Digital Bin Laden by Timothy Comeau

The current forms of Islamic fundamentalism should not be understood as a return to past social forms and values, not even from the perspective of the practitioners. According to Fazlur Rahman: ‘Actually it is even something of a misnomer to call such phenomena in Islam “fundamentalist” except insofar as they emphasize the basis of Islam as being the two original sources: the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad. Otherwise they emphasize ijtihad, original thought.’ Contemporary Islamic radicalisms are indeed primarily based on ‘original thought’ and the invention of original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of other periods of revivalism or fundamentalism but are really directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then, the fundamentalist ‘return to tradition’ is really a new invention.

The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalism might be understood, then, not a premodern but as a postmodern project. The postmodernity of fundamentalism has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony – and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the paradigmatic case. In the context of Islamic traditions, fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony. [Shah’s Iran, Attaturk’s Turkey, Nasser’s Egypt] ‘If modern meant the pursuit of Western education, technology and industrialization in the first flush of the post-colonial period,’ Akbar Ahmed writes, ‘postmodern would mean a reversion to traditional Muslim values and a rejection of modernism.’ Considered simply in cultural terms, Islamic fundamentalism is a paradoxical kind of postmodernist theory – postmodern only because it chronologically follows and opposes Islamic modernism. It is more properly postmodernist, however, when considered in geopolitical terms. Rahman writes ‘The current postmodernist fundamentalism, in an important way, is novel because its basic élan is anti-Western … Hence its condemnation of classical modernism as a purely Westernizing force.’ Certainly, powerful segments of Islam have been in some sense ‘anti-Western’ since the religion’s inception. What is novel in the contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is really the refusal of the powers that are emerging in the new imperial order. From this perspective, then, insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodernist revolution. (Hardt & Negri, Empire [2000] p. 148-149)