Fundamentalism
247
KEY CONCEPT THEOCRACY
and precepts to be the guiding principles of both personal life and political conduct. Second, it invests political authority with potentially unlimited power because, as temporal power derived from spiritual wisdom, it cannot be based on popular consent, or be properly constrained within a constitutional framework. Strict theocratic rule is therefore a form of autocracy, while limited theocratic rule may co-exist with democracy and constitutionalism (see p. 42).
Theocracy (literally ‘rule by God’) is the principle that religious authority should prevail over political authority. Atheocracy is therefore a regime inwhich government posts are filled on the basis of people’s position in the religious hierarchy. Theocratic rule is illiberal in two senses. First, it violates the public/private divide, in that it takes religious rules
brought the Ayatollah Khomeini (see p. 248) to power as the leader of the world’s first Islamic state. It soon became clear, however, that the fundamentalist upsurge was not an exclusively Islamic development. Christian fundamentalists, led by political organizations such as theMoral Majority, played a prominent role in the 1980s inUS politics, campaigning for changes in public policy in such areas as abortion, homosexuality and school prayers. What became, in effect, the evangelical wing of the Republican Party forged close links to the Ronald Reagan presidency (1981–89), as it did with Donald Trump’s presidency (2017–21) (see p. 249). During the 1980s and 1990s, fundamentalist movements also arose within Hinduism and Sikhism in India and within Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Interest in fundamentalism nevertheless peaked in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, and the initiation of the so-called ‘war on terror’, events which were interpreted by some as marking the beginning of a global struggle between Islam and the West , in line with Samuel Huntington’s idea of a ‘clash of civilization’.
KEY CONCEPT CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
faded in significance in the post-Cold War world and globalization has weakened the state’s ability to generate a sense of civic belonging. Civilizations inevitably ‘clash’ because they are based on incommensurate values and meanings, with tension between China and the USA and between Islam and the West being particularly likely. The thesis may nevertheless underestimate both the complex and fluid nature of civilizations and their capacity for peaceful co-existence.
The ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis suggests that the twenty-first-century global order will be characterized by growing tension and conflict, but that this conflict will be cultural in character, rather than ideological, political or economic. According to Huntington (1996), the rise of culture as the key factor in world politics has occurred as ideology has
CORE THEMES Fundamentalism is an untypical political ideology. Not only does it, in its religious guise, draw inspiration from sacred, spiritual or ‘other-worldly’ matters, but it also cuts across a variety of, or perhaps all, religions, regardless of their doctrinal and structural differences. To study religious fundamentalism as a single, coherent entity is to treat
as secondary the substantial differences that divide the religions of the world – whether they believe in a single god, many small gods or no god at all; whether they have a holy book, a variety of scriptures or place faith in an oral tradition; how they view morality and social conduct, and so on. Moreover, while some fundamentalisms have been associated with violence and anti-constitutional political action, others have supported law-abiding and peaceful behaviour.
West: The parts of the world that are distinguished culturally by common Greco- Roman and Christian roots, socially by the dominance of industrial capitalism, and politically by the prevalence of liberal democracy.
Powered by FlippingBook