Saha, Santosh C., ed. Religious Fundamentalism in the Contemporary
World: Critical Social and Political Issues. Lanham, Md.: Lexington
Books, 2004. 340 pp. $75.00 (cloth).
This collection represents a pluralist approach to
religious fundamentalism. No definitional order is imposed and a variety
of theories are expounded. All the authors are engaged analytically in
the attempt to identify and to comprehend the many faces of
fundamentalist ideology in our contemporary world. There are ten
chapters by authors representing a broad range of academic disciplines.
Those chapters focusing
on methodological pursuit of religious fundamentalism include treatments
of (1) the "Global Information Order" [ch. 1] as a transnational forum
outside the control of states and corporations that is being exploited
by fundamentalist groups, (2) the "nature of religious markets" [ch. 2]
in a time when the "sacred canopy" of religion as social consensus is no
longer a plausible reality for any society, and (3) the continuum along
which both fundamentalism and pluralism are situated [ch. 3] in strong
or weak versions determined by the interpretive handling of the
"Collection" of writings held as sacred by the society. This
last-mentioned study illustrates its points through an examination of
the political role of religion in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In
each of the three instances, the cultural complexity and social
particulars of the society are judged as too diverse for a
fundamentalist ideology to be functionally dominant. In Singapore, a
city-state dominated by ethnic Chinese, a compulsory religious education
curriculum called "Religious Knowledge" that included pluralist choices
foundered because of "student disinterest in Confucianism" which was the
choice favored by the government. Abandoning the "Religious Knowledge"
project, the government adopted a set of principles "intended to
enshrine an ‘Asian’ set of values" (p. 62). In Indonesia, "the Islam of
a large proportion of the population is too mixed up with other local
religious beliefs and practices to allow a purist version of Islam to be
enforced nationwide" (p. 65). The government has employed a "strategic
ideological compromise" known as pancasila, five principles that
were included in the Indonesian constitution and that "contain both
religious and secular ideas" (p. 64). In Malaysia, with 61 percent
ethnic Malay Muslims and 34 percent ethnic Chinese and Indians, "almost
none of whom are Muslims" (p. 67), the government "must try to find
pluralist accommodations with its large non-Muslim populations, which
greatly reduces the prospect of implementing a particularist national
ideology" (p. 67).
A fourth chapter grouped with the methodological
approaches claims that, with the collapse of communist ideologies in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, "religions quickly moved to the
center of public discourse" (p. 74), providing continuity to cultural
identities. At first, this discourse was pluralist and predominantly lay
discourse. Later, clerical discourse came to the fore with a
particularist slant (p. 76). The author claims that "a straightforward,
ostensible particularism, shown by the Eastern European religions, turns
out to be in fact the only tactic for them to retain a substantial
symbolic power in the era of global culture" (p. 85).
The remaining six
chapters are identified as treating regional fundamentalisms, though
chapters on political Islam and the Islamophobia of the Western media
are not so much regional as thematic. The regional chapters include two
addressing Hindu fundamentalism in India, one focusing on the
Islamization of Pakistan, and one recounting the emergence of the Shas
party in Israel.|
Hindu revivalist politics
[ch. 6] is obsessed with establishing Hindu religious communalism as the
basis for national identity in India. It assumes the homogeneity of a
Hindu community in the form of the brahmanical Hinduism of the Vedas and
it freely revises history into an Aryan golden age followed by a Muslim
age of moral decline (p. 144). It advocates the compulsory teaching of
Sanskrit, the inclusion of astrology in university curricula, and
observance of traditions like sati, the self-immolation of a
widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. The author, who is also the editor
of the volume, points out weaknesses in the ideology of the Hindu
revivalists. Not only was the Hindu past always quite diverse and the
history of India largely pluralist, but Saha claims that at the core of
this revivalist movement "lay a secular ideology of the state and a
modern approach to party politics" (p. 159). The revivalists, Saha
asserts, created divisiveness, "but the majority of Hindus were in favor
of a secular state because modernity would likely bring efficiency and
material prosperity without jeopardizing Hindu norms and valued
traditions" (p. 160).
