Any one who wants to understand the rise of radical Islam, which on occasion has morphed into terrorism, or the success in America of the right-wing evangelical Christian movement, which contains fascist elements, needs to read Karen Armstrong's book The Battle for God (in German: Im Kampf für Gott) Armstrong traces the historical develpment of the fundamentalist strain of the three great montheistic faiths Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In particular, the book is a welcome corrective for those who equate Islam with terrorism and repression, for Armstrong brilliantly shows how Islamic fundamentalism was a response to the the particular historical developments - especially the experience of colonization - in the Middle East.
The basic premise of Armstrong's historical analysis is that human beings experience the world through two separate modes of thought: mythos and logos. It is through mythos - myth and allegory - that humans experience the sacred. Myth concerns itself with what is constant and timeless in human existence: it looks back to the origins of life, the foundations of culture and our collective unconscious. Logos is practical reason which enables us to funtion in the world. Logos is the basis of scientific inquiry. The modern age is a triumph of logos, but that has not made humans any more secure or happy; we have banished mythos but in the process have created a "God-shaped hole in our consciousness" (Sartre). Religious fundamentalism seeks to fill the void by forcing logos into mythos - conflating the two modes:
Nevertheless, a large number of people still want to be religious and have tried to evolve new forms of faith. Fundamentalism is just one of these modern religious experiments, and, as we have seen, it has enjoyed a certain success in putting religion squarely back on the international agenda, but it has often lost sight of some of the most sacred values of the confessional faiths. Fundamentalists have turned the mythos of their religions into logos, either by insisting that their dogmas are scientifically true, or by transforming their complex mythology into a streamlined ideology. They have thus conflated two complementary sources and styles of knowledge which the people in the pre-modern world had usually decided it was wise to keep separate. The fundamentalist experience shows the truth of this conservative insight. By insisting that the truths of Christianity are factual and scientifically demonstrable, American Protestant fundamentalists have created a caricature of both religion and science. Those Jews and Muslims who have presented their faith in a reasoned, systematic way to compete with other secular ideologies have also distorted their tradition, narrowing it down to a single point by a process of ruthless selection. As a result all have neglected the more tolerant, inclusive, and compassionate teachings and have cultivated theologies of rage, resentment, and revenge. On occasion, this has even lead a small minority to pervert religion by using it to sanction murder. Even the vast majority of fundamentalists, who are opposed to such acts of terror, tend to be exclusive and condemnatory of those who do not share their views. (The Battle for God, p. 366)
It would be interesting to compare Armstrong's historical conflict between logos and mythos to Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightmentment, where instrumental reason evolves from a tool of dominating nature, to an instrument for dominating human subjectivity, culiminating in the fascist state. But that analysis will have to wait.
Armstrong's book is a great achievement. I wish she would write a new chapter on the post-9/11 era, since the events since 2001 have, if anything, borne out her analysis of fundamentalism.
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