The New York Review of Books has its usual quota of literary luminaries on the reviewing stand this week, with three of them writing on subjects of particular interest (to me, at least). Russell Baker reviews Paul Krugman’s new book, The Great Unraveling; Gary Wills introduces his own new book on Thomas Jefferson, Negro President; and Joan Didion offers a very timely glance at George Bush via the lens of Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages, the most recent of the Left Behind series. That last essay dovetails nicely with the current flap surrounding General William “Jerry” Boykin’s somewhat intemperate remarks regarding the true nature of the War on Terra®.
I read an opinion piece in Newsweek a year or so ago suggesting that militant fundamentalists of any religion have a great deal more in common with one another than with the much larger population of temperate practioners of their respective faiths. It seems not to be online anymore, so I’ve posted it in its entirety—just click on the “full entry” link below for the text.
The Age of Fundamentalism
by Carla Power
Fundamentalists of all religions have a lot in common
The holy warrior speaks simply and directly, cleaving the world neatly in two. “This is a religious struggle, a clash of cultures,” he intones. Luckily, God is on the right side, having “put a hedge of protection around us.”
OSAMA BIN LADEN, lashing out on Al-Jazeera? No, a lunchtime speech to the Economic Club in Detroit by Pat Robertson, the Christian evangelical. Those who might have thought otherwise can be forgiven, for the echo is spookily similar. The Americans and the British, the Qaeda leader said before the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, “have divided the world into two regions— one of faith and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us.”
These are good days for Holy Warriors, for this is the age of fundamentalism. Relativism remains a key casualty of September 11. In these queasy times, clinging to certainty and absolutism seems far safer than the messy course of debate and dissent. So in the Islamic world, so in America, where members of the Christian right have come out with a rash of attacks on Islam, calling it “evil” and branding Muhammad a “terrorist” and “demon-possessed pedophile.” With his “Axis of Evil,” George W. Bush parses the world: “for us or against us,” tidy lines in the sand dividing “barbarians” from the “civilized.”
Look more closely, though, and the “us” and “them” distinction collapses. Right-wing Christian leaders like Franklin Graham may denounce Islam as a “wicked religion,” and Muslim fundamentalists may defame Jews, but in fact their visions are far closer than either camp would admit. Their beliefs on the roles of women and religion in public life closely mirror one another. Both share a love affair with the media and a suspicion of pluralism and secular liberalism. When the Muslim College, a London-based center of Islamic learning, held a seminar for Muslim, Christian and Jewish conservatives, the participants had a shock of self-recognition, says Zaki Badawi, an Egyptian religious scholar who heads the college. Suddenly, they realized they shared attitudes and world views. Whatever their stripe, fundamentalists are absolutists at heart, says Badawi. “They don’t like to hear other ideas at all. They want to hear their own voice, and are suspicious of anyone else’s.”
The exchange of vitriol between Christian and Muslim camps has thus produced a weird mirroring effect. It wasn’t always so. Back in 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the writer Salman Rushdie to death for denigrating the Prophet Muhammad in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Then, the so-called Rushdie Affair pitted secularism against religion. The sureness of the perfection of the Qur’an slammed up against Western liberalism’s fanatical belief in tolerance, in the absolutism of free speech and the status of literature as a sacred place to question and debate. Thirteen years on, the loudest voices in the debate aren’t liberals and Muslim fundamentalists, but two sets of fundamentalists: Christians and Muslims. If right-wing Christians attack Muhammad and his teachings, Muslim extremists attack America and the Jews, albeit not Jesus, since he is considered a prophet in the Qur’an. Whatever its target, the vitriol is the same. “This is the same kind of religiosity, with the same kind of dynamisms,” says Karen Armstrong, author of “The Battle for God.” “All fundamentalists feel threatened by modernity, and all of them in their sense of threat tend to demonize the Other.”
One Other is shared by all fundamentalisms, and that is Woman. Every fundamentalist wants a traditional wife and mother, preferably covered up. (The reason for the Muslim woman’s veil and the Orthodox Jewish woman’s wig? The shared belief that a woman’s hair is for her husband, not the public.) The Taliban weren’t alone in dominating women. The Faith and Message Statement of the Southern Baptist Convention requires a wife to “submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Conservative Muslims, fearing sex outside marriage, would feel right at home in the Christian right’s new abstinence campaign.
Though both Muslim and Christian fundamentalists claim to be wary of modernity, they’re dexterous with its tools. Just as the ministries of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart were built on radio and television, so do extremist Muslim groups owe their popularity to the Internet and satellite television. To be fair, the mainstream media use fundamentalists just as much as the fundamentalists use the media. Bombs and fatwa s make better copy than the predictable routine of five daily prayers. Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion crusade, is the stuff of national headlines, while Quaker prayer meetings are the stuff of community newsletters. And precisely because extremists make such great copy, the quietists and moderates rarely get heard. The wishy-washy liberal, the Sufi, the Israeli peacenik, the born-again Christian who believes in the separation of church and state — they are shouted down. Robertson is right. We are in the middle of a clash of cultures. But itis not between Islam and Christianity. It’s between fundamentalists and the rest of us.
