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The Fundamentalists
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February 23, 2011
Richard W. Bulliet [2]

MANY PEOPLE believe the world is—or should

be—reaching a consensus on the universal and inevitable superiority of the rationalistic,
humane and rights-based values of Western civilization.

In stark contrast, the “end-time is nigh, secular humanism seduces people from their faith, and
personal behavior with respect to God is (or should be) our primary concern” school of thought
is attracting an increasing number of adherents.

The secularists’ vision of the world’s future fits the uplifting story of the past few centuries
contained in most American history books. The venerable Great Books curriculum of Columbia
University, for example, exposes undergraduates to the key thoughts of the greatest Western
thinkers. Plato and Aristotle rub shoulders with Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, and we
continue reading both secular and religious texts up to the time of Luther and Calvin. Then we
turn a page. No more readings about religion. Instead we follow the path of reason from Hobbes
to Locke to Kant to Marx to Nietzsche to Freud.

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Did debates about faith come to an end three hundred years ago? No. But the readings are not
intended to chronicle the history of Western thought; they are intended to teach the lesson of
admiration for rationality and the liberal values suitable to our times. This is the Western-
civilization-trumps-all narrative.

Our schools teach that “modernity” (whatever that is) took shape at a certain point in European
history. Secularism, democracy, human rights, gender parity and opposition to racism constitute
the bright side of modernity. Consumerism, imperialist domination, genocide and the decay of
social institutions constitute the dark side. Historical studies have illuminated both the rough and
the smooth.

But as this historical narrative meets the present, it expresses a less and less positive view of
people with strong religious beliefs. If religious adherents hold their peace and don’t make a
fuss about their faith, it treats them as the dwindling remnant of a once-important, and indeed
honorable, tradition which reminds us that Judeo-Christian civilization at one time involved
religion. If, on the other hand, they carry on about things the march-of-rationality believers do
not like, they are branded with the mark of Cain: irrational religious zealots, enemies of freedom,
violators of human rights or, at the furthest extreme, terrorist fanatics.

Yet, doesn’t all of that put good Christian people who feel that abortion and homosexuality are
abominations in the same basket with Muslim terrorists who decapitate hostages, burn American
flags and blow up American embassies?

Though historians do tip their hats to those few believers, nowadays termed “moderates” or
“reformers,” who contrive to accommodate the noble ends of modernity to the tenets of their
faith—bold voices speaking out against obscurantism and fanaticism!—more commonly people
of faith who fail to embark on the modernity cruise ship are portrayed as missing the boat—or is
it the juggernaut?—of history.

THE PHRASE “teleological history” encapsulates the search for roots. In Greek, a telos is an
“end,” so “teleological” denotes the “study of an end.” Of course, different people think of ends
differently. For a follower of Hegel, the flow of history leads toward maximizing the principle of
freedom; for a Marxist, it leads to a communist utopia.

For ordinary historians, however, teleological history is more mundane. They stick their thumbs
in the air, guess where their society is headed, and then ransack archives and half-forgotten
tomes to cobble together the story of where and with whom this heading originated. Thus a
world careening toward a telos imbued with Western liberal values and economic success—call
it globalization, for short—demands a historical narrative that reveals the roots of these prized
qualities.

When Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle East historians, saw how many Muslims were
choosing not to follow the Christians and Jews of Europe down the garden path of modernity,
he famously asked: “What went wrong?” Teleological history makes this an acceptable
question—if not a very useful one. It takes for granted that history is headed in a certain
direction. So if some people have strayed from the path, something must have gone wrong.

The political scientist Samuel Huntington, Lewis’s ideological soul mate, put forward an
alternative approach in his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. For him,
modernity is not for everyone. If you belong to the wrong civilization, which in his view Muslims
certainly do, you can never grasp the key values that underlie Western modernity. He doesn’t
ask how the Muslims went wrong. Being Muslims, they just couldn’t help it.

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But does this mean that everyone in Western civilization is on the right track? Huntington
confronted this awkward assumption in 2004 in a book entitled Who Are We? Secularized
Protestants, he opined, have been more adept than anyone else at following the trail of liberal
and rational thought blazed by our Founding Fathers. Americans from other backgrounds must
learn to try harder.

