Islamic “Fundamentalism”: the
Mission Creep of an American
Religious Metaphor
Rosemary R. Corbett*
*Rosemary R. Corbett, Bard College–Bard Prison Initiative, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson,
NY 12504-5000, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. My thanks to David Watt for—in addition to
being a thoughtful interlocutor—inviting me to present a version of this article at the 2013 annual
meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Thanks, also, to Khalid Blankenship for his response
to that presentation and to the anonymous reviewers of the JAAR, as well as to my 2013–2015 Young
Scholars in American Religion colleagues for their helpful suggestions. Any errors contained within
are mine alone.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, pp. 1–28
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfv056
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
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In this article I examine the work of the earliest scholars to identify “fundamentalism” among Muslims and highlight debates over the cross-cultural usefulness of the Protestant label. I focus on renowned orientalists
who used the metaphor to describe the differences among Muslims long
before American liberals popularized it by applying it to the Iranian
Revolution. These scholars applied the term to Islam to justify a larger
narrative about the nature of religion and its relationship to universal
history. Although this progress narrative, reliant on Hegelian idealism
and dialectics derived from Christian templates, is rarely reiterated now,
its binary image of Muslims (rabid fundamentalists versus enlightened
liberal mystics) has become dominant. By naturalizing the use of the
metaphor in Muslim contexts, the scholars I discuss helped foster the
idea that fundamentalism occurs in all traditions and set the terms for
contemporary narratives in which religious explanations for conflict
elide political and economic issues.
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INTRODUCTION
1
The New York Times Company, “Shaw and Belloc Debate ‘What is Coming,’” The New York
Times (28 June 1925).
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IN 1925, THE NEW YORK TIMES published the proceedings of a
semi-satirical London debate between George Bernard Shaw and Hilaire
Belloc. Their theatrical dispute concerned the nature of the future. Shaw
set the tone by identifying himself and his interlocutor as modernists,
extolling the merits of evolution, and castigating those who disagreed
with the theory. His straw man of choice: William Jennings Bryan,
whom Shaw identified as an avowed “fundamentalist” and ignoramus the
likes of which could gain popularity only in America.1 For Shaw, there
was hardly any room for debate between himself and Belloc, despite
the fact that the two had been called to the Savoy Theatre to represent
Protestantism and Catholicism, respectively. The real debate was not between modernists, be they Protestant, Catholic, or members of the “Church
of Mahomet,” Shaw claimed. The real debate was between modernists and
men like Bryan.
Reading the account now, some might regard Shaw’s reference to “the
Church of Mahomet” as a quaint anachronism and muse about the
progress made in the last century of cross-cultural studies. Others might
recognize a tendency that contemporary scholars increasingly criticize
(Asad 1993; J. Z. Smith 1998) but many have yet to fully quit: the metaphorical use of terms from Christian history to describe non-Christian
traditions. Although the metaphor of “church” is no longer used to describe gatherings of non-Christians, other metaphors—particularly that
of “fundamentalism”—have since taken hold in both academic and policy
circles despite growing academic and political insistence on cultural specificity and awareness of the dangers of ethno-centrism. George Bernard
Shaw did not use the term “fundamentalist” to describe Muslims or other
non-Protestants in his 1925 diatribe. Other New York Times contributors
occasionally did, as I note below, but even they did not make a habit of
it—at least, not until academics made metaphoric usage more common
by applying the term to Muslims.
Use of the “fundamentalism” label to describe non-Protestant, nonU.S.-based movements has not occurred because the term contains
unique explanatory powers (ones other terms, such as “church,” can no
longer claim). As a metaphor, it was not generally applied cross-culturally
until the late 1970s. Increasing usage since then has obscured both the
Protestant theological debates that give the label its analogical weight, as
well as the local culture, history, and politics of the people to whom it is
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2
For a brief look at the American Protestant history of the term and later debates about its uses, see
Wood and Watt (2014), including their expansive bibliography of works that argue for and against
cross-cultural usage. For a thorough summary of the rationales behind support or criticism of global
use of the term, see Watt (forthcoming).
3
This article is not primarily devoted to contemporary uses of the term or to possible alternative
categories, because both subjects have received sophisticated treatment elsewhere. For an Islamic
studies scholar’s discussion of the merit (or lack thereof ) of the term as applied to various Muslim
thinkers and movements, as well as the comparative utility (or lack thereof ) of proposed alternative
terms such as “Islamist,” see Blankenship (2014).
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applied. Not surprisingly, given these issues, several scholars have argued
that using the label to describe movements and people other than those
who originally coined and embraced it (American Protestants) fails to
reveal anything substantive about such populations. Even those who
confer the appellation on others rarely agree on its cross-cultural meanings. Instead, such linguistic choices often reveal more about those—historically, U.S. Protestant liberals (sometimes missionaries, sometimes
scholars, and, increasingly, politicians)—bent on making particular theological and political points about their perceived opponents.2 Still, not
only does pervasive use of the term persist, it is increasingly taken up
outside of U.S. contexts.
The “fundamentalist” label was coined in 1920 by Curtis Lee Laws, a
journalist covering that year’s Northern Baptist Convention in New York.
Laws sought to distinguish those who adhered to “fundamentals” of the
faith from “modernists” who ostensibly rejected them. Not long after,
various Protestants who emphasized similar fundamentals began to use
the term self-referentially. How, then, did it come to be so widely applied
to non-Protestants who do not, themselves, generally identify with the
label or the theology behind it? Rather than simply add to the chorus of
voices arguing against continued use of the term as metaphor, I provide
an intellectual history of how it became increasingly prominent in academic discourse during the mid-twentieth century.3 Focusing on a
network of British, Canadian, and Indian orientalists—the first scholars
to employ the term in academic analyses of Islam, and who did so long
before American liberals popularized it by applying it to the Iranian
Revolution—I offer a window into early debates over the metaphor’s
cross-cultural usefulness. The colleagues I discuss employed a number of
Christian theological categories in their attempts to understand Islamic
history (“fundamentalism” being one among many Protestant labels
mapped onto Muslim groups and movements). As will become clear,
however, they came to view the term’s utility very differently over time.
For example, while one member of this network—Fazlur Rahman—
engaged in discussions in the 1980s with scholars involved in the highly
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4
On the importance of The Fundamentalism Project in popularizing the term for both academics
and policy makers, see Watt (forthcoming).
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influential Fundamentalism Project (an inquiry sponsored by the American
Council of Learned Societies, which produced volumes of works purporting to prove the presence of fundamentalism in various world religions4),
another notable figure—Wilfred Cantwell Smith—came to emphasize the
term’s inutility and even cautioned against its cultural imperialism.
