The Neo-Fundamentalists

Neo-fundamentalist groups tend to combine political and militant jihad against the West with a very conservative definition of Islam. They are closer to the tenets of Wahhabism than to the official ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Taliban/al Qaeda nexus is a good example.

Neo-fundamentalists want to ban any female presence in public life, and they are strongly opposed to music, the arts, and entertainment. In contrast to the Islamists, they have no economic or social agenda. They are obsessed by the danger of a loss of purity within Islam through the influence of other religions, and they stress the implementation of the Shari’a as the sole criterion for an Islamic state and society. As strict adherents to Sunnism, they are very anti-Shi’a, and they believe that Israel, the US, and Iran have united to destroy “true” Islam.

Neo-fundamentalist movements are supranational. Adherents are mainly uprooted, Western educated, and separated from their families as well as from their country of origin. They live in a global world. The state level is bypassed and ignored. They think of themselves as “Muslims” and not as citizens of a specific country.

This new brand of supranational ne0-fundamentalism is more a product of globalization than of the Islamic past.