Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane, there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of 911. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremist have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.
The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end – wealth, fame, eternal salvation – but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.
Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God.
Muhammad - A Biography of the Prophet, Karen Armstrong, 1993
A radical religiosity, which we call ‘fundamentalism’, has erupted in most of the major religions. It is an intensely political form of faith and is a grave danger to world and civic peace. Radical Hindus have taken to the streets of defend the caste system and to oppose the Muslims of India; Jewish fundamentalists have made illegal settlements on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and have vowed to drive all Arabs from their Holy Land; Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the new Christian Right, which saw the Soviet Union as the evil empire, achieved astonishing power in the United States during the 1980s.
Religion has once again become a force to be reckoned with. We are witnessing a widespread revival, which was inconceivable to many people during the 1950s and sixties when secularists tended to assume that religion was a primitive superstition outgrown by civilized, rational man. Religion was marginal and private activity, which could no longer influence world events. Some confidently predicted its imminent demise.
Many Muslims are trying to discover a new identity and to return to their own roots. This has been a theme in the so-called fundamentalist movements in recent years. Not only have Muslims felt humiliated and degraded before the external power of the West, but they have felt disoriented and lost because their own traditions seem to be swamped by the dominant Western culture. The secularism which we have cultivated carefully in the West has sprung from our own tradition, but in Islamic countries it seems alien and foreign – of negative rather than positive import. A generation of people has grown up in the Islamic world at home neither in the East nor in the West, and the answer that many people have found has been a return to their Islamic roots.
