradual displacement of existing indigenousconcepts by this global label, in the case of fundamental-ism. Perhaps it is a special case of a more general problem,of the globalization of values, and a continuation of theperennial debates over relativisms and pluralisms.

Beyond Religion:Widening the Fundamentalist Net

As noted, the necessity of maintaining the distinctionbetween the voice of observer and observed is central tothe ethnographic method, and also part of authorial respon-sibility. But anthropologists play many roles simultane-ously, and to push an analysis further, especially in a com-parative discipline such as anthropology, they may stepback and offer a more panoptic view, in which it is the an-thropologist-as-author who is speculating. Putting on thehat of the creative comparativist, it is suggested that weabandon the assumption that fundamentalism must ulti-mately be religious-based, that it may be sighted in do-mains such as ultranationalisms, extreme or genocidal eth-nic chauvinisms, certain political ideologies, in obsessivequests for linguistic and cultural purity o, authenticity. Theterm has in fact been associated metaphorically with SouthAsian nationalisms (Caplan 1987), including Sinhaleseand Tamil nationalisms in Sri Lanka (Kapferer 1988; Tay-lor 1987). Recent Turkish nationalism has also been char-acterized as fundamentalist, but not in an Islamic sense.The resolutely secular republican nationalism founded on

the authority and sayings of the post-Ottoman leader, Ke-mal Ataturk, are interpreted by Tapper and Tapper (1987)as equally uncompromising, exclusivist and fundamental-ist. Many aspects of Islamist, Sikh, Hindu, and Sinhalesemovements are as much nationalist as religious. The ethno-cidal hypernationalisms of the Nazis, Serbs, Hutus, andTutsis, who create absolute, exclusivist boundaries againsttheir enemies, and who frequently try to bound their lan-guages and cultures to match, would also probably qualify.In effect, the nation is being sacralized (cf. Merkl andSmart 1983), with language and identity the focus of the"daily sacrament" of nationalism. In this formulation, thethin line between religious and political (fundamentalist)movements becomes even thinner. More recent commen-tary indicates the attraction of the fundamentalist metaphorfor the all-consuming ethnic and nationalist "tribalisms"(resurfacing in a supposedly transnational and more seam-less world, as used rather abrasively by Schlesinger in hisDisuniting of America (1992), and by Edward Said on thetopic of tribalism in his 1993 Reith lectures on "Repre-sentations of the Intellectual" (1996).

In the same comparative spirit, an argument can bemade for linguistic fundamentalisms. These would applyto some of the more draconian policies of the Quebec Of-fice de la Langue Francaise, which forbids Hebrew kosheror Chinese labels on imported foods as offenses against thelinguistic sacred canon. The original Academie Francaisein Paris of course has long been noted for its defensivenessagainst alien etymological imports from other languages.Of late too, "culture" in some circumstances can be said tohave taken on a fundamentalist tinge. This appears in ef-forts to exercise a possessive control, to define and manage"authenticity" or "aboriginality," and to prevent Othersfrom appropriating these, as part of a bid to take back iden-tity and to limit the ravages of uncontrolled pluralisms andmulticulturalisms.

Certain powerful ideologies, including Marxisms andMaoisms, also may move into a fundamentalist mode,when sacralized to the point of recognizing no alternative,of marginalizing and raising boundaries against a demon-ized Other. Some of these, like the Chinese Cultural Revo-lution, show a Protestant fundamentalist-like zeal in defend-ing the inerrancies of their dogmas, with inquisition-likeconsequences for dissenters. Ecological activism and dis-course now has a position for "eco-fundamentalists." Thesocialist and women's day anecdotes above also conveysomething of this flavor and mind-set.

Finally, to complete the extended metaphor, it might behazarded from some usages, that the slavish ideologicalcommitment to the principles and orthodoxies of the globalcapitalist market has fundamentalist qualities. John McMurtry(1998) likens the propagation of "market theory and prac-tice as universal absolutes" (pp. 35-36) to "a value systemwith the underpinnings of a fundamentalist theology" (p. 70),


and claims how devotedly the "market of fundamental-ists . . . exhibit undiminished faith in market laws" (p. 99).When the system falters, suggestions as to the possible fal-libility of its foundations convey overtones of heresy.Rather remarkable theological-like casuistry and secon-dary elaborations are invoked to avoid having to abandonthe basic doctrine, while slipping with ease into the satis-faction of vilifying the opposition. Such would be the diag-nosis of those who defiantly support the lightness of patch-ing up collapsed Russian markets, under the doctrine of theinfallibility of capitalism, when a similar collapse of thepreceding communism was sufficient to demonstrate its in-herent wrongness. These events may yet, in the words ofHobsbawm (cited in The Economist, October 24,1998:60),bring an end to "market fundamentalism."

