Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

214 t CHAPTER EIGHT
onslaught are everywhere apparent: the era of colonialism, the
West-abetted foundation of the State of Israel and continued Western
dominance of the political economy, the erosion of Islamic political,
judicial, and educational institutions. Two basic and contrasting
solutions have been offered (with many compromises in
between). One is to adopt Western ways, in short, to modernize
Islam—the position is called Modernism—and bring it into conformity
to the needs and demands of the modern era. The other is
to return to Islam, either to struggle for the preservation of the best
of the past, what is called Traditionalism, or to seek, as the Fundamentalists,
or Islamists, as they are now often called, do, a renewal
or revival (tajdid) of the past.
It is from this latter perspective that Fundamentalism has arisen
in the Islamic world. It has issued its “call” for a moral and social
movement to establish the Islamic order, realized in the Jamaat-i
Islami in Pakistan and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It is firm
in its denial of nationalism and its repudiation of the nation-state
in the name of a single umma. Islamic Fundamentalism struggles—
not always successfully; consider Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic
of Iran—to be nonsectarian. It seeks the reconciliation of
Shiite and Sunni differences. And if it is willing and eager to embrace
the technology of modernity, it is resolute in its denial of the
ideology of secular and pluralistic modernism. It points, with great
effect, to the failure of two modern Muslim experiments in modernism
and Westernization, republican Turkey and pre-revolutionary
Iran.
What distinguishes Fundamentalism from Traditionalism is the
flexibility of the former, its willingness to practice ijtihad (as Ibn
Taymiyya did) and to adapt sharia to the modern world. It is a
critique not only of the West but of the Muslim status quo. Islamic
Fundamentalism understands Islam as a totalizing experience and
so rejects the separation of Islam from politics or any other aspect
of modern life. The Islamists, like all other such groups, see themselves
as a faithful remnant, the true Muslims, who stand in sharp
contrast to others who profess Islam but who follow the values of
the derogatory jahiliyya, the “era of barbarism” used to charac-