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By Root 1534 0

grounded—if not in history—in a carefully suckled hatred of “others.” A Serbo-Croat—speaking Bosnian who, however, has a great-great-grandfather who became a Muslim under the Ottomans, becomes a deserving subject of expulsion. A common religion and an efficient economic partnership are not enough to keep Czechs and Slovaks aroused by rekindled “historical” passions from annihilating all they share. After all, “if there is no suitable past, it can always be invented.”26 The stories of the regions outlined here all suggest reinvented pasts employed to make war on the present in a manner that can only haunt the future.

Pessimists gave up on the region almost before it had emerged from communism. Janos Vorzsak, vice president of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, exclaimed back in 1990: “The majority of Romanians are not prepared for democracy. They have lived so long in an infernal darkness, that they are easily led. They have a primitive psychology.”27 But this is only true because leaders want it to be true, because the electronic and digital machinery of McWorld is put to work on behalf of Jihad, because memory is chained to resentment. Which means, as I shall suggest below, that it can be unchained. For if Jihad undermines the conditions for democracy, so democracy can undermine the conditions for Jihad. Or can it?

14

Essential Jihad: Islam and

Fundamentalism

NOWHERE IS THE tension between democracy and Jihad more evident than in the Islamic world, where the idea of Jihad has a home of birth but certainly not an exclusive patent. For, although it is clear that Islam is a complex religion that by no means is synonymous with Jihad, it is relatively inhospitable to democracy and that inhospitality in turn nurtures conditions favorable to parochialism, antimodernism, exclusiveness, and hostility to “others”—the characteristics that constitute what I have called Jihad.

While Jihad is a term associated with the moral (and sometimes armed) struggle of believers against faithlessness and the faithless, I have used it here to speak to a generic form of fundamentalist opposition to modernity that can be found in most world religions. In their massive five-volume study of fundamentalisms, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby treat Sunni and Shiite Islam but pay equal attention to Protestantism and Catholicism in a variety of European, and North and South American forms, to Hinduism, to the Sikhs, to Theravada Buddhism, to Confucianist Revivalism, and to Zionism. Marty and Appleby take fundamentalist religions to be engaged in militancy, in a kind of permanent fighting: they are “militant, whether in the use of words and ideas or ballots or, in extreme cases, bullets.”1 They fight back, struggling reactively against the present in the name of the past; they fight for their religious conception of the world against secularism and relativism; they fight with weapons of every kind, sometimes borrowed from the enemy, carefully chosen to secure their identity; they fight against others who are agents of corruption; and they fight under God for a cause that, because it is holy, cannot be lost even when it is not yet won. The struggle that is Jihad is not then just a feature of Islam but a characteristic of all fundamentalisms. Nevertheless, Jihad is an Islamic term and is given its animating power by its association not just with fundamentalism in general but with Islamic fundamentalism in particular and with the armed struggles groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad have engaged in. There are moderate and liberal strands in Islam, but they are less prominent at present than the militant strand.

As a religion, Islam has universalist tendencies and while hardly ecumenical, it has displayed considerable tolerance for other religions, even when practiced by minorities dwelling in Muslim countries. Historically, it has shown a greater reluctance to proselytize than Christianity. It has had its empires, but nothing to rival the Crusades or the colonial empires of Britain and France. Yet Islam posits a world in which the