forth as well as new political realities Not only did many people suffer eco-
nomic losses, but the basis of their status and dignity were lost as well.
Globalization and all that has gone with it has undermined traditional anchors
of self, community and meaning. The ties of community were attenuated,
traditional values assaulted, while a mass mediated youth culture of self
indulgent hedonism spread throughout the world. In sum, with globaliza-
tion came new forms of alienation.
Much like Fascism, religious fundamentalisms, as palliatives, are responses
to real suffering. If one accepts one’s subjugation to the larger cause of moral
renewal based on absolutist, Manichean values rooted in a holy scripture,
fundamentalisms provide alternative identity granting communities of mean-
ing and recognition premised on a morally based critique of existing condi-
tions and promises of moral restoration. In short, fundamentalism provides
cohesive communities bound by religious beliefs and rituals, stable identi-
ties rooted in fixed notions of gender in which dignity and esteem are based
on absolutist moral criteria. Fundamentalisms provide frameworks of mean-
ing based on the inerrancy of scripture in a world ever more meaningless,
rationalized and depersonalized, and seemingly in moral decline through the
embrace of relativism. For fundamentalists, an absolutist scriptural morality
counteracts the waning of community ties, the fluidity of identities and rel-
ativism of meaning.
Islamisms
As was argued, with the decline of the Caliphate, in face of an ascendant
Christendom, just as early Christians felt ressentementto the more powerful
Romans, so too did waning Islam feel ressentement toward the rising West.
While this served to keep Islamic societies weak, with the colonization of the
Muslim Middle East, and indeed Mogul India and SE Asia, it was in the self
interest of European colonizers to keep the colonized weak, passive and sub-
missive.^62 Much of this was done through the use of local authorities as inter-
mediates, but some of these local elites, to be effective administrators, were
educated in the mother countries. While this did work for awhile, neverthe-
less, as many of the colonized attended European schools they brought back
ideas of the Enlightenment and modern governance. In the late nineteenth
338 • Lauren Langman
(^62) Many of the nineteenth-century fundamentalist movements, especially Wahabism,
emerged as critiques of foreign influences as well as indigenous Sufism.