Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist,

by adopting the religiously charged rhetoric and cosmic worldview of groups like al-Qa’ida, by viewing such terrorist organizations as a demonic force bent on destroying human civilization instead of as an international criminal conspiracy to be brought to justice—in short, by treating the Global War on Terror like a cosmic war—we have not only played into the hands of these radical Muslim militants, we may have set the groundwork for a new and terrifying age of religious war.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, one half of the world’s population identified itself as Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Hindu. One hundred years of social progress, technological innovation, and scientific advancement, and that number now stands at nearly two thirds.

of those who do belong to a specific church or religious sect, it is the conservative and fundamentalist believers who outnumber, and increasingly outpace, the moderates and liberals.

How to explain this surge in religious identities? It may have partly to do with the failure of secular nationalism—the core ideological principle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to live up to its promises of global peace and prosperity.

Across the globe, secular nationalism is beginning to give way to new forms of nationalism based on ethnicity, tribe, and above all religion.

Religion is identity.

legitimate grievances and must be addressed as such.

The Palestinans really are suffering under Israeli occupation. Arab dictators are in fact being propped up by U.S. policies. The Muslim world truly does have reason to feel under attack by a “crusading” West.

defined the nation as “a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.”

frames the Jihadist struggle not as a battle between rival political ideologies but as a cosmic contest between belief and unbelief—or, in Zawahiri’s words, “between Islam and the infidels.” In such a battle, no one can remain neutral. Every Muslim has a duty to respond to the call of jihad, to rally under the banner of Islam, to come to its defense, and to join in a cosmic war whose epicenter lies here, in Israel, at the nexus of nationalist and transnationalist identities,

secular and religious nationalisms collide, often with bloody consequences, where the very concept of cosmic war was born and where, according to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition, the war will come to a final and fiery end.

the Law of Torah was absolutely clear on this point: only the Messiah could reestablish the state of Israel, and only at the end of time.

Then there was the rather large contingent of theocratic Jews, who, in contrast to the Orthodox, supported the creation of a Jewish state, but only if it were constructed as a religious state and based on Jewish law. These so-called Religious Zionists, conspicuously absent from the first meeting of the World Zionist Congress, which met in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, ultimately formed their own religious parties, which to this day remain opposed to the secular nationalism upon which Israel was founded.

the Zionists carved out a physical space for themselves inside Palestine, then gradually expelled from that space those who could claim no share of Jewish cultural, religious, ethnic, or linguistic heritage.

A carefully constructed narrative began to form among the Zionist leaders: Yes, there was a large Arab population already living in Palestine. But they were not Palestinian. They were not a distinct people, a tribe, a nation. They could not be considered a national entity. They were part of the global “Arab nation” and thus held no claim to the land on which they lived. As Israel’s “Iron Lady,” Golda Meir, explained, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

the British promised full independence for much of the Arab world in return for siding with the Allies against the Ottomans. Independence never materialized, of course; the vanquished Ottoman lands were divvied up among the European powers as spoils of war.

When the Second World War erupted, the Europeans again guaranteed the Arabs independence, this time in exchange for help fighting Adolf Hitler. That promise, too, was broken.

the problem of Palestine was handed over to the newly formed United Nations, which split the country in two. On November 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 181, calling for the creation of two separate and distinct states, each containing its own ethnically and religiously homogeneous “nation.” The Palestinians rejected Resolution 181 outright. The geography of the partition was, according to the Arab Higher Committee representing Palestinian demands, “absurd, impracticable, and unjust.” The resolution established a serpentine border. It gave the Jews, who at the time owned 7 percent of the land and made up less than a third of the population, 56 percent of the country, seven eighths of the citrus groves, most of the arable fields, and a majority of the Mediterranean ports. Some 80 percent of the land that would be the future state of Israel was still private property owned by Arabs.

