Table Of ContentRELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM
AND POLITICAL EXTREMISM
Cass Series: Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions
Series Editors: Michael Burleigh, Robert Mallett
and Emilio Gentile
ISSN 1477-058X
This innovative new book series will scrutinise all attempts to totally
refashion mankind and society, whether these hailed from the Left or
the Right, which, unusually, will receive equal consideration. Although
its primary focus will be on the authoritarian and totalitarian politics of
the twentieth century, the series will also provide a forum for the wider
discussion of the politics of faith and salvation in general, together with
an examination of their inexorably catastrophic consequences. There are
no chronological or geographical limitations to the books that may be
included, and the series will include reprints of classic works and
translations, as well as monographs and collections of essays.
Redefining Stalinism
Harold Shukman (ed.)
International Fascism, 1919–45
Gert Sørensen and Robert Mallett (eds.)
Faith, Politics and Nazism: Selected Essays by Uriel Tal
With a Foreword by Saul Friedlander
Totalitarian Democracy and After: International Colloquium in
Memory of Jakob L.Talmon
Yehoshua Arieli and Nathan Rotenstreich (eds.)
The French and Italian Communist Parties: Comrades and Culture
Cyrille Guiat
The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices
Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (eds.)
The Italian Road to Totalitarianism
Emilio Gentile, translated by Robert Mallett
The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929
Adrian Lyttelton
Religious Fundamentalism
and Political Extremism
Editors
Leonard Weinberg
Ami Pedahzur
FRANK CASS
LONDON • PORTLAND, OR
First published in 2004 in Great Britain by
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London N14 5BP, England
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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and in the United States of America by
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Copyright © 2004Frank Cass & Co. Ltd
Website: www.frankcass.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Religious fundamentalism and political extremism.—
(Totalitarian movements and political religions)
1. Religious fundamentalism—Political aspects 2. Violence—
Religious aspects 3. Religion and politics 4. Terrorism—
Religious aspects
I. Weinberg, Leonard II. Pedahzur, Ami III. Totalitarian
movements and political religions
322.1
ISBN 0-203-01096-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-7146-5492-2 (Print Edition) (cloth)
ISBN 0-7146-8394-9 (paper)
ISSN 1477-058X
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Religious fundamentalism and political extremism/editors, Leonard
Weinberg, Ami Pedahzur
p. cm.—(Cass series-totalitarian movements and political
religions, ISSN 1477-058X)
Includes index
1. Religious fundamentalism. 2. Radicalism. 3. Religion and
politics. 4. Violence—Religious aspects. 5. Terrorism—Religious
aspects. I. Weinberg, Leonard, 1939–II. Pedahzur, Ami. III. Title. IV
v
Series
BL238.R465 2003
320.5(cid:397)5–dc22
2003016967
This group of studies first appeared as a Special Issue on ‘Religious
Fundamentalism and Political Extremism’ of Totalitarian Movements and
Political Religions(ISSN 1469-0764) 4/3 (Winter 2003) published by Frank
Cass.
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocoying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher of this book.
Contents
Introduction 1
LeonardWeinberg andAmi Pedahzur
The Return of Martyrdom: Honour, Death and Immortality 11
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
Two Religious Meaning Systems, One Political Belief System: 35
Religiosity, Alternative Religiosity and Political Extremism
Daphna Canetti-Nisim
Religious Violence and the Myth of Fundamentalism 56
Michael Barkun
The Uniqueness of Islamic Fundamentalism and the Fourth 72
Wave of International Terrorism
GabrielBen-Dor andAmiPedahzur
Jewish Self-Defence and Terrorist Groups Prior to the 94
Establishment of the State of Israel: Roots and Traditions
AriePerligerandLeonard Weinberg
Counting the Causes and Dynamics of Ethnoreligious 122
Violence
Jonathan Fox
Reflections on Fascism and Religion 149
Roger Eatwell
Abstracts 1 72
About the Contributors 1 76
Index 1 78
1
Introduction
LEONARD WEINBERG and AMI PEDAHZUR
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully As when
they do it from religious conviction—Pascal
The relationship(s) between political religions, totalitarian movements,
fundamentalism and political extremism may confront us with
something of a contradiction, perhaps an irony as well. These days there
is certainly a tendency to link these concepts, especially among Western
writers. The source of their inspiration has been the rise of violent Islamist
groups in the Middle East and elsewhere. But this linkage hardly
captures the historical reality.
For important analysts of political or ‘secular’ religions and the
totalitarian movements to which they gave birth in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, these developments were the outgrowths of extreme
hostility to religious belief. Certainly in the Western world, democratic
opponents of totalitarian movements, and the fascist, Nazi and
communist regimes to which they gave rise, came to regard traditional
religious institutions as parts of civil society and as barriers to the kind
of total control over human thought and behaviour the totalitarian rulers
hoped to achieve. In fact, the decline of religious faith and practice,
again in the West, precedes the rise of totalitarian movements and
political religions.
During the Soviet era, Marxists who contemplated leaving their
countries’ communist parties over various issues, most commonly the
purge trials, the Nazi—Soviet non-aggression pact,
Khrushchev’s disclosures of Stalin’s crimes and the Soviet invasions of
Hungary and Czechoslovakia, often restrained themselves by the
thought that there ‘was no salvation outside the church’. The
communist party, in other words, played the role of church for those
who had become devout believers in Marxism-Leninism. The God that
2 RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM AND POLITICAL EXTREMISM
Failed was the title of a widely read volume in the 1950s whose
contributors (for example, the writers Richard Wright, Arthur Koestler,
Ignazio Silone and Stephen Spender) had managed to break with the
party because they had lost their faith in the dogma itself as well as with
the party organisation.
The religious-like atmosphere of totalitarian movements has not been
limited to those deriving their inspiration from the Marxist faith.
Important observers of fascism (as Roger Eatwell’s account in this
collection makes clear) have been struck by the efforts of these
movements to invest their symbols, rituals and ceremonies with sacral
significance. Fascist emphasis on blood, sacrifice and redemption on
behalf of the nation or race has an unmistakable religious quality.1
Despite the religious metaphors, for many observers the origins of
totalitarianism are to be found in the eighteenth-century pursuit of
Reason not Faith.
The reason it makes sense to devote this volume to discussions of
links between religious fundamentalism and political extremism,
particularly violent political extremism, has to do not with the rise of
totalitarian movements and political religions but, rather, with their
collapse. During the inter-war period, and particularly during the
worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, many came to believe that
a ‘managerial revolution’ was underway and that totalitarian
movements of the Right as well as the Left represented the way of the
future. The democracies simply could not cope with the economic and
social strains placed on them. After all, how could a conflict-ridden
Third Republic cope with the neighbouring fascist regime whose slogan
was ‘Believe! Obey! Fight!’?
The answer of course was that the outcome of the Second World War
not only brought about the collapse of Nazi and fascist regimes but also
discredited the political religions in which their citizens were asked to
place their faith. The same may be said, though several decades later,
about the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. Loss of faith in
the ideology long preceded the collapse of the regimes they were
supposed to embody.
In other words, if we view the matter over the long run, the recent
rise of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East, Latin America and
South Asia, among other places, has occurred at a time when the
millennial hopes placed in the secular political religions had been lost.
Marxism was a God that failed on a worldwide basis. The irony is that
these developments followed the displacement of traditional religious
understandings of the world in the first place.
