Middle East, save oil kingdoms, remains mired in economic stagnation and
political ossification in which there is growing urban poverty and social
malaise. Nor have any of these countries shown either much curiosity about
the outside world or produced much in the way of intellectual innovation.^12
Otherwise said, Islam, which was once one of the great civilizations in his-
tory, has not only remained economically stagnant, politically repressed, and
intellectually ossified, but these conditions have bred particularly virulent
Islamisms extolling theocratic governance, fundamentalist versions of Shariah
law and intense animosity to Western modernity. This has been seen in the
Algerian civil war, the Iranian theocracy, organizations such as Muslim
Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, and above all, the rise of Al Queda. Under-
standing the rise, fall and stagnation of Islam and its contemporary embrace
of fervent Islamic fundamentalisms, requires a consideration of the interac-
tion of history and biography, a “sociological imagination”, sensitive to eco-
nomic, political and depth psychological considerations of “human variety”
(Mills 1959).
Given the failures of modernist ideologies, as a result of internal barriers
specific to Islam, compounded by European interventionism and imperial-
ism, fundamentalism, political Islam, has flourished in the last few decades.
Fundamentalism has taken especially virulent forms in the Islamic societies
of the Middle East and South Asia that have on occasion led to violent acts
ranging from the Palestinian intifada, the tragedy of 9/11 and the bombings
of the Madrid Railroad Station and London tube.^13 The resistance to American
occupation in Iraq has also been seen as an expression of Islamism, political
Islam.^14 But as I will also argue, while religious fundamentalism may be the
expression of anger, alienation and frustration, it is not the cause.
300 • Lauren Langman
(^12) Arab intellectuals, commissioned by the United Nations found their societies
crippled by a lack of political freedom, repression of women and isolated from the
world of ideas that stifled creativity. For example, with a population of 280 million,
330 books were translated into Arabic, about 10% of the number translated into Greek,
with 20 million readers. In the last twenty years, there have been 350 patents com-
pared to 14,000 for S. Korea. See Arab Human Development Report 2002. The United
Nations Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Develop-
ment. New York: United Nations Publications, 2002. 13
As I shall argue, the relationship between fundamentalism and the embrace of
violence is not as simple as mass media often suggest. Indeed, the Marty and Applebee
(1991–95) fundamentalism project alone has five volumes. Further, many terrorists are
left wing and secular, NOT religious. 14
This is not to suggest that the resistance was inspired by Islam. There are a num-
ber of groups that oppose the occupation; some are quite secular like the Communists.
Rather, Islamism is often used to legitimate the struggle against foreign domination.