The state of Palestine, however, is a fading dream. Of the ten million Palestinians in the world, half live as refugees. Any real hope for a unified state has buckled under the weight of the ongoing civil war between Hamas and Fatah, between competing claims of secular and religious nationalism. Today, Gaza is one of the poorest, most densely packed regions on earth, while nearly half of the West Bank is under Israeli control.

one of Jihadism’s greatest challenges is to link together all the disparate identities of its members—regardless of their race, culture, ethnicity, or nationality—under a single collective identity. The easiest way to do this is through what the sociologist William Gamson calls “injustice framing”: identify a situation as unjust; assign blame for the injustice; propose a solution for dealing with the injustice and those responsible for it; and then, most important, connect that injustice to a larger frame of meaning so as to communicate a uniform message that will resonate with as much of the population as possible.

At the same time, the Crusades were consciously conceived of as a new means of earning salvation from the Church. This was war as an act of piety; its purpose, as spelled out by Pope Urban II in 1095 during the Council of Clermont, the ecclesiastical gathering that initiated the First Crusade, was to grant forgiveness of sins to those who would fight against the Church’s enemies. “I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds … to destroy that vile race [the Muslims] from the lands of our friends,” Urban demanded of the priests, knights, and princes gathered in the small French town. “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.”

Urban was not the first pope to offer salvation to those who fought on behalf of the Church; similar promises had been made by Popes Leo IV and John VIII two hundred years earlier.

In fact, the ...

were part of a long and steady process of Christian militarization that had begun with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine around 313 C.E. Almost overnight, the provincial religion inspired by an itinerent Jew from the Galilee became an imperial religion, and the cross of Christ was turned into a banner of war. This sudden transformation radically altered the perception of Christians when it came to the notion of war and violence. The early followers of Jesus, living in a state of constant persecution and political weakness, had focused their ideas of war on the apocalyptic plane—Christ would one day return as “a warrior on a white horse,” his eyes “like a flame of fire,” his vestments “dripping with blood,” his tongue “a sharp-edged sword” with which he would “strike down the nations...

breached the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, four years after Urban had dispatched them to liberate the Holy Land, Christianity was no longer the secret Jewish sect whose members, along with the rest of the Jews, had been forced out of the Holy Land by Rome a thousand years before. It was Rome: rich, mighty, thirsty for blood. The chronicles of Raymond of Agiles, who rode with the knights of God during the First Crusade, bear witness to the almost unimaginable violence unleashed upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem: the Crusaders cut off the heads of Muslims and Jews, shot them with arrows, tortured them by casting them into fires. Piles of heads, hands, and feet littered the cobblestoned streets. The Crusaders rode in blood up to their bridle reins, slashing their way ...

Christianity and the humiliation of paganism; our f...

Christianity’s conception of cosmic war is derived not from the New Testament but from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The knights who raped and pillaged their way to the Holy Land, who, in the words of the Christian chronicler Radulph of Caen, “boiled pagan adults whole in cooking pots, impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled,” were cosmic warriors walking in the path of the Lion of Judah, not the Lamb of God.

The concept of cosmic war, which in its simplest expression refers to the belief that God is actively engaged in human conflicts on behalf of one side against the other, is deeply ingrained in the Hebrew Bible. “God is a Man of War,” the Bible says (Exod. 15:3). He “goes forth like a

soldier, like a warrior he stirs up his fury; he cries out, he shouts aloud, he shows himself mighty against his foes” (Isa. 42:13). He is “a blood-splattered” God (Isa. 63:3), cruel to his rivals, fearsome with his foes. With his “naked bow” and his “flashing spear” at his side, he rides his war chariot to victory (Hab. 3:8–11). In a rage he “treads the earth;” in anger he “tramples the nations” (Hab. 3:12). He smashes the heads of those who stand against him, and bids his followers “to...

