History in the Fundamentalist
Imagination

R. Scott Appleby

The Fundamentalist Past as Prelude

Historians are not alone in reconstructing the past. Richly imagined and ingeniously documented versions of the past shape and sustain religious, social, and political movements. Such is the case with the antisecular, antimodernist religious movements that are sometimes compared under the term "fundamentalism." In this essay I first examine fundamentalist reconstructions of the past as a way of understanding the distinctive world views such histories reinforce and the appeal they hold for individuals and movements. In the second part of the essay, I explore the experience of the Islamic world in the twentieth century as it has been historicized and popularized by Sunni Muslim extremists such as Sayyid Qutb (1903–1966) and one of his contemporary disciples, Osama bin Laden.	1
The mentality of fundamentalists is shaped by a tortured vision of the past—a construction of history that casts the long and otherwise dispiriting record of humiliation, persecution, and exile of the true believers (punctuated by an occasional, atypical golden age of faith) as a necessary prelude to the decisive intervention of God and the final vanquishing of the apostates.	2
That sentence deserves several qualifications. First, the blanket use of the term "fundamentalism" may incorrectly suggest that Protestant fundamentalism—an early case of organized, militant religious opposition to secular modernity and its accomplices (pluralism, relativism, feminism)—is the template for all other fundamentalisms. The scriptural inerrancy invented by critics of the higher criticism of the Bible in the late 1880s, however, is hardly the defining mark of all such religious movements that arose in reaction against the modern nation-state with its absolutist pretensions and ever-increasing reach. Almost a generation before U.S. Protestant fundamentalism appeared, the Roman Catholic Church promulgated the Syllabus of Errors (1864), in which Pope Pius IX condemned most aspects of modernity, inaugurating an antimodernist campaign on a platform of ecclesial rather than scriptural "inerrancy." (The doctrine of papal infalliblity was defined by the First Vatican Council in 1870.) "Scriptural inerrancy" as a distinctive mark of fundamentalism is redundant when applied to Islam, given all Muslims' traditional—not, that is, antimodern—belief about the Koran. And so on.1	3
Second, some Muslims, Christians, and Jews have objected to the term "fundamentalism" because it implies that their militant co-religionists are the true believers, the righteous defenders of the faith, whereas, they argue, the militants manipulate sacred texts and traditional teachings to serve political ends. Mainstream believers note the irony in the posturing of self-anointed defenders of the faith who have little respect for the integrity of its fundamentals. Fundamentalism, in other words, is best understood as a mode of thought and action, an identifiable configuration of ideology and organizational resources—not as an essence or constitutive trait of any or all of the host religious traditions. And even within the family of fundamentalisms reaching across time zones and religions, the differences between the movements are far greater than their similarities.	4
Third, to describe fundamentalists' views of the past as "tortured" is to run the outsider's risk of missing the full significance and function of history as they learn, teach, and re-enact it. Each of the subgroups has developed an enduring religious culture by discerning meaning and purpose amid the farrago of its own particular and in some sense incomparable historical experiences.	. . .