To be sure, these intellectuals were not the first to describe Islam in
terms of Protestantism. In fact, they sometimes refuted the metaphorical
musings of earlier liberal Protestant commentators such as the early
twentieth-century Spiritualist, William J. Colville, who charged that
Muslims were as “fatalistic” in their outlook as his American Calvinist opponents because of their common beliefs in predestination. Colville was
far from unique in ascribing such fatalistic tendencies to “Mohammedan”
Calvinists (1906: 207–208). Nevertheless, and although at least one orientalist preceded them in describing certain Arab Muslims as “Puritans”
and “fundamentalists” (a Progressive Era author who studied Chinese traditions but nevertheless wrote on Islam for The New York Times; Peffer
1924), their debates over the term’s usefulness are instructive for scholars
who seek to understand the history and present of Muslim communities
rather than to replicate polemics and unproductive analysis. Equally
important, and more to the point here, their debates illuminate how
religious (specifically, Protestant) categories can be transformed not only
from local description into false universal classification but also from
academic musings into justifications for destructive political and military
decisions. As we shall see, well-meaning scholars—initially optimistic
that political use of their materials in a new imperial era could foster
global peace—extended Protestant categories past their analytical usefulness and, ultimately, contributed to a very different project than the
humanizing one they intended.
Humanizing Muslims for American and European audiences was
only part of the project for the academics discussed here. First and foremost, the orientalist most responsible for applying the “fundamentalist”
label to Islam did so in order to justify his attachments to a larger metanarrative about the nature of religion and its relationship to universal
history. Although this narrative of historical progress, reliant on philosophical idealism and Hegelian dialectics derived from Christian templates, is rarely reiterated by academics or policy makers now, the binary
image of Muslims that it provided (rabid fundamentalists versus enlightened liberal mystics) has become dominant in both circles. The scholars
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OBSERVATIONS FROM ACROSS THE ATLANTIC: EUROPEAN
MODELS FOR AN AMERICAN AUDIENCE
The history of fundamentalism-as-metaphor begins with the renowned British scholar Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb (1895–
1971), who first employed the term in print in his 1947 book Modern
Trends in Islam. To his credit, Gibb initially used the fundamentalist label
to resist orientalist tropes about the decline of Islamic civilization.
Ironically, some who later appropriated his schema did so to argue the essential backwardness of Muslims.
Gibb was born to Scottish missionary parents in 1895, when the sun
still shone brightly on the British Empire. He lived briefly in the Egyptian
city of Alexandria as a child, studied “Oriental languages” in London
years later, and eventually—after receiving a Master’s Degree in the
subject—became one of the foremost authorities on Arabic (and, by
proxy, Islam) of the first half of the twentieth century.7 In 1945, as British
power declined and the United States began to compete with the Soviet
5
Contemporary pundits include RAND Corporation analysts who advise the U.S. government (see
Benard 2003; Rabasa et al. 2007). For the British-cum-American imperial politics behind this history,
see Hicks (2011). Blankenship also discusses the fallacy of this dichotomy and its deployment for
geo-political ends.
6
Watt (forthcoming) demonstrates that the term was generally used only to describe Protestants
until the Iranian Revolution. It then became a popular derogatory term for Muslims and, once decoupled from its original history, was applied to other traditions. See also Waugh (1997).
7
Much has been written about Gibb’s work as an Arabist. An accessible appreciative treatment is
Hourani (1972), while Said (1979) provides a more (though not entirely) critical appraisal.
Additionally, Mahdi (1997) traces the influence of German philosophy on Gibb and other early
twentieth-century orientalists.
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discussed here, like many contemporary analysts, wrote in the context
of—and sometimes in the service of—imperial powers (Britain, then
the United States) and yet pioneered the universalizing fundamentalistversus-mystic narrative for very different reasons than contemporary
pundits who advocate Sufism as a way to counter so-called fanatics.5
Most enduringly, by naturalizing the use of the metaphor in Muslim contexts, these scholars helped foster the idea that fundamentalism is something common to all traditions.6 In so doing, they contributed, however
unintentionally, to the fallacy that anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani
(2004) calls “culture talk”: providing religious or cultural explanations for
conflict and eliding more relevant political and economic ones. Although
Islamic fundamentalism is a shifting notion with no inherent meaning,
defined mostly by what it is contrasted against, both mid-twentiethcentury and more recent uses of the label reflect this fallacious analysis.
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion
8
Gibb had employed some Christian terminology—namely, the categories of “puritan” and
“catholic”—metaphorically as early as 1932, when he published his first monograph on Islam with a
British press (Gibb 1932). It was not until writing for an American audience that he began to use the
metaphor of fundamentalism.
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Union for sole superpower status, the University of Chicago invited
Gibb—then enjoying an illustrious career at Oxford—to deliver the
Haskell Lectures on Comparative Religion. Like many European orientalists in the postwar era, Gibb would eventually take up residence at one of
the burgeoning area study centers informing policy makers in America.
Even before that, though, the University of Chicago published Gibb’s
talks, “Modern Trends in Islam,” as part of its Haskell Lectures series. It
was likely for this mid-1940s engagement, during which Gibb was specifically tasked with putting modern religious trends in comparative perspective, that he first borrowed the category of fundamentalism from
Protestant history and applied it to Islam. Thus, although Islamic studies
scholar Bruce Lawrence conjectured (1989) that Gibb first used the term
in reference to Muslims in his 1949 book, Mohammedanism: an
Historical Survey, we can see that Gibb’s penchant for applying this and
other Protestant categories cross-culturally began years before that.8
Mohammedanism is still instructive in many ways, not least because
of the array of Christian categories Gibb used to catalog the trends he believed had unfolded in Islamic history. For example, Gibb described
certain Muslims—those he viewed as the most literalist and strict in their
scripture interpretations—as “puritans.” He contrasted these so-called
puritans with those he found to be more “catholic.” As “in other historic
religious communities,” Gibb generalized, making a universal model of
religion out of Christian history, “two opposed but complementary tendencies have been constantly in operation”: the “puritan” tendency to
resist innovation and the “catholic tendency, which explicitly admits
variety of opinion . . . and implicitly accepts the necessity of reinterpretation” to meet new needs ([1949] 1970: 128). A certain segment of
“puritan” Muslims are the ones Gibb, reaching into American intraProtestant debates, decided to label “fundamentalist.” Then, more than
simply attributing these distinctions to matters of interpretation, Gibb
iterated a theme that would continually mark uses of the term “fundamentalist” when describing Islam thereafter: “All puritan reformist movements, even if peaceful in principle,” he wrote, “are by nature liable to
adopt violent courses” ([1949] 1970: 117).
These elements of Gibb’s 1949 book—the metaphorical use of
Christian terminology to describe Islamic history and the dialectical historical model on which he based it—are ones Gibb introduced to his
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is a tension. The cause lies in the religious consciousness itself. . . . All
religion asserts the otherness of God. But, at the same time, the worshiper is conscious of the nearness of God, of the impossibility of separating
the idea of God from his own spiritual experience. In the foundation
deeds of individual religions, the teachings of their founders, these two
elements exist side by side, synthesized in greater or less degree, since it
is from the intimate union of the two elements in their own spiritual experience that creative power is derived. But in the lives of their followers,
the tension springs up afresh. (Gibb 1947: 17)
9
On the Christian eschatological elements of Hegel’s philosophy of becoming and history, see
Berthold-Bond (1989: 113–132).