Thinkers who are captivated by the dream of world-embracing modernity cannot account for
faith-based conviction. At least not in civil language. Those who believe they answer to God do
not fit into the history in which the modernist teleologists believe. Being out of step with the
times, it is a group that should have disappeared long ago. Their beliefs have caused them to
lose track of where the world is headed. Yet the inexorable-Western-thrust-of-history adherents’
categorical dismissal of religion as a force in today’s world is about as effective as whistling past
a graveyard to ward off ghosts. The standard presentation of history from the Enlightenment to
the present day is persuasive; but there may be other ways to relate the history of the past few
centuries. This does not mean ditching the theme of modernity. The tale is too well worked out
for that. But complementary histories might illuminate those contemporary forces that don’t quite
fit the saga of modernity. After all, these forces had to come from somewhere.

So where did the activist-religious domain come from? Why is it that the domain of activist-
religious conservatives, of whatever sectarian label, is growing rather than diminishing? And
where is this movement headed?

THE SCRIPTURES revered by those who believe in the inevitable superiority of Western values,
particularly the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, have not been
hallowed by millennia of worship, chanting and incense burning. So how do the apostles of
modernity sell their wares? They would say that modernity sells itself to anyone who has
escaped the dead hand of religion and become open to reason. But we could also try following
the money.

From the Industrial Revolution onward, according to the standard history of the modern world,
Europeans have grown richer and richer and attended church less and less often. Accordingly,
a 2010 Gallup poll correlates abysmal poverty with countries where 98–99 percent of the
population describe religion as important in their daily lives. Of the most devout eight,
five—Bangladesh, Niger, Yemen, Malawi and Burundi—are among the poorest 20 percent of
the world in per capita income. Two others, Indonesia and Djibouti, do slightly better; and one,
Sri Lanka, achieves a ranking in the middle quintile.

At the other end of the scale, the eight countries with the least religious citizenry—from 34
percent for Russia and Belarus to 16 percent for Estonia—include those three post-Soviet (i.e.,
postatheist) states in the second wealth quintile, while four others—Denmark, Sweden, France
and the United Kingdom—rank above them in the first quintile. Only one, Vietnam, falls as low
as the fourth quintile.

Does religion automatically recede when people earn enough money to be active consumers in
the modern world economy? Does buying supplant believing? This is what American
modernization theorists of the 1960s predicted. Yet some of the world’s richest nations are
strongly religious. It’s no surprise, of course, that four countries bordering the Persian
Gulf—Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates—boast religiosity rates of over 90
percent and also belong to the top quintile of nations by wealth. Nor that their larger neighbor,
Saudi Arabia, scores over 90 percent on the religiosity scale and falls into the second wealth
quintile. This is what most Americans would expect given the zealotry we associate with Saudi
Arabia.

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A less obvious, and indeed surprising, Gallup finding is that the United States stands strikingly
alone among non-Gulf countries in its combination of high religiosity, 65 percent, and high per
capita income. It is not unusual, therefore, to find people who look like ordinary folks from my
hometown in Illinois as numerous in the worldwide contingent of the faithful as those wearing
white gowns and Arab
headdresses.

In their melding of piety with wealth, Saudi Arabia and the United States are the Odd Couple of
the twenty-first century. One a monarchy, the other a democracy. One founded on a restrictive
faith, the other a beacon of religious freedom. One blessed by vast petroleum resources, the
other cursed by a gargantuan appetite for oil. Their governments bound to each other by ties of
money, armament and elite partying, but their populations distrustful of each other’s political
designs, disdainful of their respective faiths and angry about the violent deeds each attributes to
the other.

This doesn’t make much sense within the standard history of modernity. Would a different
approach shed light on the pairing of this Odd Couple? If so, the starting point cannot be the
rise of Western civilization. Saudi Arabia and its neighbors had no Thomas Jefferson or
Benjamin Franklin to keep them abreast of advances in Enlightenment thought. And the Arabian
Peninsula remained insulated from modern economic forces until its oil came on line after World
War II.

So perhaps we should take a look at religious history, despite the presumption that Christian
Europeans, who weaned themselves from the Church in proportion to their economic success,
have always been the ones who make significant advances, and that Muslims always trail
behind.

