Islam • 171and turns it in the opposite direction of what was intended.
Like all the major faiths, Muslim fundamentalists, in their
struggle to survive, make religion a tool of oppression and
even of violence.
But most Sunni fundamentalists have not resorted to
such an extreme. The fundamentalist movements that sprang
up during the 1970s and 1980s all tried to change the world
about them in less drastic but telling ways. After the humil-
iating defeat of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War against
Israel in 1967, there was a swing towards religion through-
out the Middle East. The old secularist policies of such
leaders as al-Nasser seemed discredited. People felt that the
Muslims had failed because they had not been true to their
religion. They could see that while secularism and democ-
racy worked very well in the West, they did not benefit or-
dinary Muslims but only an elite in the Islamic world.
Fundamentalism can be seen as a "post-modern" movement,
which rejects some of the tenets and enthusiasms of moder-
nity, such as colonialism. Throughout the Islamic world,
students and factory workers started to change their imme-
diate environment. They created mosques in their universi-
ties and factories, where they could make salat, and set up
Banna-style welfare societies with an Islamic orientation,
demonstrating that Islam worked for the people better than
the secularist governments did. When students declared a
shady patch of lawn-or even a noticeboard-to be an Is-
lamic zone, they felt that they had made a small but signifi-
cant attempt to push Islam from the marginal realm to
which it had been relegated in secularist society, and re-
claimed a part of the world-however tiny-for Islam.
They were pushing forward the frontiers of the sacred, in
rather the same way as the Jewish fundamentalists in Israel
who made settlements in the occupied West Bank, reclaim-
ing Arab land and bringing it under the aegis of Judaism.