180. Karen Armstrongical intolerance of Islam has become one of the received ideas
of the West.
As the millennium drew to a close, however, some Mus-
lims seemed to live up to this Western perception, and, for the
first time, have made sacred violence a cardinal Islamic duty.
These fundamentalists often call Western colonialism and
post-colonial Western imperialism al-Salibiyyah:the Crusade.
The colonial crusade has been less violent but its impact has
been more devastating than the medieval holy wars. The
powerful Muslim world has been reduced to a dependent
bloc, and Muslim society has been gravely dislocated in the
course of an accelerated modernization programme. All over
the world, as we have seen, people in all the major faiths have
reeled under the impact of Western modernity, and have pro-
duced the embattled and frequently intolerant religiosity that
we call fundamentalism. As they struggle to rectify what they
see as the damaging effects of modern secular culture, funda-
mentalists fight back and, in the process, they depart from the
core values of compassion, justice and benevolence that char-
acterize all the world faiths, including Islam. Religion, like
any other human activity, is often abused, but at its best it
helps human beings to cultivate a sense of the sacred inviola-
bility of each individual, and thus to mitigate the murderous
violence to which our species is tragically prone. Religion has
committed atrocities in the past, but in its brief history secu-
larism has proved that it can be just as violent. As we have
seen, secular aggression and persecution have often led to a
heightening of religious intolerance and hatred.
This became tragically clear in Algeria in 1992. During the
religious revival of the 1970s, the Islamic Salvation Front
(FIS) challenged the hegemony of the secular nationalist
party, the National Liberation Front (FLN), which had led
the revolution against French colonial rule in 1954, and had
established a socialist government in the country in 1962. The