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American audience in 1945 and published in 1947. Chapter 2 of the 1947
book succinctly captures Gibb’s promiscuous, but not uncommon, use of
metaphor and narrative. Titled “The Religious Tensions in Islam,” it proceeds from the premise of Hegelian dialectics, in which (briefly) freedom
progressively unfolds throughout history via the back-and-forth movement of interrelated but oppositional forces. Opposition, in this model,
serves to clarify and define the qualities of freedom and reason (as they
are embodied in a culture, a nation, or a religious civilization) and to lead
them to transcend previous limitations. This continual refinement ultimately results in fulfillment, a state of completeness or wholeness (Gibb
uses the term “synthesis”) that harmonizes oppositional forces.9 As I
discuss below, Gibb (following G. W. F. Hegel) constructed ideal historical forces based on Christian templates and then mapped this oppositional movement onto Islam so as to chart the “inner meaning” of Islamic
history. According to this schema, Islamic history can be but one reflection of the larger world history—derived from European Christianity—of
which it is a part. Consequently, although Gibb wanted to describe the
dynamics of Islamic history as unique and separate from the West, he
could not help but replicate the western themes that he drew from what
he took to be a universally valid model. Not surprisingly, the particulars
of his account do not serve to illuminate specifically Islamic trends or
local Arab, Indian, African, or other politics so much as they serve to illustrate the story of Islamic civilization in Christianity’s image.
Gibb’s mapping of Christian metaphors and narratives onto Islam is
evident in the chapter’s first paragraph about the universal dialectic
between those he initially identifies as “transcendentalists” and “immanentists” (categories onto which further differences are projected). “In all
living religion,” he begins,
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For proof of this universal tension, Gibb refers to Christian history. Every
religion has seminal founders and ingenious synthesizers, Gibb asserts—
pointing to the apostle Paul as evidence—but most believers tend to list
to one side or another, believing in either a distant God or a personal one.
Having established the validity of his schema with Christian examples, Gibb moves on to describe its Islamic rendition, using a metaphor
that would be familiar to George Bernard Shaw:
Gibb’s case for the universality of Christian dialectics does not rest solely
on Qur’anic verses. Additionally, he identifies Muslim parties that he believes resemble Christian transcendentalists and immanentists and charts
their historical relations from medieval history to the modern present.
First, though, he explains what gives the universal tension he identifies a
“peculiar” Islamic “character” (Gibb 1947: 18).
What makes the history Gibb writes specifically Islamic, he declares,
is the presence of a certain Muslim philosophical extremism—a “recurrent tendency” to force logical arguments “to what we should regard as
excessive lengths” (1947: 18). To be sure, Gibb admits, extremism infects
all religions and all systems of theology bear witness to it, as well as to the
“dialectic” between “orthodox theologians” and more creative thinkers
(terms he employs interchangeably with “transcendentalists” and “immanentists,” respectively). Why Gibb insists on Muslim uniqueness in this
regard, then, seems a mystery until he argues that, unlike Christians,
Muslims rejected everything Greek. (By contrast, he believes that the productive dialectic between orthodox theologians and creative Greek philosophers exerted “a determining influence” on the whole of western
culture.) For Gibb, rejection of Greek logic and philosophy was “the decisive moment in the history of Muslim civilization”—the moment that
forever set it apart from the Christian west (1947: 19).
Having distinguished Christian history from Islamic history and the
universal template from a particular manifestation—all demarcated by
the purported presence or absence of Greek rationalism and logic—Gibb
reasserts the universality of his dialectic by allowing that orthodox
Muslim theologians let some Greek rationalism sneak into their systems
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In the Koran the transcendence of God is asserted again and again with
an absoluteness which seems to leave no possible loophole for a doctrine
of immanence. Yet this unimaginable transcendence does not exclude
the attributes of love and ‘subtlety,’ whereby . . . God is ‘closer to man
than his own neck vein.’ I need not retrace here in detail . . . the history
of the struggle in the Islamic church [sic] between these two conceptions
of God. (1947: 17–18)
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MYSTICS AGAINST THE MAUSOLEUM: A TALE
OF GOOD INTENTIONS
Gibb’s enduring contribution to the discourse of “Islamic fundamentalism” was not simply his use of the metaphor to describe Muslims.
More profoundly, it was the way he juxtaposed Islamic fundamentalism
against Islamic mysticism in order to create a dialectical model of Islamic
history that fit what he believed to be Christianity’s universal template.
“The function of Sufism,” according to Gibb, “was to restore to the religious life of the Muslim the element of personal communication with
God which orthodox theology was squeezing out” (1947: 20). Sufism’s
challenge to orthodoxy did not produce an instant victory. Rather, historical progress required continual oppositional movement. Thus, readers
should not be surprised that, in Gibb’s account, Muslim extremism
quickly infected Sufism and skewed the balance of spiritual forces once
again. Fortunately, hope for modern Muslims could be found in historical
precedent: the work of “the religious genius” Muhammad ibn al-Ghazali
(d. CE 1111), who escaped the “transcendental mausoleum” of the orthodox and created “a new synthesis between the two poles of the religious
consciousness by rebuilding the structure of orthodox theology upon the
foundations of personal religious experience” (Gibb 1947: 20). Although
this synthesis had lasted only a short time, it could be effected again.
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after all. Thus, even the orthodox fell prone to certain types of immanentism (e.g., the yearning for a personal god, if not the “pantheism” of those
who saw God in all of creation). In fact, it was in their eagerness to
decisively conquer the “Hellenizers” that the gatekeepers of Islamic orthodoxy over-emphasized God’s otherness and, in Gibb’s account, “constructed their new logical fortress with such stubbornly transcendentalist
materials that it turned into a vast cold monument, beneath which the
element of personal religious experience seemed to be crushed out of
existence” (1947: 19–20).
Not content to end on such a hopeless note (and not finished demonstrating how Islamic history conforms to universal template), Gibb cites
another episode from the history of European Christendom as an
example of how to resolve the dichotomy between “orthodox” Muslim
theologians and creative pantheists, as well as between a distance from
God and a sense of closeness. Just as Christianity gave rise to the mystic
Meister Eckhart, who contradicted orthodox theologians and provided
grounds for religious synthesis, Gibb claims, so Islamic history gave rise
to “the mystical movement known as ‘Sufism’” (1947: 20).
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Already in the eighth Islamic century (the fourteenth of our reckoning)
the violent resistance to Sufism expressed by the fundamentalist
Hanbalite, Ibn Taimiya [sic], and his small body of disciples was regarded by the orthodox generally as a mild form of lunacy. During the later
centuries the tension relaxed more and more and gave way to something
more like an equilibrium. (1947: 24)
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Just as Hegel’s dialectics gave the German philosopher hope that
history ultimately marched toward reason and freedom (despite—and,
for Hegel, because of—the carnage of Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquests),
projecting this dialectical model onto Islamic history gave Gibb confidence to resist the pervasive “decline thesis” so common among orientalists. Contrary to the likely expectations of twenty-first-century readers,
Gibb viewed “Islamic fundamentalism” as essential to historical progress.
Since “there can be no living religion without inner tension,” the complete dominance of either Sufis who promoted personal experience of
God or dogmatists who insisted on doctrinal distance “would have resulted in a disastrous loss of spiritual vitality in Islam” (Gibb 1947: 24). What
happened, instead, in Gibb’s account, is that doctrinaire theologians
struggled for centuries with Sufi brotherhoods, which, meanwhile, spread
throughout Muslim regions. In the course of this struggle, an even more
aggressive dogmatism emerged. While the first incarnation of this force
was too extreme, Gibb believed, it ultimately provided a salutary corrective to the equally extreme fancies of unbridled mystics. Lacking a
better name for the new doctrinal camp, and in keeping with his habit of
borrowing terms from Christian history, Gibb deployed the metaphor of
fundamentalism. He then developed his argument to explain how fundamentalism both furthers and is tempered through historical dialectics.