Some of my best friends are Christians
The New York Review of Books has its usual quota of literary luminaries on the reviewing stand this week, with three of them writing on subjects of particular interest (to me, at least). Russell Baker reviews Paul Krugman’s new book, The Great Unraveling; Gary Wills introduces his own new book on Thomas Jefferson, Negro President; and Joan Didion offers a very timely glance at George Bush via the lens of Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages, the most recent of the Left Behind series. That last essay dovetails nicely with the current flap surrounding General William “Jerry” Boykin’s somewhat intemperate remarks regarding the true nature of the War on Terra®.
I read an opinion piece in Newsweek a year or so ago suggesting that militant fundamentalists of any religion have a great deal more in common with one another than with the much larger population of temperate practioners of their respective faiths. It seems not to be online anymore, so I’ve posted it in its entirety—just click on the “full entry” link below for the text.
The Age of Fundamentalism
by Carla Power
Fundamentalists of all religions have a lot in common
The holy warrior speaks simply and directly, cleaving the world neatly in two. “This is a religious struggle, a clash of cultures,” he intones. Luckily, God is on the right side, having “put a hedge of protection around us.”
OSAMA BIN LADEN, lashing out on Al-Jazeera? No, a lunchtime speech to the Economic Club in Detroit by Pat Robertson, the Christian evangelical. Those who might have thought otherwise can be forgiven, for the echo is spookily similar. The Americans and the British, the Qaeda leader said before the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, “have divided the world into two regions— one of faith and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us.”
These are good days for Holy Warriors, for this is the age of fundamentalism. Relativism remains a key casualty of September 11. In these queasy times, clinging to certainty and absolutism seems far safer than the messy course of debate and dissent. So in the Islamic world, so in America, where members of the Christian right have come out with a rash of attacks on Islam, calling it “evil” and branding Muhammad a “terrorist” and “demon-possessed pedophile.” With his “Axis of Evil,” George W. Bush parses the world: “for us or against us,” tidy lines in the sand dividing “barbarians” from the “civilized.”
Look more closely, though, and the “us” and “them” distinction collapses. Right-wing Christian leaders like Franklin Graham may denounce Islam as a “wicked religion,” and Muslim fundamentalists may defame Jews, but in fact their visions are far closer than either camp would admit. Their beliefs on the roles of women and religion in public life closely mirror one another. Both share a love affair with the media and a suspicion of pluralism and secular liberalism. When the Muslim College, a London-based center of Islamic learning, held a seminar for Muslim, Christian and Jewish conservatives, the participants had a shock of self-recognition, says Zaki Badawi, an Egyptian religious scholar who heads the college. Suddenly, they realized they shared attitudes and world views. Whatever their stripe, fundamentalists are absolutists at heart, says Badawi. “They don’t like to hear other ideas at all. They want to hear their own voice, and are suspicious of anyone else’s.”
The exchange of vitriol between Christian and Muslim camps has thus produced a weird mirroring effect. It wasn’t always so. Back in 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the writer Salman Rushdie to death for denigrating the Prophet Muhammad in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Then, the so-called Rushdie Affair pitted secularism against religion. The sureness of the perfection of the Qur’an slammed up against Western liberalism’s fanatical belief in tolerance, in the absolutism of free speech and the status of literature as a sacred place to question and debate. Thirteen years on, the loudest voices in the debate aren’t liberals and Muslim fundamentalists, but two sets of fundamentalists: Christians and Muslims. If right-wing Christians attack Muhammad and his teachings, Muslim extremists attack America and the Jews, albeit not Jesus, since he is considered a prophet in the Qur’an. Whatever its target, the vitriol is the same. “This is the same kind of religiosity, with the same kind of dynamisms,” says Karen Armstrong, author of “The Battle for God.” “All fundamentalists feel threatened by modernity, and all of them in their sense of threat tend to demonize the Other.”
One Other is shared by all fundamentalisms, and that is Woman. Every fundamentalist wants a traditional wife and mother, preferably covered up. (The reason for the Muslim woman’s veil and the Orthodox Jewish woman’s wig? The shared belief that a woman’s hair is for her husband, not the public.) The Taliban weren’t alone in dominating women. The Faith and Message Statement of the Southern Baptist Convention requires a wife to “submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Conservative Muslims, fearing sex outside marriage, would feel right at home in the Christian right’s new abstinence campaign.
Though both Muslim and Christian fundamentalists claim to be wary of modernity, they’re dexterous with its tools. Just as the ministries of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart were built on radio and television, so do extremist Muslim groups owe their popularity to the Internet and satellite television. To be fair, the mainstream media use fundamentalists just as much as the fundamentalists use the media. Bombs and fatwa s make better copy than the predictable routine of five daily prayers. Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion crusade, is the stuff of national headlines, while Quaker prayer meetings are the stuff of community newsletters. And precisely because extremists make such great copy, the quietists and moderates rarely get heard. The wishy-washy liberal, the Sufi, the Israeli peacenik, the born-again Christian who believes in the separation of church and state — they are shouted down. Robertson is right. We are in the middle of a clash of cultures. But itis not between Islam and Christianity. It’s between fundamentalists and the rest of us.