Islam in Germany - Institut für Islamfragen

pace of change. Coupled to great advances
in literacy and in mass communication
technologies, these have created
widespread demands for religious, social
and political reform much of it expressed
in religious language.
In response to the crises in their societies,
Islamic reformers arose who saw the
deviation of contemporary Islam from its
original pure form as the main cause of
Muslim weakness and humiliation. They
demanded a return to the revealed scriptures
and to the early model of the first
community, as well as a purification of
Islam from later additions and superstitions.
They were often lay people who
attacked the monopoly of establishment
religious specialists and worked for a
reinterpretation of the sources to meet the
needs of the modern age.
Islamic Fundamentalism (also known
as Islamism or political Islam) is part of
this wider reform movement, a reaction
to the destructive effects of secular modernity
and Western hegemony on Muslim
societies. The secularist separation of
religion from politics is seen as a Western
imposition foreign to the spirit of
Islam which must be resisted at all costs.
Secularism is viewed as a rebellion
against God and his Law. All modern
societies, both Muslim and others, are
examined in this light and found wanting,
corrupted by Western secularism, materialism,
and sexual permissiveness which
have caused the breakdown of morality
and the family and the explosion in
crime. Fundamentalists critique the passivity
of traditional Islam and challenge
all true Muslims to sacrificial activism in
the religious, social and political spheres
in order to roll back the secular immoral
wave and restore pure religion to its Godordained
position as first implemented in
the „golden age” of the Prophet and his
immediate followers.
Islamic fundamentalists want to defend
the fundamentals of original Islam
while meeting the challenge of modernity.
For fundamentalists, God must be at
the centre of the whole universe, including
politics, and they fight to bring
religion back to the centre of the public
arena. Fundamentalism transforms religion
into a political ideology that includes
a social element of protest by the
have-nots of the Muslim world against an
oppressive world order, demanding economic
and social justice and the establishment
of an Islamic state in which
God’s law reigns supreme. In this sense
Islamism is a revolutionary ideology.
III.
Fundamentalists aim at Islamizing the
total social and political systems of their
societies and at establishing a world-wide
Islamic state based on Sharia (the allencompassing
law ordained by God for
humans and based on Quran and Hadith).
Islamic fundamentalism is a fairly
modern phenomenon that started in the
1920s with the founding of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, the first Islamist
mass movement. There are now a wide
variety of movements that offer Islam as
a total way of life and as an alternative to
Western secular ideologies. Islamic fundamentalism
aims at bringing all of contemporary
society under God’s sovereignty,
rule and law. The restoration of
Islamic glory will be achieved by purifying
society from un-Islamic teachings
and practices, by a return to Islam’s original
pure sources (the Quran - God’s
written revelation through Muhammad,
and Hadith, the divinely inspired traditions
of the Prophet’s sayings and deeds)
as the only authority, and by the establishment
of an ideal Islamic state modelled
on that of the Prophet and his
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