God, as conceived of in the ancient mind, was not a passive force in war but an active soldier. Central to biblical ideas about cosmic war was the belief that it is not human beings who fight on behalf of God, but rather God who fights on behalf of human beings. Sometimes God is the only warrior on the...

name of their king but in the name of their god, Marduk, who was believed to have sanctioned, initiated, and commanded each battle. The same holds true for the Egyptians and their god Amun-Re; the Assyrians and their god, Ashur; the Canaanites and their god, Baal; and, mos...

when it comes to war, there is little room in the Bible for human notions of justice and morality. Whatever God decrees is ethical and right. The only limits are God’s limits. “Now go and attack the Amalekites,” God orders Saul, Israel’s incipient king, “and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Sam. 15:3).

This act of “utter annihilation” (herem, in Hebrew), in which God commands the wholesale slaughter of “all that breathes,” is a recurring

theme in the...

Mere separation from the gods of foreign tribes was not enough to ensure purity. To truly rid the land of the idolatrous force and ensure the exclusive worship of Israel’s god, neighboring tribes had to be eradicated. “Anyone who sacrifices to any god but Yahweh shall be utterly destroyed” (Exod. 22:20). Yet even that was not enough to contain the virus. The enemy’s land, livestock, farms and fields, gold and silver had also to be destroyed, “lest they make you sin against me,” says the Lord (Exod. 23:33).

biblical zeal implies an unwavering commitment to God’s rule, an uncompromising fidelity to God’s law, and, most crucially, the complete separation of God’s people from their neighbors. It is in the divine character of God that the doctrine of zeal finds its inspiration. “The Lord your God is a devouring fire, a jealous God,” the Bible says (Deut. 4:24).

This is a God who tolerates no equal, abides no partner, accepts no portion but the whole. He demands absolute and unqualified devotion and reacts with uninhibited rage when receiving anything less.

The origins of the Zealot movement can be traced to the year 6 C.E., when Rome called for a census to be taken of all of Syria and Palestine. It was customary for the Romans to conduct periodic registers of their citizens, along with their wives, children, slaves, and property, for the purpose of proper taxation. But this time, a small band of Jewish reactionaries from the Galilee decided to take a stand: They would not be counted. The land was not Rome’s to be parceled out and tallied. The land was God’s, and only God could claim ownership of it. To cooperate with the Roman census would be to acknowledge Rome’s dominion, and that would be an act of sacrilege: a violation of the first and greatest commandment, revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, to take no other god besides Yahweh (Exod. 20:3).

Jew who deigned to be registered by Rome was in effect swearing allegiance to Rome instead of to God and was thus no longer a Jew. He was an apostate; he would be slated for death.

Within hours of the army’s taking of the Temple, bulldozers began destroying Palestinian homes in front of the Wailing Wall, making it accessible to the Jews for the first time in centuries.

according to research done by the preeminent scholar of American evangelicalism, George Marsden, evangelicals are far more likely than other Americans to sanction and support war.

60 percent of evangelicals in the United States continued to support the war in Iraq (50 percent remained convinced, despite all

evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein had been directly involved in the attacks of 9/11).

Modern American evangelicalism grew out of another distinctly American religious movement called fundamentalism, which arose in the early twentieth century, was a period of grave uncertainty for many conservative Christians. New and unfamiliar ideas such as Darwinism and feminism

were posing extraordinary challenges to traditional Christian beliefs; the scientific revolution in general seemed to make a mockery of the idea of biblical creationism.

Fundamentalism (the term derives from a series of Christian tracts entitled The Fundamentals, published between 1909 and 1915) was a means of pushing back against these new forces in American society.

Originally, the term “fundamentalism” was used to describe a militantly ultraconservative wing

of the American evangelical movement (“A Fundamentalist is an Evangelical who is angry about something,” George Marsden wrote). Fundamentalists argued that it was not enough merely to believe in God and obey the teachings of the Gospels. One had to make a personal, confessional commitment to Jesus Christ, so that he could wash away one’s sins with his “re...

Fundamentalist leaders preached a radical return to the fundamentals o...