AT THE beginning of the eighteenth century, the interior of Arabia was the wild and unsettled
hinterland of an old and sophisticated cultural tradition concentrated in cosmopolitan centers
like Istanbul, Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo. The hardship, starkness and simplicity of life in
the heart of the peninsula contrasted sharply with the luxuries available in the imperial centers.

Half a world away, the interior of what would become the United States of America was similarly
wild and unsettled. Colonists living in the small cities on the Atlantic coast looked to London and
Paris for culture and sophistication, but European faces were seldom seen west of the
Appalachian Mountains. Moreover, the most urbane Bostonians and Philadelphians seemed
and felt like bumpkins when they traveled to Europe, while the people of the frontier lived lives
that were often as stark and simple as those of the bedouin of Nejd.

Religion was a concern for many people in both lands, but for illustrative purposes, I will focus
on two personalities: Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab and John Wesley. They were both born in
1703, and both would find fertile ground for their teachings in these remote and scantily
populated backwoods.

After an early upbringing in Nejd, the center of Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab traveled
to the rich and historic commercial city of Basra to acquire an education in Islamic law and
theology. When he returned to Arabia, he called for a purification of Islamic religious practice
and a return to the simple ideals of the earliest Muslim community (the salaf ). Opposition to his
stark reforms caused him to seek refuge with Muhammad ibn Saud, the ruler of the town of
Diriyah. Politically, their alliance planted the seed of the Saudi kingdom. Religiously, it gave rise
to the Wahhabi form of Islam, and more broadly to the current of Salafism that is today so often
associated with Muslim militancy around the world.

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His age-mate, John Wesley, was born near London and educated at Oxford, where he led a
revivalist “Holy Club” whose members were taunted as “Methodists.” (“Wahhabi” similarly
originated as a pejorative term for believers who called themselves “Muwahhidun,” that is,
believers in God’s unity or tawhid.) In 1735, John and his brother Charles traveled to the
fledgling colony of Georgia, leaving their friend George Whitefield behind to advance their
revivalist work in England. Though the Wesleys spent only one year in the New World, George
Whitefield followed them abroad, making seven transatlantic voyages and delivering riveting
open-air sermons that touched off the tumultuous revivalist movement known as the Great
Awakening.

Wesley died in 1791, a year before Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab. But he and his followers
had set an example. The Methodist, Baptist and like-minded Protestant preachers who inspired
later waves of popular revivalism focused on simple living, abstinence from sinful practices like
drinking alcohol and dancing, and chastising their less abstemious neighbors. Their message
was enormously influential in the frontier lands of the American South and Middle West and
remains so today. And like most Protestants, they deplored anything they considered
threatening to God’s triune purity, most particularly the saint worship of the Catholic Church.

The doctrinal differences between Wahhabism and Methodism were not trivial, but their
followers nevertheless shared certain traits. Both groups were accused of being fanatics. Both
stressed a constant and active adherence to God’s laws, as they understood them, and an
energetic avoidance of whatever deviated from those laws. Both believed in showing their faith
through actions. And both tirelessly spread their beliefs and practices to people of their own, or
of other, faiths both at home and in faraway lands.

Historians of the modern Middle East maintain that the United States played a negligible role in
the region prior to World War II. Leaving aside Woodrow Wilson’s advocacy of national
self-determination, this is a sound judgment at a political level. At the religious level, however, it
overlooks the massive commitment of American Protestants to missionary work throughout the
world. Inspired by the periodic waves of revival that began with George Whitefield and the Great
Awakening, tens of thousands of young Americans journeyed abroad to spread their faith or
demonstrate to others the purity of heart of American Protestant life. The Ottoman Empire and
the Persian Gulf were centers for American missionary enterprise.

Similarly, a Wahhabi zeal for reviving Islam expressed itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, long before anyone suspected that oil would one day transform the Arabian Desert.
Missionary activities were initially less important than military campaigns to suppress what
Wahhabi preachers deemed idolatrous practices, particularly those connected with Sufism,
Shiism and the veneration of saintly tombs. But in the twentieth century, Wahhabi missionary
activities expanded enormously.

