Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [418]
As they grew older the pupils were instucted in the use of sophistcated hand weapons and taught how to make and plant bombs. ISI agents provided training and supervision. They could also observe the development of the more promising students or Taliban, who were later picked out and sent for more specialized training at secret army camps, the better to fight the “holy war” against the unbelievers in Afghanistan….
The dragon seeds sown in 2,500 madrasas produced a crop of 225,000 fanatics ready to kill and to die for their faith when ordered to do so by their religious leaders.72
The result of the upsurge in fundamentalist extremism has been a tragic polarization of public opinion in the democracies which have been targeted. Public opinion is one area in which terrorism has had a major and tragic effect. The majority of the Israeli electorate went from actively supporting the peace process (to the extent of trading back all the land) to desultory support for the continued occupation of Palestine simply because of the enormous upsurge in violence, starting with the second intifada (not a grassroots revolt) followed by waves of equally well-planned suicide bombing encouraged by the World Trade Center attack. The architects of this policy were the Palestinian radicals who did not support the existence of Israel in any form. And Israel got the message, perhaps too strongly, as did the United States when the Twin Towers fell, and as will any democracy that is attacked in this way. It will be a while before the folly of this policy is perceived on both sides.
One result is public justification in the US for a new crusade against the evildoers. To move from these responses to a true settlement of the issues-a just settlement of the Palestine issue and the establishment of economic and political progress in the Arab world-will take more than a change of public opinion in the United States and Israel. It will take a new voice in the Arab world as well, one that firmly rejects the absurd commitments of the fundamentalist extremists. Fouad Ajami sums up what is needed in his book The Dream Palace of the Arabs: “But there arises too the recognition that it is time for the imagination to steal away from Israel and to look at the Arab reality, to behold its own view of the kind of world the Arabs want for themselves.”73 He points out that the intellectual leadership of the Arabs has built a dream-palace and allowed itself to be seduced by hatred of Israel when it should just get on with the development of the Arab world.
The Original Fundamentalism: An American Phenomenon
FUNDAMENTALISM per se is not the same as millenialism or fundamentalist extremism. There are many perfectly law-abiding members of society everywhere who consider themselves fundamentalist.74 Indeed, we as Americans are very familiar with fundamentalism. The term in its original usage was a self-designation of a conservative, American, Christian movement. Originally, it referred to a series of twelve volumes written by conservative theologians of the 1910s, all of whom espoused no compromise with a scientific worldview or any version of modern life that depended on it.75 Actually, it demonstrated that the technology of science could be used to defeat any “demonic” scientific theory. It was not violent in its religious expression, though sporadic acts of intolerance (especially racist intolerance) were committed in its name. It had its own view of heaven and the apocalypse that involved heavy emphasis on “the tribulation” and the “rapture,” two American concerns from earlier missionary and revivalist groups but that were clear innovations in Christian tradition, based on tendentious readings of Paul and Revelation. It is interesting that one of the characteristics of fundamentalist thinking is always that it innovates most just where it says it is returning to Scriptures to simplify and cleanse religious tradition of