1. How are we to explain the development of 'Islamic Fundamentalism'?

Most scholars and commentators today have major reservations about using the word 'fundamentalism' in this context because it comes out of a very specific Christian context in the USA in the early 1900s and doesn't exactly fit the phenomenon that we're speaking about in Islamic contexts. They therefore prefer to use the term 'Islamism', or 'Radical', 'Political', 'Revivalist', 'Reformist', 'Militant' or 'Activist' Islam.

a. Background and antecedents

- In the first century of Islam the Kharijites, literally 'Outsiders', were a very conservative, strict and puritanical movement, seeking to recall Muslims to the basic teaching of the Qur'an and the example of the Prophet and his immediate successors. They went so far as to wage war against fellow Muslims whom they regarded as infidels, and assassinated Ali, the son in law of the Prophet.

- The Assassins (from the Arabic hashishiyya, suggesting 'hashish takers') were extremist, secret communities of Shi'ites, based in Persia and Syria from the 11th to the 13th centuries. They were sent one by one by their leader, the Grand Master, to kill individuals with a dagger ? usually political, military or religious leaders of the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad. They carried out their targeted assassinations knowing that they would be killed by their captors, and were not allowed to commit suicide.

- Ibn Taymiyya (1268 ? 1328) was a scholar and political activist who had to move from Iraq to Damascus because of the Mongol invasion. Starting from a literalist interpretation of the Qur'an and the Sunnnah, he called for the renewal and reform of Islamic societies, pointing to the first state in Medina as the model of the Islamic state. Although the Mongols were Muslims, ibn Taymiya issued a legal ruling (fatwa), describing them as unbelievers, kuffar, and apostates who needed to be resisted by force. He has been described as 'the spiritual father of (Sunni) revolutionary Islam' (John Esposito. 2).

- In the 18th Century there were a number of revivalist movements in the Sudan, Libya, Nigeria, India, SE Asia and Arabia, where the movement was founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703 ? 1791) and known as Wahhabism. This fundamentalist, puritanical form of Islam was later used by Abdulaziz ibn Saud in a kind of holy war to gain control of the Hejaz in 1927 and then to establish the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. In 1933 an agreement was signed with Standard Oil Company of California allowing them to extract oil. Wahhabism therefore became, in the words of Bernard Lewis 'the official, state-enforced doctrine of one of the most influential governments in all Islam ? the custodian of the two holiest places of Islam ?' He adds that 'The custodianship of the holy places and the revenues of oil have given worldwide impact to what would otherwise have been an extremist fringe in a marginal country' (3).

b. Key ideologues

- Hassan al-Banna (1906 - 1949) was a school teacher who became actively involved in the campaign to get the British out of Egypt, and founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. Attributing the weakness of the Muslim world to its departure from true Islam and to the corrupting influence of the West, he called for jihad to implement reforms in society.

- Mawlana Abul A'la Mawdudi (1903 - 1979) was a journalist in the Indian sub-continent who shared the same outlook as al-Banna. He described Islam as 'a comprehensive system that tends to annihilate all tyrannical and evil systems in the world and enforce its own program ? a revolutionary concept and ideology which seeks to change and revolutionise the world social order and reshape it according to its own concept and ideals' (4). He founded the Jamaat-i-Islami in 1929 and supported the creation of Pakistan as an Islamic state. His writings were widely distributed all over the Muslim world and had a profound influence on Muslims in many different contexts.

- Sayyid Qutb (1906 - 1966) worked for some years as a school teacher in Egypt and then as a government official in the Ministry of Education. While he admired many things in the West, as a result of two years spent in the US between 1948 and 1950, he became a strong critic of what he saw as degenerate Western societies. He worked with the Muslim Brotherhood, and was critical of the secularist approach of Nasser's revolution in Egypt. During the nine years that he spent in prison, he wrote one of his most important works, Signposts on the Way, which was published in 1964 after his release from prison, and which transformed the teaching of al-Banna and Mawdudi into 'a rejectionist, revolutionary call to arms' (Esposito. 5). He believed that violence and terrorism were justified in the jihad to overthrow existing governments which were not sufficiently Islamic.

- Dr Abdullah Azzam, originally from Jordan, has been a strong advocate of militant, global jihad, and is significant because he was one of Osama bin Laden's university teachers in Saudi Arabia. 'Jihad,' he wrote, 'and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues ? jihad will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us so that Islam will reign again: before us lie Palestine, Bokhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent and Andslusia [souther Spain]' (6).

c. Significant dates

- It is hard to exaggerate the significance of the Six Day War in June 1967 in the development of Islamism. The humiliating defeat of the Arab armies which attacked Israel is seen by Muslims and Arabs as the lowest point ever reached by the Muslim world. Egypt's brief victory in October 1973 restored some sense of pride, and was followed by the Arab oil embargo. But the shame of the defeat in 1967 still remains.

- The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 ousted the pro-West Shah and brought into existence the Islamic Republic, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. America became the main target of Muslim anger and contempt, being labelled as 'The Great Satan'.

In 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and this was an event which had a profound effect on Osama bin Laden. The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in the same year showed the depth of hostility to the Saudi authorities.

- In 1989 the Soviet forces were forced to withdraw from Afghanistan, driven out by Afghan fighters supported by Osama bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida and Muslim fighters from the Arab world, and supplied with weapons from the US. Defeating the army of the second most powerful nation in the world gave an enormous boost to the confidence of these Muslim fighters, encouraging them to turn their attention to the most powerful nation of all, the US. 'The Soviet-Afghan war,' says John Esposito, 'marked a new turning point as jihad went global to a degree never seen in the past' (7).