In crafting this history of the fundamentalist-Sufi dialectic, Gibb did
not portray fundamentalism as a modern movement among Muslims (as
it was among Protestants, who had only coined the term in the 1920s).
Rather, Gibb identified fundamentalist tendencies in the distant past—as
part of a longer and larger history that transcended any one incarnation.
He thereby not only naturalized fundamentalism as a term that could
describe both Protestant and Muslim factions but presented it as a timeless and universal category of religious orientation divorced from all of
the particularly Protestant and specifically American twentieth-century
dynamics that had given rise to the term. Unlike late twentieth- and
early twenty-first-century pundits, Gibb then proceeded to explain how
fundamentalism can be a positive force that eventually leads to productive
synthesis:
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Acknowledging that most of his European and American audiences
would not view Islamic civilization as one characterized by “equilibrium,”
Gibb admitted that modern Muslim societies still suffered from the perpetual tension between dogmatists and mystics, as well as from other
problems. Contradicting the views of many of his colleagues, however,
Gibb did not attribute this seeming stalemate to a lack of historical dynamism. In a rather novel interpretation, given the British imperial attitudes
in which he was steeped—an interpretation that his students replicated—
Gibb insisted that the back and forth between proponents of doctrine and
proponents of personal experience had produced a creative tension
within Muslim societies that helped propel them forward without any intervention from the West (1947: 24–25). Yet, Gibb seemed to imply, true
progress could only occur when these forces joined in true synthesis. It
had happened before in Muslim history, and some of Gibb’s students
hoped to speed the day when it would happen again.
Before discussing how Gibb’s students employed his dialectical
schema while replicating (and then refuting) his metaphors, it is important to take further note of two things: first, the inadequacies of Gibb’s
account of Islamic history (i.e., the inexactitude of applying Christian categories cross-culturally and of attributing political developments to the
influence of impersonal spectral forces), and second, how Gibb’s use of
the fundamentalism metaphor is distinct from American usage. These
aspects of Gibb’s narrative are interrelated.
According to Gibb, what interrupted the balance of transcendentalism and immanentism, of orthodoxy and experience, was Sufi expansion.
While orthodox theologians held sway in Mecca, Damascus, and Cairo,
Sufi merchants canvassed the globe, taking with them tenets of Islam but
also an overly tolerant attitude toward indigenous practices. This excessive
tolerance was not a good thing, Gibb opined, because it upset the balance
of forces in Islam (1947: 25)—even if at a systemic level, not in the actual
awareness of any theologians in ostensibly more orthodox locales. (Gibb
did not provide evidence for his conjectures about how religious practices
in, say, Indonesia, went over in Arabia or the Levant.) A correcting
impulse was, in his view, unavoidable and badly needed. It is in Gibb’s
account of this inevitable reaction and its consequences that one can fully
distinguish his use of the term “fundamentalist” from that of American
liberals who—despite having adopted Gibb’s history—employ it only as
an epithet.
In Gibb’s telling, “the puritanical Hanbalite school” that “produced
Ibn Taimiya” survived in Arabia and parts of the Levant and, four centuries later, somehow (almost mystically) inspired the historical fundamentalist par excellence, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. “Whether
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10
It is worth noting here that contemporary pundits and policy makers do not arbitrarily designate
Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab a fundamentalist. “Wahhabis” was the pejorative British colonial term for
“disfavored Muslims”; American uses of the “fundamentalist” label—often conflated with
“Wahhabism”—follow this longer imperial trend (Blankenship 2014: 149).
11
On militancy as a staple of post-1970s descriptions of fundamentalism, see Watt (forthcoming).
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consciously or unconsciously,” Gibb argues, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab
adopted “the same course as was taken by the leaders of similar reformist
movements both before and after his time” (1947: 26). Making this ahistorical conjecture allowed Gibb to buttress his dialectical model and to
set the stage for the next counter-movement and synthesis. When he
elaborated on the extremism of the “first Wahhabi movement,” it was not
because he wanted to condemn fundamentalism, necessarily, but because
this force would have needed no counter and would have occasioned no
progress had it not been excessive. Thus, although arguing that Wahhabi
fundamentalism in “its original phase” had “shocked the conscience of
the Muslim community” with its violence and intolerance (Gibb 1947:
26), Gibb highlighted what he saw as its spreading “salutary and revitalizing effect.” His words here reveal his narrative reliance on Hegelian
tropes. The value of fundamentalism in its Wahhabi iteration came from
“its ideal aspect,” from its opposition to “the contamination of pure
Islamic monotheism by the infiltration [through Sufism] of animistic
practices and pantheistic notions” (Gibb 1947: 27). Far from decrying
fundamentalism in toto, Gibb depicted it as a productive corrective to excessively tolerant Sufism and as a handmaiden of historical progress that
prevented Islam from losing its true character and genius.
Realizing that his rendition of Islamic history as dynamic rather than
in decline was unconventional, Gibb claimed that most observers did not
notice the positive revitalization wrought by Wahhabi fundamentalism
because they were distracted by the political expressions it developed in
colonized areas.10 “Even in such distant regions as Nigeria and Sumatra,”
Gibb argued—in no way attempting to provide an intellectual or political
history of the movement’s spread—“Wahhabi influence contributed
to the outbreak of militant movements” (1947: 27).11 Ultimately, he
claimed, it even came to influence the most famous nineteenth-century
Muslim political activist, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and in turn his students
Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida. With the differences among these
figures rendering his account rather thin, Gibb added some qualifications.
Al-Afghani and his successors did not “spread the Wahhabi emphasis on
pure doctrine and the reassertion of koranic orthodoxy” in the “narrow”
sense of Wahhabism, he admitted. Rather (and here Gibb stretched the definition of Wahhabism and fundamentalism so greatly that it included
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12
Al-Afghani and ‘Abduh were part of a larger reform movement devoted to restoring the primacy
of the Qur’an and hadith that did draw some inspiration from Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, among others
(Commins 1990, 2006). Gibb’s link between the men was neither entirely specious nor as strictly
determinative as he intimated.
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almost anyone who argued for greater piety), these men called “Muslims,
learned and unlearned alike, to a fuller understanding of what Muslim
faith demands and of the dangers with which it was menaced” (1947: 28,
emphasis added). While analytically imprecise, this more expansive and
unspecific interpretation allowed Gibb to maintain his dialectical framework of Sufism versus fundamentalism.
