Deconstructing fundamentalism: a response to Yawning Bread

Prefatory note: I generally really enjoy reading Yawning Bread’s writing. I think he writes well and has good analyses of much that is going on in Singapore and in the world, which does not necessarily mean that I agree with everything he says, ofcourse. As such, I offer this critique not as a vengeful attack but as an alternative viewpoint in the spirit of an exchange of ideas.

In the essay ‘Indonesia: fundamentalism on the march’, Yawning Bread offers an analysis on the history of religion and the rise of religious militancy and fundamentalism, using the specific case of Islam.

I believe his analysis is flawed in several ways.

For one thing, the history that he maps out is an extremely Eurocentric version. Charting out the history of the development of scientific thought in Western Europe doesn’t shed any light on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Scientific thought developed in its own unique way in Islamic societies; in fact, scientific pursuit and empirical experimentation were cornerstones in many Islamic societies of the past. The many scientific discoveries which are now popularly credited to Western Europe were actually built on the foundations of scientific thought in Islamic societies, most notably in the time of the Ottoman Empire. So right there, his main thesis that the tension between the mythos-logos dichotomy has caused a rise in Islamic fundamentalism falls apart.

Later, he goes on to say that the development of rational thought led to the development of questioning the dominant social ethos, particularly based on questions of unequal treatment (let’s call that discrimination) based on gender, ‘race’, sexual orientation, and so on. Again, I believe this is false. As long as there have been slaves there have been slave rebellions. As long as there has been patriarchy there have been women rising up against it. Resistance to oppression and exploitation precedes the Western European Enlightenment, it precedes the language of ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’ that we use today, and it will continue whether or not these ideas and this language remains a part of dominant discourse.

This is why I think the word “traditional” (as opposed to “modern”) is not the correct language to describe what we are talking about here. “Traditional” implies a harking back to a past way of doing things that is usually either romanticized or demonized. The “traditional social order” sounds like there was a time when things were peaceful, all was well, or at least calm, and no one was questioning anything, which I find very hard to believe. Perhaps ‘conservative’ is a more appropriate term to describe an ideology that is hierarchical and committed to ‘conserving’ the status quo.

In this sense, too, I find the term “religious fundamentalism” problematic and prefer the term ‘religious conservative’ to describe the phenomenon. A Muslim activist acquaintance I know in Canada has really challenged me to think about the connotations of using that term “fundamentalist”. As Yawning Bread himself has noted in the comment thread for this essay in his newly-created blog that supports his website, the term “fundamentalism” implies a return to the fundamentals, or basics, of a religion. However, the people we are referring to are not actually doing that. Usually they are advocating a highly skewed perspective on the religion. This is also a tricky thing because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate religion from culture, politics, economics, social roles and life on the ground in general. Is there really such a thing as ‘pure religion’? And if so whose interpretation is right, and why?

So how then to understand the rise of Islamic religious conservatism? Any attempt at analysis must take into account the world geo-political situation, the simultaneous (and arguably more powerful) rise of Christian religious conservatism, the economics of who controls the world’s resources, and the nuances of power dynamics created by the increased demonization of Muslims throughout the world but particularly in the so-called ‘First World’ as well as in Muslim-minority countries like India.

The protest against the Indonesian government’s rejection of the ‘anti-pornography bill’ (which Yawning Bread rightly points out is less about abolishing pornography and more about restricting sexual behaviour), is one indication that Islamic religious conservatism, like all religious conservatism, quite often chooses women’s bodies as its battleground. And again, women are speaking out against this. But in a world where they who have the most power have the most airtime, the question then becomes, who is listening?


Endnote: I use the term ‘Islamic societies’ with much caution, without trying to homogenize groups of people who are connected by a particular identity and in recognition that the term tends to invisibilize minorities within these societies.