The attacks in France on cartoonists, journalists, police and Jews, and the massacres committed in the same week by Boko Haram in Baga, Nigeria, are horrible milestones in what seems like a relentless rise of militant religious fundamentalism.
The attacks in France on cartoonists, journalists, police and Jews, and the massacres committed in the same week by Boko Haram in Baga, Nigeria, are horrible milestones in what seems like a relentless rise of militant religious fundamentalism.
These crimes were committed in the name of Islam but actually represent just a sliver of Islamic thinking. Deeply sectarian and committed to violence, this fundamentalist approach is not unique to Islam.
The broader issue the world needs to face is how and why the once dominant liberalising currents in Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism have been truncated and diminished over the past three decades?
And what can be done to urgently reverse these trends?
Partly catching the social and political winds of change in the 20th century, all the world’s major religions started to liberalise two or three generations ago. This meant less doctrinaire approaches to everyday morality and a greater openness to accepting their own particular religion was not the only truth, the only way and the only light. It manifested in religions that were, for example, less overtly sexist, allowing women greater opportunities to participate and even officiate in religious affairs and public life.
At root, this move was away from a view of human nature as weak and immoral and needing strictures and regulating laws. Control by men over women’s bodies and sexuality had been at the core of all the main religions' world views. The liberalisation of the 20th century included some deregulation of sexuality and some loosening of the previously rigid control of young people.
Traditionalists within each religion soon started fighting back.
These conservatives want to retain not just the ‘old ways’ but to reassert even more rigorous and narrow interpretations of their respective theologies, and tighten up control on women and on sex.
They also wanted to get involved in the secular world and seek political influence.
Conservative Hindus, Jews, Christians (both Catholic and Protestant churches, especially the Southern Baptist movement in the US) have worked tirelessly to take on what they see as moral relativism and theological laxity.
Isn’t it amazing that in the 21st Century, Catholics still can’t find it within their belief system to approve of the use of condoms — on a continent where thousands become HIV-positive each day?
The growth of ultra-Orthodox views within Judaism, and expression of those views by people like the late Rabbi Meir Kahane in Israel (where many of his views have now become mainstream thinking), have been met and matched in their nationalist, racist and sexist intensity by groups like Al Qaeda.
For those for whom even the idea of educating girls is an apostasy punishable by death, such as the Taliban, the modern world of rights and freedoms is a mortal enemy.
The killers of cartoonists share a belief with their fellow fundamentalist across many religions in theologies of punishment and judgement.
The modernising forces within those same religions, which emphasise contrasting theologies of inclusion, love and mercy, are not raising their voices loudly enough to condemn those who are convinced that it has to be their way or the highway to hell (and they’ll gladly help you get there if you don’t agree with them).
The Islamic fundamentalism of the murderous trio in Paris, and of Boko Haram’s perpetrators of genocide in Nigeria, might arguably be grimmer and more barbaric than some other fundamentalisms. But all fundamentalisms need to be countered by every weapon that secular societies can muster, including satire and ridicule.
Whatever it takes, for the sake of humanity, these fundamentalisms need to be dismantled and defeated.
* Professor Harry Dugmore is a lecturer in the School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University
