Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History

Islamic Education and the Limitations of Fundamentalism as an Analytical Category

Islamic Education and the Limitations of Fundamentalism as an Analytical Category Florian Pohl Past decades have seen the confident reassertion of religion in public life in many parts of the world. Seemingly defying predictions of religion’s demise in modernity , religion reentered the public stage as a key player in the political and moral discourses over the public life of citizens and the state. Variously described as the “desecularization” or “deprivatization” of religions, this process has challenged the validity of earlier canons of scholarship and raised the question of how we can make sense of religion’s ongoing public role in the modern world.1 Responses have oscillated between those who welcome the resurgence of religion as a means of supplying a much-needed moral dimension to secular discourse and others who consider these developments with greater concern, describing them as a threat to democracies and civil society. One of the ways in which scholars have looked at phenomena of religious revival is to portray them as “a rejection of modernism” and as specifically antimodern, irrational responses to the unsettling uncertainties of modern life.2 Similarly, others have configured religious revival movements as a specifically postmodern phenomenon and described them as expressions of religious fundamentalism that, in the words of Zygmunt Baumann, are part of “a wider family of totalitarian or proto-totalitarian solutions offered to all those who find the burden of individual freedom excessive and unbearable.”3 Instead of retreating from the public sphere into the private realm of individualized belief as much of sociological theory had postulated, religion has shown not only staying power but also increasing vitality in the post-Enlightenment world. The term fundamentalism has become increasingly common in academic and popular usage in the comparative study of groups, movements, or individuals 218 :: Florian Pohl associated with phenomena of religious revival. To think through the heuristic value of the term fundamentalism for our understanding of the continuing vitality of religion in the post-Enlightenment world is the central task of this essay. A particular focus will be placed on Islamic education as an example of the ways Muslims assert the public relevance of Islam in the contemporary world. As part of the larger taxonomy of the study of the public ambitions of Muslims, fundamentalism has found its way into the contemporary debate over the persistent strength of Muslim schools and Islamic learning. Drawing on specific cases from the Indonesian Islamic educational scene, this essay demonstrates the limitations of fundamentalism as an analytical category by highlighting the term’s often hidden normative dimensions that derive from its uncritical reliance on an historically contingent understanding of religion, of what it is or what it should be: namely, a distinct sphere of life kept separate from other spheres such as politics, economy, law, and education. As a result, fundamentalism fails to offer meaningful distinctions for an analysis of religious agendas in public life and heightens suspicion of religious formations that transgress the boundaries between private and public spheres. Fundamentalism: The Emergence of an Analytical Construct As Watt outlines in this volume, fundamentalism has its origins in the controversy over nineteenth-century Christian modernism. It dates back to the 1920s when it designated a particular branch of American Protestantism that reacted against the challenges posed by evolutionary theories and the development of historical critical scholarship of the Bible, popularly evidenced by the so-called Monkey Trials in Tennessee (1925). Only with the 1970s and more pervasively in the subsequent two decades was fundamentalism used to describe a myriad of revival movements in other religious traditions of the world. In its application to Muslims the use of fundamentalism accelerated in the 1980s as a key concept in a rapidly growing body of scholarly literature that set out to analyze the increasing significance of Islam in Muslim communities around the world.4 In works on events such as the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca, Muslim resistance to Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in Egypt, the responses by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Muslim organizations against repression by the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haqq’s Islamization campaign in Pakistan, and the Salman Rushdie affair at the end of the decade, fundamentalism became a central element in the discursive economy by which scholars sought to describe the increasing public relevance of Islam both locally and globally.5 Despite its prevalence, the description of Muslim movements as fundamentalist was...