- When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, American forces were stationed in Saudi Arabia. This was another deeply traumatic experience for Osama bin Laden, and set him on a collision course with the Saudi government.

- In 1996 Osama bin Laden fled from the Sudan to join the Taliban in Afghanistan, who by 1998 had taken over most of the country. In August 1998 bin Laden issued his first fatwa calling for driving US forces out of Saudi Arabia. In the same month there was the bombing of the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salam. A later fatwa called on all Muslims to kill US citizens and their allies.

- On 11 September 2001 around 3,000 people were killed in the attacks in New York and Washington. And in March 2004 around 200 were killed in the bombings on the trains in Madrid which brought down the Spanish government.

What is most significant from this brief survey is that bin Laden and those associated with him represent 'the radical fringe of a broad based Islamic jihad that began in the late 20th century' and that al-Qa'ida represents 'a watershed for contemporary Islamic radicalism' (Esposito. 8). What was new was the way in which from the 1990s America and the West became 'a primary target in an unholy war of terrorism' (Esposito. 9).

d. Major grievances and goals

The basic grievances of all Islamists can be listed as follows:

1. The weakness and humiliation of the Muslim world, which is seen as largely the result of Western imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Justifying the attacks of 9/11 bin Laden said, 'Our nation has been tasting humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years' (10).

2. New forms of Western imperialism ? political, military, economic and religious - which have taken the place of the old imperialism, but which are seen as more subtle and dangerous than the old.

3. The failure of the ideologies imported from the West ? especially capitalism, communism/socialism and nationalism. These are perceived as 'bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside' (Bernard Lewis. 11). While some aspects of modernity are enthusiastically embraced, others are vigorously rejected.

4. The establishment of the Zionist state of Israel in the heartlands of Islam, carried out with the support of the West, especially by Britain and later by the US. One-sided American support for Israel since 1967, and especially since the 1980s enables Israel to hold on to the occupied territories. There is continuing, deep anger over the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948-49 and the continuing illegal occupation of the West Bank.

5. The presence of foreign troops in Saudi Arabia since the early 1990s and the Gulf War. Sacred territory, containing the two most holy Islamic sites, is felt to have been invaded by infidels. Although American forces have now been withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, their presence in the Gulf and Iraq is seen as deeply offensive because Baghdad was 'the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium and the scene of some of the most glorious chapters of Islamic history' (Lewis. 12).

6. Corrupt and autocratic governments in Islamic countries which are not truly Islamic and are colluding with the West. For many Islamists the main target for their anger is their own governments. 'From their point of view,' says Bernard Lewis, 'the ultimate struggle is not against the Western intruder but against the Westernizing traitor at home. Their most dangerous enemies, as they see it, are the false and renegade Muslims who rule the countries of the Islamic world and who have imported and imposed infidel ways on Muslim peoples' (13).

7. Double standards. We are constantly reminded, for example, that the West will go to war to force Saddam Hussein to comply with a UN Security Council Resolution calling on him to withdraw from Kuwait, but will do nothing to force Israel to comply with similar UN Resolutions in 1967 requiring it to withdraw from occupied territory.

Islamism is therefore the angry response of Muslims who are painfully aware of the decline of Islam and the resurgence of the West. For Muslims it shouldn't be like this - that the world of Islam becomes subject to Dar al-Harb, the non-Muslim world. This might be called 'the great reversal'. We should be ruling over them, not them ruling over us! The giant has been stung, wounded and humiliated, and Islamism is part of the response of the awakening giant.

Those who turn to terrorism are a minority among the Islamists; but their violence has to be seen in the context of the whole Islamist movement. In the words of Bernard Lewis, 'Popular sentiment is not entirely wrong is seeing the Western world and Western ideas as the ultimate source of the major changes that have transformed the Islamic world in the last century or more. As a consequence, much of the anger in the Islamic world is directed against the Westerner, seen as the ancient and immemorial enemy of Islam since the first clashes between the Muslim caliphs and the Christian emperors, and against the Westernizer, seen as a tool or accomplice of the West and as a traitor to his own faith and people' (14).

If by this stage you still find it hard to get inside the world-view of Islamists, listen to these words of an American, Paul Kennedy, writing in the Wall Street Journal in October 2001:

'How do we appear to them, and what would it be like were our places in the world reversed -- Suppose that there existed today a powerful, unified Arab-Muslim state that stretched from Algeria to Turkey and Arabia -- as there was 400 years ago, the Ottoman Empire. Suppose this unified Arab-Muslim state had the biggest economy in the world, and the most effective military.

'Suppose by contrast this United States of ours had split into 12 or 15 countries, with different regimes, some conservative and corrupt. Suppose that the great Arab-Muslim power had its aircraft carriers cruising off our shores, its aircraft flying over our lands, its satellites watching us every day. Suppose that its multinational corporations had reached into North America to extract oil, and paid the corrupt, conservative governments big royalties for that. Suppose that it dominate all international institutions like the Security Council and the IMF.

'Suppose that there was a special state set up in North America fifty years ago, of a different religion and language to ours, and the giant Arab-Muslim power always gave it support. Suppose the Colossus state was bombarding us with cultural messages, about the status of women, about sexuality, that we found offensive. Suppose it was always urging us to change, to modernise, to go global, to follow its example. Hmm ? in those conditions, would not many Americans steadily grow to loath that Colossus, wish it harm? And perhaps try to harm it? I think so' (15).