Quest for Certainty in an Uncertain WorldOpening the metaphorical door of fundamentalism to

cover sacred canons other than religion alerts us to paral-lels which are intuitively persuasive. What these parallelsare, however, remain to be revealed. For this, it is neces-sary to pick up the theme of the simultaneous interest inglobalization and fundamentalism, where they may beseen as two ends of a continuum, where the one is antidoteto the other and depends on its dialectical opposite for sus-tenance. An icon of extreme cosmopolitanness would beSalman Rushdie, the archetypical celebrant of ambiguityand hybridity, the man for all seasons, places, and cultures.Such cavalier celebration of uncertainties of iucnuty anddestiny, however, are beyond the capacity of most people,most of the time. At the other extreme are those who seekthe comfort of the known, the familiar, a ready answereven before the question is raised, a catechism for life,which may push them in a fundamentalist direction. An ex-cess of openness and choice may generate its antithesis andresult in closure. Per contra, out of the bonds of closedcommunities burst freer spirits seeking wider horizons andopportunities. Fundamentalismsreligious, ethnic, na-tionalistic, or otherclose off the ideological marketplaceand reduce what McNeill calls "the normal part of a ca-cophony that arises from the diversity of the civilised"(1992). Or, as Robertson puts it: "fundamentalism, in thewidest reach of the term, constitutes ways of finding aplace in the world . . . which frequently involves attemptsto enhance the power of the groups concerned" (1995:239)It simplifies complex issues, makes black and white out ofgrey zones and attempts to restore certainty (cf. James1995; Nagata 1994b). It is worth remembering that amongthe Islamists, most of the movers and shakers are geo-graphically and socially mobile, often culturally dislocatedyouth, educated in foreign institutions, returning to sys-tems where they have no clear role models, are subject tohigh demands but have limited control. From the inventoryof cultural and political options to which they have been

exposed, their choice is ideology that offers not only a pre-scriptive worldview but the means to create a distinctiveidentity and a ready-made set of principles by which to de-sign their own lives and to mobilize others and harnessthem to their causes.

These canons set their own boundaries, of people andideas. From the above, it could be argued (by the anthro-pologist) that the fundamentalist mind-set is shown in re-fusal to find common ground or compromise, seekingdifferences rather than shared interests with others. A fun-damentalist response to a quest for codes or covenants ofuniversal human rights is typified by that of the IranianAyatollahs who declined to participate in existing interna-tional human rights codes on grounds that they have theirown "universal" Islamic codes of behavior. In a differentcontext, a similar spirit underlies the Protestant fundamen-talists' distaste for the social gospel or any concession byoutreach to those who reject their religious worldview.This kind of fundamentalism is a negation of relativism ina pluralistic world (cf. Geertz 1984) and a retreat from ecu-menism and dialogue. In similar spirit, a resistance to shar-ing even common academic ground with those from thewrong side of the boundary exhibits a fundamentalistmind-set in this sense. This propels the cultivation, for ex-ample, of schools of "Islamic economics" and Islamic so-cial science, politics, law, medicine, and so on, such asthose proposed by Pakistani teacher, Maulana A'laMaududi, in the 1980s. Some of these became very popularamong Islamist youth in Egypt, Malaysia, and even NorthAmerica, as well as in Maududi's Pakistan, as one guidethrough that cultural and cognitive "cacophony" of whichMcNeill writes.

Central to the quest for certainty is the kind of mind-setthat refuses to dialogue, or is "antihermeneutic" in Martyand Appleby's terms. In the words of Mohd Arkoun, it isexemplified in the inability to contemplate the impensableand the impense, the fear of liminality, a reluctance to en-tertain alternatives. Without using the term fundamentalist,Paine (1995:51) seems to be covering the same existentialterritory in his distinction between "referential" and "ca-nonical" forms of knowing. The former admits the possi-bility of "many truths" or of cognitive pluralism, while thelatter remains "impregnable to the possibility of critique."Further, citing Overing (1995:58), Paine twists the screwand exposes anthropology as a discipline, with its owncategorical typologies, received wisdoms, and epistemolo-gies among its disciples, as a sacred canon (with, one mightadd, some parallels to other fundamentalisms).

As a postscript, it is worth noting that the sponsorship ofMarty and Appleby's ambitious fundamentalisms projectbeginning in the late 1980s at the University of Chicago,by the McArthur Foundation, itself was an indicator of theclimate of the times. This was the period, at the end of thecold war, when older ideological titans (and enemies) suchas communism, were collapsing, and as yet unknown


dangers of Islamism were on the rise. One of the interestsof the McArthur Foundation lay in understanding how uni-versal was the dominance and need for powerful ideolo-gies and religious beliefs and, more specifically, what toexpect of these in the future. These concerns themselvesexpressed uncertainties for which more certain knowledgewas required. A few years later, in 1993, another scholar,Huntington, came up with his own answer, which had theworld realigned into mutually exclusive sets of fundamen-talist-style (although he did not use the word fundamental-ist) cultural and civilizational camps.

