248 CHAPTER 12
Such differences draw attention to the fact that religious fundamentalism is essentially a style of political thought rather than a substantive collection of political ideas and values. To the extent that religious fundamentalism’s central or core themes can be identified, they follow from its tendency to recognize certain principles as essential or unchallengeable ‘truths’, regardless of their content. This, in turn, implies that religion has a profoundly ‘this-worldly’ orientation; indeed, that it is the very stuff of politics itself. As a programme for the comprehensive restructuring of society on religious lines and according to religious principles, fundamentalism deserves to be classified as an ideology in its own right. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that in certain cases religious fundamentalism constitutes a form of ethnic nationalism (as discussed in Chapter 6). However, at least in its more radical forms, religious fundamentalism goes well beyond the reassertion of national or ethnic distinctiveness, and in the case of Islam in particular it has a marked transnational dimension. The characteristic themes of religious fundamentalism are: z z religion as politics z z essential truths z z anti-modernism z z militancy. Religion as politics The core theme of fundamentalism is a rejection of the distinction between religion and politics. In effect, in Ayatollah Khomeini’s words, ‘Politics is religion.’ Religion may be the basis of politics, but what is religion? In its most general sense a religion is an organized community of people bound together by a shared body of beliefs concerning some kind of transcendent reality, usually expressed in a set of approved activities and practices. What ‘transcendent’ means here is difficult to define, for it may refer to anything from a supreme being, a creator God, to the experience of personal liberation, as in the Buddhist concept of nirvana, the ‘extinction’ of the personal self.
KEY FIGURE
AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI (1900–89) An Iranian cleric and political leader, Khomeini was the architect of the ‘Islamic Revolution’ and leader of Iran (1979–89). Khomeini’s world-view was rooted in a clear division between the oppressed (understood largely as the poor and excluded of the developing world) and the oppressors (seen as the twin Satans: the USA and the Soviet Union, capitalism and communism). In Khomeini’s Shia fundamentalism, Islam was a theo-political project aimed at regenerating the Islamic world by ridding it of occupation and corruption from outside.
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The impact of religion on political life has been restricted progressively by the spread of liberal culture and ideas, a process that has been particularly prominent in the West. Nevertheless, liberal secularism is by no means an anti -religious tendency. Rather, it is
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