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Causes of Islamic Fundamentalism
The
fall of Ottoman Caliphate
The disintegration of the Ottoman state – officially in 1923
– has had major consequences on Islamic revival, because
Ottoman Empire, although it was weak and corrupt, it was a
symbol of Islamic unity, not just political unity but
theological unity. But there has been a feeling that, since
1924, that unity has disappeared, the Muslim world has had
no centre, so to speak. And that, of course, has ushered the
muslims into the era of the nation-states in the Muslim
world, that are not unified, but as a matter of fact there
are different conflicts between them. The response of the
Muslims in India in the first decades of 20th
century was to create the Al-Khilafa movement. They
collected donations and sent them to Turkey as a means to
preserve the integrity of the Ottoman state.
The
Idea of an “Islamic Way of Life” and the Twentieth Century
Islamic Movements:
The
world of Islam also received the impact of Western ideas in
the field of social sciences, and Muslims began to propound
Islam as a system of life. Islamic teachings were projected
as an all-embracing “system of life,” and movements in
different lands were launched to implement and put into
practice this system of life. These twentieth century
revivalist movements started almost simultaneously in Muslim
countries from Indonesia to Egypt. The most prominent and
influential among these movements are Egypt´s Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslemoon
and the Indo-Pak subcontinent´s Jama`at-e-Islami. They were
similar in a number of ways. Indeed it would not be far from
true to say that they were all animated by a single
conception of religion. It must be admitted, in all
fairness, that these efforts imparted credibility to Islam
as a code of life superior to other ideologies, and have
weakened the influence of the West upon the young. 15
Liberation of Muslim Lands
In the mid of twentieth century most of the Muslim
countries got liberation from the colonial rule. The
military and political victories of the Western colonial
powers were checked with the passage of time. In many
countries there were forceful and sustained nationalist
freedom movements. As a result western powers were forced to
withdraw their political hegemony from occupied lands.
Almost the entire Muslim bloc has got ride of the yoke of
direct rule by imperialist powers. In many Muslim countries
nationalist freedom and self-rule movements were launched,
and these invariably appealed to religious sentiments of the
people for sparking off feelings of nationalism. There was
no alternative to this, as Muslim nationalism had no
anchorage other than Islam. This appeal to religion,
however, was more like a slogan than an existential concern
for the Islamic faith. Yet it did strengthen the idea of the
revival of Islam. 16
Fallibility
of science
In
the realm of science new physical theories shook the very
foundations of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry.
Matter was no longer considered as something permanent and
tangible, and the former absolute faith in mechanical laws
gave way to less rigid views of the universe. This made
easier to affirm metaphysical beliefs, and gave support to
religion. 17
Hollowness
of Western civilization
At the
same time, the hollowness of Western civilization has been
clearly brought out by the two disastrous world wars, so
that even the West has come to consider the foundations of
its own culture as ill-conceived and misguided.
Materialistic atheism reached its logical culmination in the
forms of socialism and communism, and moral as well as
religious values were reinterpreted in purely economic
terms. This alarmed Western peoples themselves, and they
began to propound a new philosophy of humanism which was
quite sympathetic to spiritual values. 18
The
Prince of Wales emphasizes this sense of disillusionment
with the West.
"Among
the many religious, social and political causes of what
we might more accurately call the Islamic revival is a
powerful feeling of disenchantment, of the realization
that Western technology and material things are
insufficient, and that a deeper meaning to life lies
elsewhere in the essence of Islamic belief."
(Prince Charles, "Islam and the West".)
Failure of liberal democracy and socialism
The
failure of liberal nationalism and socialism also serve the
cause of Islamic fundamentalism. Martin and Appleby
observed:
Fundamentalists leaders, among others, called attention to
the repeated failures of national elites to ensure a secure
identity for these competing factions. For example, when
postcolonial liberal nationalism and later, Arab socialism,
failed to lift the Egyptian masses out of poverty and to
defeat the Israeli army, Islamic fundamentalists, who had
been providing alternative institutions and messages since
the 1930s, explained the failures of governmental policies
by pointing to (neglected) Islam as the one indigenous Arab
glory not shared with the West.
19
Muslim revivalist presented islam as a solution. Neither
nationalism nor socialism, al-Turabi argues, produced
development in the Islamic world. 20 Secular
nationalism (whether in the form of liberal nationalism,
Arab nationalism, or socialism) has not provided a sense of
national identity or produced strong and prosperous
societies. The governments in Muslim countries-- mostly
nonelected, authoritarian, and dependent on security
forces--have been unable to establish their political
legitimacy. They have been blamed for the failure to achieve
economic self-sufficiency, to stem the widening gap between
rich and poor, to halt widespread corruption, to liberate
Palestine, to resist Western political and cultural
hegemony.21 Armstrong also noticed that the Islamic
fundamentalism erupted in the late 1960s, after a degree of
modernization had been accomplished and after secularist
ideologies, such as nationalism and socialism, seemed to
have failed. 22
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