I. Terminological Debates

A quick look at the scholarly literature produced in the West about contemporary Islamic Fundamentalism – particularly in the Arab World – will show a considerable amount of anxious concern over the use of such terms as “Fundamentalism”, “Revivalism”, “Islamism”, “Intégrisme”, and their equivalents and derivatives to refer to this religio-political phenomenon. The issue in question is the legitimacy of transferring concepts generated by Western Christian experiences – especially Protestant experiences – to the presumably very different context of Islam, the Arab World and the Muslim universes of discourse and practice in general. In my own experience, this same question used to come up invariably in the discussions, exchanges, debates, lectures, classes, and so on, that I have been intermittently involved in since the early 1980s, both in Europe and the United States. My active interlocutors were the usual crowd of colleagues, intellectuals, students – graduate and undergraduate – enlightened journalists, and various Middle Eastern scholars, experts and specialists.

Now I would like to turn to a discussion of some representative examples. Richard Mitchell, the foremost American expert on, and historian of the Muslim Brothers Organization in Egypt, suggests that there is no real equivalent for a term like “Fundamentalism” in Arabic, implying the illegitimacy of applying it to Islam. Another specialist, struggling with the same terminological problem, deems it “unwise to bring preconceived categories to bear on these phenomena, [i.e., the Islamist movements] especially when we are examining a non-Western religious tradition such as Islam.” John O. Voll, in an otherwise excellent study, notes the reservations of some contemporary Muslim thinkers and non-Muslim (i.e., Western) scholars concerning the use of the concept “Fundamentalism” in any study of Islam, but then proceeds to retain the term anyhow, on the purely practical grounds of convenience, widespread use and the absence of a better alternative. Yousef N. Choueiri prefaces his first-rate book Islamic Fundamentalism with an observation that subverts the operative concept in his own title (Fundamentalism) as no more than a “vague term, currently in vogue as a catch-phrase used to describe the militant ideology of contemporary Islamic movements”. He, like John O. Voll, retains it only “for lack of a better word” (after noting its Protestant origins).