Saudi Arabia and the United States are today the world’s two principal exporters of religious
missionaries. The techniques, training and political involvement of the two sorts of missionaries
differ in various ways. Saudis graduating from university religious-propagation (da’wa) faculties
focus more on strengthening religious observance among Muslims than on winning converts or
distributing sacred texts, which are more American concerns. Also, the Saudi government,
unlike the American government, directly supports religious-propagation faculties; and American
missionaries are more likely than their Saudi counterparts to work through relief and cultural
organizations, as opposed to formal institutions, such as schools, madrassas, churches or
mosques. Nevertheless, both movements draw strength from dedicated educational institutions
and almost unlimited private financial donations. Political leaders in both the American and
Saudi governments are loath to criticize these missionary endeavors or put limits on their

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funding. That many Wahhabi and Protestant missionaries see nothing but evil and political
subversion in the actions of their counterparts serves to conceal, but not refute, the fundamental
similarity of their social and religious roots.

This similarity shows up even in the way both desert Arabia and frontier America now view their
former cultural heartlands. Zealous Protestants do not admire Europe. Europe is largely
post-Christian, and Europeans are often dismayed by the importance of evangelical Christianity
in American social and political life. In return, evangelical Americans see sinful Europe as a land
in need of religious revival. In the same way, great Islamic cultural hubs like Istanbul, Cairo,
Damascus, Tunis, Fez, Lahore and New Delhi are seen by Salafi Muslims as MINO (Muslim in
Name Only) hotbeds and thus ripe fields for missionary revival.

This shared history of religious revival and puritanism on the peripheries of the old cultural and
imperial centers of Europe and the Middle East also serves as an excuse to ignore the imperial
past. The United States rejects any suggestion that it is heir to British and French imperialism
and pretends that it has nothing to learn from their historical experiences. Saudi Arabia similarly
regards the grandeur of earlier Muslim empires and the histories under imperialism of other
Muslim states as irrelevant to its own standing in the Muslim world of today. Neither government
wastes much time studying the past.

THE MAKEUP of the secular-religious divide cannot be easily categorized through labels of rich
and poor, or of Western and non-Western national origin. Nor can it be seen as a backward-
versus-modern dichotomy. Many who guide their lives through faith feel just as modern as do
the globalizers. And for every secularist who derides fundamentalists for living or thinking in the
past, there is a person of faith who is convinced that it is the secularists’ abandonment of
religion that is out-of-date, a sad vestige of a nineteenth-century rationalism that crashed and
burned in the horror and chaos of two world wars and the Cold War.

Perhaps, then, it is time to divide the world according to a different variable. On one side stand
the great cultural centers and the groups within them that either led, sustained or became
entangled in the growing political and intellectual labyrinths of the nineteenth century. These
are such metropolitan areas as London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Boston,
New York, San Francisco, Istanbul, Tehran, Cairo, Damascus, Lahore, New Delhi, Calcutta,
Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai.

These centers stand in juxtaposition to an array of culturally insular hinterlands: the American
South, Midwest and Mountain states; the non-European republics of the former Soviet Union
and the eastern reaches of the current Russian Federation; the Arabian Peninsula and other
lightly settled parts of the arid zone, along with most of sub-Saharan Africa; and the remote
regions of South America, Central America, Southeast Asia and China. In the United States, the
terms red state and blue state shorthand this division. But that may just be a way of
characterizing the American version of a general phenomenon.

This is not an original idea. In the fourteenth century, the Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun identified
tension between civilized city life and rural tribal life as the key to explaining how one state
succeeded another. The people of the desert, austere and aggressive by nature, from time to
time experience powerful episodes of religious bonding. Such movements give them the power
to overturn the tired political order of the cities.

In his book Muslim Society, the sociologist Ernest Gellner wedded Ibn Khaldun’s schema to
David Hume’s ideas about the natural history of religion and argued that the high culture of
urban life favored dry, legalistic expressions of religion, while the rugged life of the wilderness

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favored a purer, more self-denying and more potent spirituality. In Hume’s formulation, “men
have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism into
idolatry.” Theism for Hume was a rational monotheism based on observing the natural order of
creation, while idolatry arose from the play of human fears and anxieties.