Not blind to the contradictions in his account (it is difficult to find
precise commonality among ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, al-Afghani, ‘Abduh,
and Rida), Gibb forced a connection between ‘Abd al-Wahhab, alAfghani, and ‘Abduh by contending that the latter were inspired by the
same impulse as the former, but that Sufism tempered their dogmatism
(1947: 32). Yet this synthesis also failed to hold as ‘Abduh’s student,
Rashid Rida—lacking ‘Abduh’s “ballast of catholicity”—“naturally” gravitated toward an imbalanced puritanical extremism. The result: ‘Abduh’s
activities only issued forth in “a new fundamentalist school calling themselves the ‘Salafiya’” (1947: 29). In fact, because of their shared fundamentalism, Gibb argued, Salafis could rightfully be called “Neo-Wahhabis”
(1947: 35). The fact that the geo-political circumstances of Ibn ‘Abd alWahhab’s life and those of Muhammad ‘Abduh’s and Rashid Rida’s bore
little in common did not trouble Gibb’s idealist generalizations.12
Gibb’s imputation of Hegelian dynamics and familiar Christian categories onto the history of Islamic civilization does not ultimately illuminate his subject. What it does reveal is that that over-usage of the term
“Wahhabi” (not even Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s followers used it) and confusion of “Wahhabism” with “Salafism” (as in contemporary speculation
about “radical Islam”) began long before the so-called “War on Terror”
and even before American politicians and journalists began to depict
Arabs from the Gulf as antagonists during the 1970s Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries embargo and oil crisis (McAlister 2005:
125–154). During these periods, Gibb’s narrative—by then disseminated
by others and not recognized as an idealist projection—resonated with
American strategic interests, and the unhelpful trend of broadly applying
the fundamentalism metaphor worsened. In the process, even what
nuance existed in Gibb’s idealist dialectic got lost. Gibb himself acknowledged that those he identified as Islamic fundamentalists were not universally intolerant and that Sufis were not universally liberal and pacifist
Page 14 of 28
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
ISLAMIC DIALECTICS IN NORTH AMERICAN
IMAGINATIONS: REPETITION AND REJECTION
In 1957, Gibb became the first director of Harvard University’s
Center for Middle East Studies. He encountered Smith and Rahman
before that, while still a faculty member at St. John’s College, Oxford. Like
Gibb, Smith—most famously known as a comparative religion scholar—
started out as a student of Islam. He studied Arabic with Gibb while
working on a degree at Cambridge and, after initially replicating Gibb’s
interpretive framework, later decried the use of fundamentalism as a term
for Muslims. Rahman, on the other hand, a Muslim scholar from British
India, retained the term throughout his life (often using it to describe his
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(and provided examples to the contrary of both suppositions).
Nevertheless, many American pundits who popularized these narratives
had less understanding of Islamic history than Gibb and more incentive
to overlook differences.
Intriguingly, despite characterizing Islamic thought as inherently extremist, Gibb inserted a qualification about the use of language in the
middle of his chapter on historical tension. “To judge from the books,
one would suppose that the Muslim must be either a complete transcendentalist or a complete pantheist,” he warned. In contrast to this scholarly
consensus, he argued, it “may be confidently said that the average sincere
Muslim keeps . . . to the middle of the road” (1947: 21). The only way to
reconcile the discrepancy between scholarly accounts and Muslims’
actual lives, Gibb mused, is to assume that Muslims speak more metaphorically about Islam than observers realize and that religious metaphors in both East and West have their limits (1947: 21–22). If Gibb took
this conjecture to heart when deploying metaphorical statements, those
who later relied on his work generally did not.
Although most contemporary scholars and policy analysts who echo
Gibb’s dichotomous analysis of Muslim movements (fundamentalists
versus Sufis) do so without recognizing the Hegelian schema on which
it is based and without considering the anachronism of using Christian
categories out of context, this was not true for all of Gibb’s colleagues
and students, who—although disagreeing with their mentor on some
points—published various renditions of his dialectical analysis. Gibb’s influence on two younger scholars, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000)
and Fazlur Rahman (1919–1988), is particularly evident and significant.
Both maintained Gibb’s emphasis on the dialectic between Muslim factions: not between “puritans” and “catholics,” as Gibb put it in 1949, but
between mystical Sufis and legalistic “fundamentalists.”
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13
As Blankenship notes (2014: 157), many Sufi practitioners and non-Muslims sympathetic to
Sufism for personal or geo-political reasons have adopted the label as a term for Muslims who
consider Sufi practices to be unorthodox.
14
While Smith technically used the term in print before Gibb, he did so while writing as Gibb’s
student and it is Gibb’s dialectical schema that has exerted the lasting influence on the discourse.
Hints of Gibb’s determining influence are evident when Smith later compares the mindset of the
Indian-turned-Pakistani Muslims he identified as fundamentalists to that of the Muslim Brotherhood
(Gibb’s specialty) and elsewhere attributes fundamentalism to “Wahhabi influence” (1957: 68, 234).
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opponents) and contributed an analysis of fundamentalism to orientalist
Bernard Lewis’ 1970 encyclopedia, the Cambridge History of Islam.13
Smith first employed the term to describe Muslims in his 1943 book,
Modern Islam in India. He had written the survey as a doctoral dissertation partly under Gibb’s direction and adopted his mentor’s schema—
just one of their many similarities—early on.14 Like Gibb, Smith was the
child of devout Protestant parents, was a Commonwealth subject, and
had traveled briefly to Egypt—journeying there as a teenager with his
American mother (a Methodist who had once hoped to be a missionary
to Muslims)—prior to the British Empire’s collapse. Moreover, as an undergraduate, Smith majored in Oriental Studies (as the program in
Semitic languages and Near Eastern history was then known) at the
University of Toronto (Cracknell 2001: 3). Nevertheless, there were some
differences between Smith and Gibb that the two could not reconcile—at
least, not at first.
As an undergraduate and during the theological studies he undertook
at Westminster College before pursuing his doctorate, Smith became involved in Social Gospel activism and immersed himself in philosophical
debates between idealists and materialists. Dialectical reasoning became
almost second nature to him and he brought a dialectical materialism to
his doctoral studies of Islamic history. Whereas many of his colleagues
and mentors talked about the inherent mindsets of “Semites” and other
groups (even Gibb argued that Muslim tendencies toward extremism resulted from their “Eastern” mindset [1947: 21]), Smith spoke of economic
determinism. The materialist—indeed, Marxist—aspects of this approach
were ones Gibb could not countenance. According to Gibb, secularism—
particularly “the doctrines of scientific materialism and the economic interpretation of history”—posed a great danger not only to Islam, but to
all “theistic religion” in the modern era ([1970] 1949: 129).
In contrast, as a missionary during World War II with his wife Muriel
in Lahore, where he taught Islamic and Indian History at Forman
Christian College for the Canadian Overseas Mission Council, Smith
refined his Christian socialist thinking and worked on his doctoral research (Putnam et al. 2001). In the resulting dissertation, Smith echoed
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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some of Gibb’s Protestant-derived terminology, applying the “fundamentalist” label to the leader of India’s Jama’ati-Islaami party, Maulana
Maududi ([1943] 2006: 176–178). Significantly, however, he also insisted
on reading religious identity as a product of class dynamics rather than as
a product of inherent religious or cultural dispositions. As Gibb predicted, this materialist approach (complete with an argument, four years
before independence, that the British should leave India) did not serve
Smith well in England, and his doctoral dissertation was rejected.
It is important not to overstate Gibb’s and Smith’s differences. Smith
was not an absolute materialist; he was a missionary who had socialist
convictions, but who—like his older mentor—also left room in his philosophy for transcendence. Thus, even in his first, most materialist book,
Smith felt the need to counter atheistic positivism. He did this by emphasizing another principle of historical change—one he borrowed from
Henri Bergson (a philosopher enchanted with mysticism) and described
as “similar to historical criticism” and “dialectics,” but less reductionist
(W. C. Smith [1943] 2006: 94–95, 110). That principle was “evolution”—
something he would discuss at length in later works, particularly in his
most famous book, The Meaning and End of Religion (1963).
