Are fundamentalist groups modern?

Is Islam compatible with modernity?  This has been a question that we have spent nearly a semester grappling with.  As a class, we have studied a broad spectrum of ideas on the subject from academics, scholars, and commentators.  An area that has perhaps been ignored is that of fundamentalist Islamic movements.  Although we studied Sayyid Qutb whose book Milestones influenced groups such as Al-Qaeda, the subject of fundamentalists has taken a necessary back-seat.  Fundamentalist Islam, defined here as global terrorists groups, consist of an insignificant portion of the Islamic world.  Despite their size and influence, terrorism is often brought up within the context of Islam.  It is not a topic that can simply be brushed aside within an academic setting because it has no bearings on bigger pictures.  The sheer frequency terrorism is brought up make it worth studying within the context of the modern. 

                The question is whether fundamentalist Islam compatible with the modern?  The best way of framing this answer is not whether the ideas espoused by leaders such as bin Laden are modern but rather if these ideas are a product of the modern world.  If they are a product of the modern world, then it is natural to assume that they are compatible with modernity even if they were produced by hostility to said world.  Tanzanian author Mahmood Mamdani chronicles the emergence of fundamentalist Islam as a product of the Cold War.  As the United States searched for proxies in its fight against communism following the quagmire in Vietnam, US foreign policy actively supported terrorist groups in places such as Nicaragua, Mozambique, and most famously Afghanistan.  Mamdani links the beginnings of fundamentalist Islam as the product of American attempts to unite a billion Muslims against the Soviet Union (as well as driving a wedge between the Sunni majority and Shia Iran).  To achieve this end, the United States actively funded and supported mujahedeen groups fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Groups such as Al-Qaeda, lead by the upper-class Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden, were grown out of American aid.  The modern condition of the 1980’s Cold War was therefore responsible for giving the organizational structure for fundamentalist groups.  In addition to being a response to modernity, groups such as Al-Qaeda were also created by modernity. 

                In short, what created such a negative response to modernity was modernity itself.  Al-Qaeda and similar groups are a part of the modern world.  There is a certain level of irony that groups dedicated towards promoting an anti-modern message have found their greatest recruitment success using modern technology.  Internet forums and websites have become prominent in both the growth and sustainment of fundamentalist movements.   In fact, one can claim that apart from a few completely isolated groups of people, everybody in the world has been shaped in one way or another by modernity.  Fundamentalist groups throughout the world may criticize the modern world (as have many Western groups and activists) but the point remains that the ideological character of a person is shaped by modernity.   Despite how “pre-modern” one may feel this character is, such responses are invariably modern.  Try to find something in society that has not been shaped by modernity.  It would be an extremely hard quest.

BDF