Conclusions: Much Ado about Very Little?An exegesis of the idea of fundamentalism (as much as

the substantive ideas fundamentalists allegedly promote ordefend) reveals the many-layered meanings the term hasacquired on its uneven trajectory across cultures, interestgroups, and disciplines. It is evident that, as a label, theterm is used for different purposes and effect by differentconstituencies, from outsider to insider ("true believer"),enemy to sympathizer, "detached" scholar to sensationalpublic or media. Over the past two decades, when it firstentered anthropological (and public) discourse, it hasmoved from inductive applications from its Protestantsource and content, beyond textual hermeneutics, out ofthe narrow band of religion, and into political activism,identity politics, nationalist movements, and other ideolo-gies. These have become the new sacred canons and ortho-doxies, identified by their defensive mind-sets, their antire-lativism, their unwillingness to dialogue or compromise,bound by categorical thinking and "referential" modes ofknowing. The fundamentalist epithet is often a form of ver-bal ammunition against ideological and political enemiesand "Others," recalling old orientalisms, and usually im-posed unilaterally, whether by academics, popular opinion,or the media. These frequently cross, contradict, or emulateone another in unexpected ways, as the changing course ofMalaysian religious politics and identities shows.

This conveniently polysemic term lends itself to meta-phorical expansion, hence the current obsession with locat-ing new fundamentalisms everywhere. All this unfolds in aglobal context of unprecedented changes and uncertainties,where alternative solutions offer a prescriptive new world-view and models by which to think and live, with whichsome Malay Muslims have been experimenting. Funda-mentalism is an expanding metaphor, for an expanding ar-ray of circumstances, from the market to politics to linguis-tic purity. Given all these possible facilitating conditions, itis to be expected that a proliferation of other global key-words will follow the fate of fundamentalism, and that theywill each continue to mutate and be creatively accommo-dated to new circumstances indefinitely.

Notes1. The first of several pronouncements on a return to fun-

damentals, mostly of a doctrinal variety, was originally madeat a conference in Niagara in 1895. More widely publicizedwere a series of tracts, appropriately known as "The Funda-mentals," appearing from 1909 on, from the pens of a numberof prominent (mostly Presbyterian and Baptist) evangelicalleaders. Eventually, most of the Protestant churches in theUnited States were fractured into "fundamentalist" and "mod-ernist" wings, which have persisted until the present. Sub-sequent elaborations, in the form of personal testimonies,speaking in tongues, and other manifestations of the HolySpirit, often associated with Pentecostalism, gathered momen-tum in America and Europe in the first half of the twentiethcentury. For some fundamentalists, the Pentecostalists privi-leged emotion over text and hence were not fully accepted, al-though this was not universal.

2. The Hadith is a collection of compilations of the deedsand sayings of the life, family, and companions of the ProphetMuhammad, in the form of stories, anecdotes, etc., which arecommonly invoked by Muslims everywhere as a guide to in-terpretations and decisions, as a supplement to the Qur'an andclarification of difficult or obscure passages.

3. One egregious case of a dissenting Muslim, voraciouslyseized upon by Western media eager to "prove" a case, wasthat of the Egyptian professor, Abu Zaid, who in 1995 pro-posed that the Qur'an may be studied as a historical text, forwhich he was branded as an apostate, or non-Muslim, andeven forced to divorce his wife. Whatever the judgment ofAbu Zaid's actions and fate, the logic was impeccable inmaintaining the congruence between respect for the text andbeing a true Muslim.

4. During the nineteenth century, the impact of variousEuropean colonialisms on Muslim societies in North Africaand the Middle East stimulated debates and dilemmas, bothideological and practical, over the choices between Westernsecularism, scientism, democracy, and economic "progress,"on the one hand, and local ethical, moral, and religious valuesand authority, on the other. At the time, a number of Muslimscholars, often with Western education and experience in bothsystems, attempted to creatively interpret the Scriptures in ac-cordance with their perception of the needs of modern society,so that the latter could play a credible role in world affairs. Inthe case of Turkey, the unilateral decision of Kemal Ataturk toabandon the public role of Islam and to create a secular "na-tion-state" represents one extreme, although lately this is be-ing contested by Islamists from below.

5. In the three most recent Indian national elections, in1996, 1998, and 1999, the BJP astounded India and the worldby winning a technical majority (only about 26% on two occa-sions) but requiring complex and delicate alliances with otherparties to form a viable government. In the first two cases,these soon unraveled, hence the short interval between elec-tions. Since the early 1990s, the BJP had been priming its con-stituencies politically, in a s

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Beyond Theology: Toward an Anthropology of "Fundamentalism"