of opportunities for meaningful work. Traditional forms of agriculture, arti-
san labor and petty bourgeois trade are rendered obsolete. Further, in many
countries, there are limited opportunities even for educated classes.
Globalization has encouraged the diffusion of modernity, as the cultural
expression of capitalism, with its secular worldviews and values of Reason,
progress, and in some cases freedom, democracy, and equality.^38 So too, do
the global culture industries, intertwined with consumerism as the hegemonic
ideology of our age, widely disseminate mass mediated forms of privatized
hedonism from shopping to eroticism (Cf. Sklair 2002). This hedonistic self-
indulgence and valorization of the erotic, spread through satellite television
and the Internet, challenge traditional patriarchal authority and moral norms
of sexual modesty and constraint. Patriarchy has been sustained by economic
power on the one hand and ideologies of gender essentialism that restrict
women on the other. The globalization of MTV culture thus erodes the author-
ity of elders, at least male elders, and interrogates the subordinated role
of women, now seeking, if not demanding, political, economic and even
gender-based voice and agency. Such media are an acute affront to the values
and identities of many traditional people, especially those already disad-
vantaged by the global economy for whom traditional male status (patri-
archy) and religious piety served as a basis for status and self esteem. Between
its economic changes that erode traditional authority and its hedonistic pop-
ular culture, modernity challenges essentialist notions of gender that sustain
patriarchy and hierarchical gender relations.
Fundamentalism as a Response to Globalization
Globalization has fostered alienation and distress at economic, political, cul-
tural and social psychological levels. Fundamentalism is an anti-modernist
compensatory response to rapid social and cultural changes and the stresses
and strains of a global age. Fundamentalist religion is a reactionto these rapid
transformations, dislocations and adverse economic consequences, as well as
a critique of the superficiality of a materialistic culture, and the problematic
nature of individualistic, self-critical forms of de-centered, hedonistic self-
hood (see Marty and Applebee 1991; Juergensmeyer 2001). The growth of
From the Caliphate to the Shaheedim• 317(^38) Global capital often works through some of the more authoritarian governments
in the world, and indeed, American capital has often been responsible for installing
and sustaining these governments.