Despite his linking of Ibn Khaldun to one of the icons of Western political thought, Gellner did
not venture to suggest that the Arab thinker’s ideas might apply to a non-Muslim land like the
United States. But the Wahhabi-Methodist parallel points in that direction. And one can find
other similarities. In 1813, an immense rural revolt known as the Eight Trigrams Rebellion came
so close to overthrowing the Chinese emperor that he was forced to take up bow and arrow to
defend himself in his own palace. The leaders of the rebellion believed that the Maitreya
Buddha, the Buddhist equivalent of the Messiah, was soon to appear. Moreover, they stressed
personal discipline in their use of martial-arts instruction as a vehicle for arousing revolutionary
passions. A generation later, a man claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ launched
his strenuously disciplined followers against the same empire in the Taiping Rebellion of
1850–1864.

FUTURE YEARS may present fresh instances of boondocks dynamism with emphases on
apocalyptic faith and personal discipline rising to the level of major political and cultural
movements. Evangelical Protestantism may challenge the traditional Catholicism of Latin
America. Chinese centralized government may face serious challenges from Sufi Muslims in
Xinjiang, Tibetan Buddhists or Qigong movements like the Falun Gong. Or the Lord’s
Resistance Army in Uganda might spawn African imitators.

For now, however, hinterland faith movements are making their strongest showings in two
areas: the Middle East, where Wahhabis from Arabia find religious and political common ground
with rural Afghan and Pakistani Taliban; and the United States, where evangelical politics spark
scary headlines and send shivers coursing through every liberal soul.

It is true that the dissimilarities between these religious currents seem to far outweigh what they
share. After all, only the angriest Americans engage in outright terrorism—our overt and covert
wars against Muslims do not count—while the Muslim world abounds in suicide bombings,
hostage taking and the victimization of women. Just for starters.

It is fair to ask, however, whether militant Islamists would perpetrate so much violence if the
countries in which they lived had open political systems. Is there a nonviolent way for a popular
religious movement to challenge the state in an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia? Or in
corrupt and faction-ridden oligarchies like Afghanistan and Somalia? Or in barely disguised
military dictatorships like Egypt and Pakistan? By the same token, would America’s angry
evangelicals be so peacefully intent on winning elections if we had none? Or if the governing
party consistently stuffed the ballot boxes? Or if an American dictator barred committed
Christians from government jobs and herded their pastors into prison camps?

If the dissimilarities may not be as vast as they seem, what of the parallels? Seldom have two
countries with so much in common in terms of religious background and so tightly bound by
economics and geostrategic calculations despised one another so ardently. Suspicion and
hatred between Americans and Saudis differ greatly from Europe’s clamorous debate over
Muslim immigration.

Modernists in the United States—many who consider themselves secularists—despise Saudi

Arabia’s religious straightjacket and its perpetuation of absolute monarchy. And the “red states”
are comprised of a lot of devout American Christians who feel outraged over certain aspects of

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the Islamic faith, or believe that Islam as a whole is the work of Satan. Where these two groups
come together is in recognizing that most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi nationals.

On the Saudi side, modernist businessmen who wear their Islam lightly and have summer
escape-the-heat homes in Houston or London or Nice look down on the atavistic mud wrestling
that characterizes contemporary American democracy and look to the Chinese model of
centralized development for a road map to the future. Devout Wahhabis, on the other hand, see
the American fist, rather than President Obama’s extended hand, wherever they look in the
Islamic world. And everyone is hyperconscious of Israel’s influence on American policies.

There’s no changing this situation. Oil and geopolitics indissolubly bind the two countries.
Unless, of course, the hinterland zealots on one side or the other should actually succeed in
seizing control of the government. (Contrary to popular belief, Wahhabi divines do not currently
have the power to push King Abdullah around.) A Saudi Arabia ruled by Osama bin Laden
would not be America’s friend and partner. Nor would an America governed by the Tea Party be
looked on with equanimity by a Saudi king.

Could such a game-changing shift in power come about in either country? No. At least not
according to our historical master narrative devoted to the rise of modernity. The world has
boarded the globalization express and is hell-bent on a WTO paradise. But what if the
counternarrative of yahoo-hinterlands-pushing-back-hard-against-the-modernizers has
substance? What if those who see secular humanism as an amoral distraction from faith are
thinking actors, and not just mindless scarecrows put up to keep the globalizers on their toes?
Can we face the future with any confidence when our reading of the past excludes, demeans or
explains away the forces that seem increasingly to be real? If we are to ignore this telos, the
inexorable forces of history may push back violently against the naysayers who cannot fathom a
world that must reconcile religiosity with the Enlightenment.

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