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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (71224)	2/3/2003 11:01:32 PM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Thomas A Watson. Please read the interview with Aziz Al-Azmeh in iran-bulletin.org You will find much of interest there. Conversation with Aziz Al-Azmeh on Islamism and Modernism Part I Iran Bulletin: Let me begin with conceptual matters. In your book Islams and Modernities why did you label contemporary Islamic movements "political Islamism" and not, for instance, "Islamic fundamentalism?" Aziz Al-Azmeh: I have no aversion whatsoever to using the term fundamentalism, except that fundamentalism need not be political, and could be construed as a form of rigorous personal self-discipline and renewed self-fashioning according to ritual and religio-moral requirements. Fundamentalism is an attitude towards time, which it considers of no consequence, and therefore finds no problem with the absurd proposition that the initial conditions, the golden age, can be retrieved: either by going back to the texts without the mediation of traditions considered corrupt (because they represent Time between the present and its putative beginning), as with Luther and Sunni Salafism generally from Abduh through Rida and the Muslim Brothers until now, or by the re-formation of society according to primitivist models seen to be copies of practices in the golden age, as with what are recognised as fundamentalist movements. The latter are known as integrism by Catholics, but the phenomena are similar: moralisation on and in religious terms of private life, authoritarian invigilation and management of society reformed according to institutions that make this possible: Calvinism, the Bavarian (Catholic, naturally) Counter-Roformation, Wahhabism, Khomeinism, are all of this type, in their different ways. Muslim and Protestant fundamentalism are so similar, according to studies by my friend Sadiq al-Azm, that all hesitation against the use of the term fundamentalism for Muslim analogues has no explanation other than sub-orientalist assumptions about Muslim "incommensurability". So you see, I have no terminological doctrine.