After World War II, Smith returned to Toronto, where he learned of
Nazi-Communist collaboration in Germany, the actions of Stalinist forces
in Spain, and (from his older brother, Arnold, the Canadian ambassador
to the U.S.S.R.) the Gulag and its Siberian camps. With his dissertation
rejected at Cambridge, Smith enrolled at Princeton, wrote a second dissertation, and finally received a doctorate in 1948. He then went on to
found the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in 1951 and
published a revised and expanded version of his Cambridge dissertation
in 1957 as Islam in Modern History. This work reflected his disillusionment with economic explanations of history, as well as his increasing
turn to cultural and religious evolution as the primary engine of historical
change. Smith did not give up his dialectical approach to history but,
after seeing the carnage in Lahore after Partition, began to put more emphasis on idealism than materialism. In some ways, this meant accepting
idealist philosophies of cultural and religious essences that he once
tended to reject. Eventually, Smith came to advocate creating a dialectical
synthesis of what he believed to be Muslims’ cultural and religious traits
in order to bring Muslim societies into the modern world. Once the legalistic Sunni orthodoxy of Arab Muslims (Semites) was blended with the
flexible liberalism of South Asian Sufi traditions (which he saw as IndoEuropean in cultural origin), he believed, a liberal, yet orthodox, version
of Islam would emerge (Hicks 2011). Such an evolution would allow
Muslims to creatively answer the challenges of the modern world without
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15
According to Gibb, the Muslim Brotherhood “gained at first a wide popular following with its
fundamentalist and activist programme, but fell victim eventually to the excesses of its extremist
wing” ([1949] 1970: 129).
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resorting to the tactics Gibb attributed to early fundamentalists. And
Smith thought he had found just the person to help him create this synthesis: Fazlur Rahman, who—after Indian partition in 1947—served as
the first Minister of Education in Pakistan.
Smith first heard about Rahman during his early years at McGill.
Rahman had written a dissertation at Oxford under Gibb, and in 1954
Smith described Rahman’s work as exactly what he was looking for: “a
typical and true modern liberalism, whose structure is fully Islamic”
(1954: 84). Like Smith, Rahman echoed Gibb’s ideas about secular threats
and about the “fundamentalist” activism of the Muslim Brotherhood
(which he also compared to Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami).15 By 1957, Smith
had used Gibb’s and Rahman’s works as some of his primary sources for
revising his analysis of modern Islam. However, while Smith had come
closer to Gibb’s opinions in some ways during this time, he continued to
differ from his mentor in others. Notably, by the time Smith published
his 1963 classic, he had ceased to use the term fundamentalism and
would later argue that to apply this term to Muslims was to confuse the
histories and cultural essences of East and West.
At McGill, Smith and Rahman (who joined the Institute as a fellow in
the 1950s) concentrated on developing educational programs that would
foster the South Asian traditions that they believed could help counter
the dogmatism and materialism spreading throughout the Muslim world.
Though initially receiving funding from American private foundations
that were concerned, in part, with ensuring U.S. advantage in the postwar
international environment, Rahman and Smith soon turned to working
directly with heads of state in Muslim-majority nations (Hicks 2011). In
1961, Rahman and another McGill fellow left Montreal for Pakistan,
where they worked with the Minister of Education to set up a McGill satellite program. Rahman remained in Pakistan, working with the Ayub
Khan government, until his life was endangered during the turmoil of
1968. He then returned to the United States and soon thereafter accepted
a chair of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of
Chicago. He also served as an advisor to the American State Department
and continued to write about the necessary balance between Wahhabi
fundamentalism and authentic Sufi reform (Denny 1991; Waugh 1998).
In a 1966 treatise that reveals Gibb’s influence, Rahman described the
twelfth-century jurist and theologian Ibn Taymiyyah as the intellectual
ancestor of modern anti-Sufis such as Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. This
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion
When the Shah’s regime came to power, it started off by being a liberal,
progressive, modern sort and the West supported it. But it gradually
shifted to becoming autocratic, tyrannical, oppressive. And the Western
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influence, as well as Rahman’s own bias against popular Sufi traditions
(which he regarded as insufficiently intellectual), was clear in Rahman’s
celebration of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab for denouncing popular religion, saint
veneration, superstition, and the static medieval orthodoxy of the Sunni
‘ulama. In wording contemporary pundits might find surprising but that
also echoed Gibb, Rahman argued that Wahhabi interpretative styles
“acted as a great liberating force and . . . affected the temper of subsequent Islamic developments perhaps more than any other single factor,”
giving rise to both liberal and conservative movements ([1966] 1979:
198–199, emphasis added).
Even while in Pakistan, Rahman had attempted to chronicle the
historical dialectic between Sufi revivalists and orthodox Sunni religious
scholars. From Karachi, he sent a version of this argument to Bernard
Lewis, who included it in his massive co-edited Cambridge History of
Islam (Rahman 1970). Although Rahman died before publishing his
monograph-in-process on the topic, Ebrahim Moosa later compiled and
edited the notes into a full text, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of
Islamic Fundamentalism (2000). Before his death, Rahman also engaged
briefly in discussions with members of the University of Chicago Divinity
School about fundamentalism in Muslim-majority contexts. His Chicago
colleagues in The Fundamentalism Project acknowledged that Rahman
and Edward Said, among others, held that “Islamic fundamentalism”
could only be understood “against the background of Western history”
( presumably as a response to colonialism). Nevertheless, reiterating
Gibb’s framework, these colleagues insisted that the essence of fundamentalism was evident in all religions and, when recognized, in all previous periods of Islamic history (Martin and Appleby 1996: 204). As I
discuss in the conclusion to this article, Rahman was not the only scholar
to inject Gibb’s influence into The Fundamentalism Project.
In contrast to Rahman and Gibb, Smith warned that calling Muslims
fundamentalists made little sense. Or, if it did, he argued, it was at the
cost of hiding something else. As noted above, Smith had abandoned
the term well before it entered popular parlance during the Iranian
Revolution. The events of that conflict only seemed to deepen his resolve
not to use it. On December 11, 1979 (a month into the hostage crisis,
and the same year that Smith served as the President of the Middle
East Studies Association), he commented on the situation for The
New York Times:
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liberal world, most particularly the countries that supported the Shah
and trained his Savak, taught them how to torture their own people. . . .
The young students of Khomeini sense that the Western liberals are the
people who backed those who crush us. (W. C. Smith 1979)
CONCLUSION: A NATURALIZED METAPHOR
IN A NEW ERA
As mentioned above, Rahman was not the only scholar to take
Gibb’s ideas to The Fundamentalism Project, which has since influenced
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I cannot recount here the full history of Smith’s disillusionment with
American liberalism and foreign policy, but it is noteworthy that just as
Americans began applying the fundamentalist label to Islam to describe
an ostensibly inherent (and militant) disposition, Smith insisted that
Americans reckon with the backlash and uprisings their oppressive modernization tactics had engendered among Muslim populations. Two
decades later, Smith again attempted to account for what happened in
Iran and for what the use of the term fundamentalism obscured. What he
saw as the necessary goals of modernization and liberalization had not
failed in Iran in the face of an inherent fundamentalism, he contended.