Ideology supplants
historiography according to a study subtitled, "The Islamization of
Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks" [ch. 10]. History becomes a mere
tool for creating heroes and villains suitable for teaching a Pakstani
nationalism committed to the "Two-Nation Theory" which holds that
"Hindus and Muslims in South Asia had always constituted distinct and
irreconcilably separate communities" (p. 278). The rich cultural variety
of peoples constituting Pakistan has been effaced by Islamization
generated by the central government. "Islam has been the tool and
Panjabi hegemony has been the rule" (p. 280). The Islamization of social
science textbooks began in 1972 and reached full stride under General
Zia ul-Haq, whose textbooks live on long after his assassination in 1988
(p. 290). "Denial and erasure are the primary tools of historiography as
it is officially practiced in Pakistan" (p. 287).
Relatively short chapters
on the Shas party in Israel [ch. 9] and the Bharatiya Janata Party in
India [ch. 8] tell surprisingly similar stories. These parties are very
pragmatic about wielding what power they can achieve, and they are both
willing to manipulate political matters by use of religiously charged
issues. Seeking political advantage, the BJP linked itself to the
questionable tradition of Ayodhya as the birthplace of Rama which led to
the razing of Babar’s mosque in Ayodhya by a mob on 6 December 1992 (p.
213). From its initial electoral foray in 1984, the Shas party has
charted a political course that left its natural ally, Likud, in the
lurch while allying with its original enemy, Labor, in the quest for
favorable treatment toward its Sephardi constituents. The author claims
that "both Labor and Likud failed to reach the voters through grass
roots social and economic activities" whereas the Shas party
concentrated on delivering the goods for the Sephardi cause (p. 256).
The chapter on political
Islam [ch. 5] posits two phases of Islamist discourse. The first phase
is identified as motivational and it consists of stereotypical
denunciation of the immoral values of the West and of utopian claims
about Islam as the answer to all political questions. The necessary
second phase is analytical and directed toward pragmatic engagement with
practical realities in order to implement desired political and economic
changes (pp. 95–96). The author claims that the Ayatollah Khomeini is
"the quintessential example of this (first) phase of Islamism" (p. 96),
and that the current president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami, who "developed
a very sophisticated worldview focusing on the need for progress in the
Muslim world" (p. 95), represents the essence of the second phase of
Islamist discourse. The author asserts that, in Khatami’s case, "both
the essentialized ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ are viewed critically" (p. 106).
The chapter on "Islamophobia
in the Western Media" [ch. 7] is the most volatile piece in this
collection. Western phobia about Islam is cited as far back as
Voltaire’s ignorant rant in a play he wrote about Muhammad. Samuel
Huntington’s identification of Islam as the new "other" in his 1993
work, The Clash of Civilizations, is panned for its over-reliance
on works by Bernard Lewis that employ simplistic reductions of Islam and
point to fanatic Islamists as the real Muslims (p. 175). The co-authors
conclude that "it is the scholarship of oversimplification that informs
the West about Islam" (p. 176). The authors point out that there are no
Jewish terrorists or Christian terrorists for the Western media—"only
Muslims are ‘terrorists’" (p. 178). They note that "armed Zionists in
the Hagannah, Irgun, and Stern Gang, fighting often ferociously for the
independent state of Israel, were referred to not as Jewish terrorists
but as patriots, nationalists, commandos, guerrillas, the Jewish
underground, and freedom fighters" (p. 177). They further note that
Serbs attacking Muslims in Bosnia were called "nationalists," never
"Christian terrorists" (p. 177).
The authors go on to
present an instructive look at the media’s handling of the Rushdie
controversy, concluding that his work was culturally treasonous and well
outside the bounds of what the West permits to be published within its
own cultural territory (p. 194). The authors contrast the coddling of
Rushdie by the Western media to the treatment of Irish singer Sinead
O’Connor when she tore up a photograph of the pope on Saturday Night
Live in 1992. "No mention was ever made of O’Connor’s right to free
speech while a mob cheered on a steamroller as it crushed hundreds of
O’Connor CDs—a picture analogous to the burning of Rushdie’s books by a
handful of Muslims in different parts of the world" (p. 194). The
authors are equally lively in their exposé of Islamophobia in the
media’s role in the Gulf War and in the War on Terror.
While there are nuggets
of interest to be found in each of the ten chapters, the most valuable
presentations are Saha’s chapter on Hindu revivalists and Yvette Claire
Rosser’s chapter on Islamization of Pakistani ideology by way of
textbooks. These authors both offer thorough knowledge about the leading
figures, strategic shifts, and pivotal developments in the recent
history of the two leading fundamentalisms of South Asia, and they
provide sound, incisive critiques of these respective movements in India
and Pakistan. The secular and pluralist traditions of India afford the
reader some optimism, but the reader can only dread the future of
Pakistan as a "failed state."