What had failed was Westernization. Western secular imperialism and
the Shah’s “brutal” dictatorship, not fundamentalism, were the real
causes of the revolution. In concluding his analysis, Smith again warned
that the terms Islamic fundamentalism and “Islamic fascism” (a more
recent metaphor) were nonsensical. “Fascism,” he argued (like fundamentalism), “was something that we did . . . we in the West” (2000: 15,
emphasis added). For him, using the fundamentalist or fascist metaphor
was not only culturally inappropriate, it also served to obscure and deflect
attention from western atrocities in Iran and elsewhere—atrocities that
incited rebellion and resistance. One need not share Smith’s belief in cultural essences to see the merit of his argument: fundamentalism, treated
as a universal and ostensibly inherent religious disposition, is still blamed
for all manner of rebellions and resistance in Muslim-majority regions—
to the extent that the political and economic factors involved in such uprisings or movements are ignored (Pieterse 1994). Smith’s suspicions
about the dangers of the term were well founded. At the very least, continual usage of the label outside of Protestant contexts is intellectually
lazy. More seriously, reliance on this easy metaphor by policy makers and
the academics who advise them has contributed not only to faulty interpretations of the causes and possible solutions of political and economic
conflicts but to justifications for state-sponsored mass violence.
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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popular cultural and foreign policy in myriad ways. The academic who
most obviously contributed aspects of Gibb’s analysis to that forum was
John O. Voll, a 1969 graduate of Harvard who, though younger than the
scholars mentioned previously, shared many of their intellectual proclivities. Voll spent over a decade studying the Middle East while Gibb served
as director of the Harvard Center. His contribution to the discourse
on fundamentalism combines the work of Gibb, Rahman, and Smith
(the early writings) with that of liberal pundits and intellectuals who
decried American Protestant fundamentalism. Although Voll’s essay in
The Fundamentalism Project’s first volume (Fundamentalisms Observed)
is far more nuanced and thorough than Gibb’s idealist treatise, traces of
the idealism inherent to Gibb’s dialectical model are still evident in his
work—as is the difficulty of making the metaphor consistent or meaningful in a detailed treatment of Islamic history.
The movements labeled fundamentalist in Voll’s “Fundamentalism in
the Sunni Arab World: Egypt and the Sudan” are remarkably diverse:
they have different origins (geographically, temporally, and intellectually), different aims and agenda corresponding to their different political
situations, different tactics (even when their agenda are similar), and different sources of political and moral authority aside from the Qur’an and
hadith. Sometimes they are “militant,” violent, and anti-modern or antiWest; sometimes they are not (Voll 1991: 345–349). Sometimes they advocate withdrawal from the world; sometimes they do not. Sometimes
they cooperate with established political powers (colonial or nationalist);
sometimes they cannot. Sometimes they have received education in
Islamic theology; sometimes they have not. Sometimes they are “moderate” (Voll 1991: 385–387), and sometimes they are not.
When Voll defines fundamentalism, he does so in a way that, as he acknowledges, could describe the aspirations of many—if not most—
Muslims: as “the reaffirmation of foundational principles and the effort
to reshape society” in terms of them (1991: 347). This is not much more
precise than Gibb’s definition, which is itself broad enough to include
almost anyone noticeably pious. Defining the term in such a capacious
way allows Voll to claim at the beginning of his piece that fundamentalists
can include everyone from the jihadists who assassinated Anwar al-Sadat
to the tens of thousands of nonviolent Muslims who provide the poor
with basic social services. Seeking to narrow his definition, Voll emphasizes those who engage in “a distinctive mode of response to major social
and cultural change . . . perceived as threatening to dilute or dissolve the
clear lines of Islamic identity, or to overwhelm that identity in a synthesis
of many different elements” (1991: 347, emphasis added). According to
Gibb, too, of course, so-called fundamentalists are always opposed to
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16
Regarding Gibb’s primary dialectic, Voll only once discusses mysticism—when mentioning that
Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had modeled his own organization on the
structure of Sufi brotherhoods (1991: 360). On the other hand, Gibb’s influence is clearly evident in
Voll’s footnotes, which frequently cite Gibb’s students. At one point, Voll refers to Rahman’s work on
how medieval mysticism gave rise to Ibn Taymiyyah’s fundamentalism (1991: 396, note 7). Voll also
refers readers to Rahman for an analysis of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, his fundamentalist par excellence
(1991: 395, note 9). Moreover, although South Asia is not the topic of his piece, Voll cites
W. C. Smith’s 1957 work and identifies Maulana Maududi as a fundamentalist (1991: 396, notes 11
and 13).
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synthesizing their pure doctrine with other elements. Despite noting the
incredible socio-economic and educational diversity among “fundamentalists” (whose numbers are in the millions if defined broadly, he claims,
and may even constitute the majority of Egyptian society), Voll contends
that “they find a powerful basis for unity in a dissatisfaction with the contemporary character of Arab society” (1991: 346). Fundamentalists, then,
are those who are both pious and discontent.
Voll hardly replicates Gibb’s dialectical approach in his essay, but he
does borrow the outlines of Gibb’s narrative by connecting those he
regards as contemporary fundamentalists to Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, to Ibn
Taymiyyah and, even earlier than that, to Ibn Hanbal (the “early medieval
fundamentalist” founder of the Hanbali legal school to which Ibn ‘Abd
al-Wahhab subscribed (1991: 349). Rather than attributing similarities
among these figures to a universal cycle of orthodox idealism as Gibb did,
Voll puts forth more historical connections. Nevertheless, the influence
of Gibb’s idealism shows through in Voll’s essay.16 For example, Voll also
argues that fundamentalism did not originate as a response to “Western
expansion” (i.e., colonialism), but was an “indigenous movement of
reform” most notably exemplified by Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who rejected
the social balance and syntheses (or, in his words, “compromises”) that
orthodox theologians had worked out with popular movements (1991:
348–349). Although Voll’s history of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab—like that of
other figures he discusses—is more thorough than Gibb’s, Voll similarly
portrays fundamentalism as an ideal type of orientation independent
from political and social particulars. As Voll argues, despite the political,
geographical, temporal, and tactical diversity of those he discusses, the
“major themes” of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s teaching “reflect the concerns
of Sunni Muslim fundamentalists in any era” (1991: 350). Not surprisingly, given his reliance on Gibb’s model, Voll identifies one—perhaps
the—major aspect of fundamentalism as “transcendence” (1991: 350).
Having identified eighteenth-century Saudi Wahhabism as fundamentalism, Voll then asserts that the influence of this fundamentalist
movement is spread globally by the contemporary Saudi nation-state,
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both in ideological form and through “financial support . . . made possible by the sale of Saudi petroleum products” (1991: 352). (The consonance between Voll’s depiction and then-current American government
attitudes toward the oil-producing nation was not necessarily intentional,
but also not incidental [McAlister 2005].) Voll does not discuss the centuries intervening between the birth of “Wahhabism” and the rise of
petrol-politics or acknowledge that Saudi society and interpretations of
religion might have changed since Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s era. Instead, he
turns to nineteenth-century fundamentalism in the Sudan—exemplified
best, Voll asserts, by the anti-colonial leader Muhammad Ahmad, whom
he does not attempt to connect intellectually or politically to Ibn ‘Abd alWahhab or any other previously identified fundamentalist, but nevertheless claims “recalled” Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s influence (1991: 354). Voll
holds to this fundamentalist family resemblance despite acknowledging
that Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s fundamentalism—unlike Sudanese fundamentalism—was not anti-imperialist. To reconcile this disparity, he
insists that early Sudanese fundamentalism was influenced by nationalism. In so doing, however, Voll undercuts his initial definition of the phenomenon—for he describes Sudanese fundamentalists as concerned less
with the fundamentals of faith and practice by which he defined the term
(and the Saudis) and more with “the establishment and defense of national communal identity” (1991: 354). Indeed, the Sudanese even stopped
citing Ibn Taymiyyah’s work on devotional issues and started citing him,
instead, as an analyst of how to respond to political occupation. This shift
of emphasis causes readers to wonder what actually ties these geographically, temporally, politically, and religiously disparate figures together
other than Voll’s insistence.
Without resolving these contradictions, Voll turns, like Gibb, to the
role of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh in creating an
intellectual and religious synthesis that, under Rashid Rida’s guidance,
mutated into another fundamentalist movement (1991: 355–358). To
buttress his claim that a doctrinaire strand of Islam is the key component
of all of these various movements, Voll refers readers to Gibb’s 1947 text
(1991: 397, note 21) and proceeds from there to discuss the Muslim
Brotherhood. Not surprisingly, given that he is otherwise more careful
than Gibb, Voll eventually includes a disclaimer that the fundamentalism
of the Muslim Brotherhood and the fundamentalism of Ibn ‘Abd alWahhab can hardly be seen as similar. Reiterating that these fundamentalist movements are marked by crucial differences, Voll undercuts the
utility of the category once again.
Removed from the dialectic in which Gibb placed it for comparative purposes, so-called Islamic fundamentalism has been used to
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17
American interpretations of fundamentalism as a movement primarily organized against
modernity are evident in Voll’s argument that nineteenth-century Islamic societies were, by and
large, transformed by the influence of western technology and economic systems, except “in the more
peripheral or frontier areas” where fundamentalists held sway (1991: 353). Voll refers to discomfort
with modernity as a twentieth-century description of some fundamentalists, as well (1991: 365).
However, this interpretation of fundamentalism does not fit with the description Voll provides of the
Muslim Brotherhood, which thrived as an urban movement and, as he argues, co-opted modernism
(1991: 365–366). On the work and influence of the American liberals who criticized fundamentalists’
ostensible anti-modernism—such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, H. Richard Niebuhr, Richard
Hofstadter, and Talcott Parsons (who influenced Martin Marty, editor of The Fundamentalism
Project volumes), among others—see Watt (forthcoming).
18
Some political scientists—including Christine Fair, a Georgetown professor of Security Studies
who has served as an advisor for the RAND Corporation and the United Nations—go so far as to
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demonstrate just the opposite of what Gibb intended. Rather than describing the continued back-and-forth of religious tensions in a forward
movement of progress—one that allowed Islamic civilizations to thrive
rather than decline—use of the term after the 1970s has come to indicate
an inherent state of backwardness. This was the tone in some of Voll’s
account, and it has only become more prevalent since. Because of the difficulty of combining all of the various streams of work on fundamentalism, both Protestant (written by scholars such as Talcott Parsons) and
so-called Islamic (Gibb, Smith, and Rahman), Voll’s careful cartography
is sometimes a bit incoherent—particularly when he speaks about
“modern fundamentalism,” a category in which he places a diverse group
of movements (including, but not limited to, Saudi, Sudanese, Egyptian
modern, Egyptian conservative, Egyptian radical, and a Syrian “Islamic
Socialism”) all ostensibly characterized by a sense of being threatened
(1991: 365–369).17 At the very least, the impression Voll’s essay leaves
defies the argument he makes in it: fundamentalism, it turns out, is not a
very helpful category, after all—at least not for those who seek in it a
meaningful or consistent definition.
Given the problems inherent in identifying fundamentalism crossculturally, academics and policy makers would have done well to abandon
this anachronistic metaphor in favor of analyses that actually illuminate
historical and contemporary conditions in Muslim-majority contexts.
Instead, metaphorical use of this particular American Protestant termturned-religious universal has only grown more pervasive in the last few
decades, making it harder and harder to see the particular conditions of
any given situation clearly. What is worse, the term has figured centrally in
justifications for state-sponsored violence against both political dissenters
and apolitical bystanders around the world. Be it in the valleys of Pakistan
(where civilian casualties caused by unmanned American drones mount in
the battle against “fundamentalists”18), the capital of Egypt (where a 2013
Page 24 of 28
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
military coup and the massacre and unlawful detention of thousands
of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, among others, was defended with
reference to the fight against fundamentalism19), or the Gaza Strip (where
periodic Israeli operations against Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim
Brotherhood, have resulted in thousands of civilian casualties20), the term
is now commonly used to legitimate the most brutal means of pursuing political and economic interests. This is not just an ironic turn of events,
given what Gibb and some of his students intended when first applying the
term; it is a tragic one.
Asad, Talal
1993
Benard, Cheryl
2003
Berthold-Bond, Daniel
1989
Blankenship, Khalid
2014
Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of
Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and
Strategies. Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation.
Hegel’s Grand Synthesis: Being, Thought, and
History. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
“Muslim ‘Fundamentalism,’ Salafism, Sufism,
and Other Trends.” In Fundamentalism:
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A. Wood and David Harrington Watt, 144–162.
Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina
Press.
argue that opposition to the drone strikes in Pakistan comes primarily from Muslim fundamentalists
because such persons perceive the United States to be at war with Islam, not because of the deaths of
civilians (Kaltenthaler et al. 2012).
19
On the Egyptian military coup and Field Marshal (later, President) Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s claim to
defend both the Egyptian state and moderate Islam from the ostensibly fundamentalist Muslim
Brotherhood, see sociologist Atef Said’s post on the Social Science Research Council’s website, The
Immanent Frame, titled “Three Observations on Religion, Politics, and the Muslim Brotherhood” (http://
blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2014/04/01/three-observations-on-religion-politics-and-the-muslim-brotherhood/).
20
Likely borrowing the label as applied to the Muslim Brotherhood, Israelis have routinely
described Hamas as fundamentalist since shortly after the organization’s founding in the 1980s.
During the July 2014 invasion of Gaza—as the civilian casualty rate in Gaza reached 75% of reported
fatalities—The Jerusalem Post ran an article titled “Islamic Fundamentalism, the Permanent Threat”
(Gerstenfeld 2014). The article consisted primarily of a redacted twenty-year-old interview with
Israeli academic Mordechai Abir—a Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs—who
delineated the differences between so-called Muslim fundamentalist groups (Hamas included),
warned of the spread of fundamentalism from the Palestinian Territories to Israeli Arabs, and argued
that the threat from fundamentalists required that Israel must, “above all,” in journalist Manfred
Gerstenfeld’s words, “preserve its vital interests and ability to defend itself.”
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