Let us raise a few general questions about radical religious movements. Radical is probably the alternative to 'mainstream' and moderate. It is perhaps instructive to begin by looking at Jonathan Israel's recent (2001) monograph, entitled Radical Enlightenment in which he argues that there was a radical underground European Enlightenment between 1650 and 1750 that has been generally regarded as marginal to the wider phenomenon but that he sees as central. In his view ‘the Enlightenment-European and global- not only attacked and severed the roots of traditional European culture in the sacred, magic, kinship, and hierarchy, secularising all institutions and ideas, but (intellectually and to a degree in practice) effectively demolished all legitimation of monarchy, aristocracy, woman's subordination to man, ecclesiastical authority, and slavery, replacing these with the principles of universality, equality, and democracy’. I do not cite Israel because I accept his grand view of modernity or enjoy his history of men and ideas approach or even because he places Spinoza and Holland in the center of world history, but because it is this wholesale, great transformation perspective, that we find also in many writings on Fundamentalism which is the catch phrase for writing about radical religion. Radical in this case stands for a total rejection of secular global modernity (the product of Jonathan Israel's and Peter Gay's Enlightenment) by religious movements.

When in the early 1990s I was invited to participate in the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I felt attracted to its comparative framework. I still think that due to the importance of the Middle East to U.S. global politics, there is too much emphasis on radical Islam and a neglect of the importance of global processes for a number of religious movements. To compare Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish movements therefore has an immediate appeal. The problem, however, with comparison is that it is often not left at that, but that social scientists also want to come up with a general model to explain global phenomena. In the case of the Fundamentalism project this was basically the model of modernisation and secularisation.
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The argument is the following: fundamentalism is a social phenomenon that occurs during rapid social change, is marked by a profound experience of crisis, and tries to overcome that crisis by a revitalisation of religion and a search for authenticity. Fundamentalism is a global phenomenon in so far as it is a response to global processes of transformation. Gabriel Almond, a political scientist, who had been a prominent modernisation theorist in the 1960s, was a leading influence behind the Fundamentalism Project and, indeed, the Project had a focus on secularisation or rather, the failure thereof, as a major structural factor. It was in outline accepted by Huntington for his theory of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’. In a recent sequel to the multi-volume Fundamentalism Project Gabriel Almond, Scott Appleby and Emmanuel Sivan have again proposed a general model of what they now call Strong Religion. They propose the following: ‘strong religions are historical counterattacks from threatened religious traditions, seeking to hold ground against this spreading secular ‘contamination’ and even to regain ground by taking advantage of the weaknesses of modernisation. The resistance to modern forms of secularisation is a defining common feature of religious fundamentalisms.’ Secular Modernity is the Enemy against which radical religious movements rally, according to these authors. In their view secularisation is the main structural factor in the rise of these movements. It is clear that this is a view that belongs to the old orthodoxy of modernisation theory and that, after two decades of criticism of the secularisation thesis one might wonder whether this is a fruitful approach. In the case I am most familiar with, Hindu radical movements, it is not.

These movements do not protest against secularisation, since they explicitly demand secularisation of India's legislation. They object to what they call the ‘pseudo-secularism’ of India's Congress Party because they argue that this party thrives on ‘pampering the religious minorities’. What is clear from the Indian case is that ‘secularism’ is a political ideology carried by political actors and opposed by other political actors in the name of religion. If liberalism is a secular ideology, radical Hindus accept most of it, such as liberalisation of the market, the free individual, democracy, but all in the name of a nationalist utopia in which the majority of Hindus dominate the nation-state. The Enemy is not secularisation but Islam that is seen as an obstacle to the secular ideal of progress that is shared by Hindus. Of course, one could object that Hinduism and India are special cases that cannot be understood in general models. However, if the Muslim attackers of the World Trade Center can be considered followers of radical religion it is clear that they did not object to the secularisation of Saudi-Arabia, but to something far more specific, namely the close ties of the Saudi establishment with the American military-industrial complex and the presence of American soldiers on Saudi holy land.

I, therefore, do not think that a general model based on modernisation theory is what we should aim at, but that comparison between cases will bring out some general features of the movements we are interested in. The question whether they are religious or not may not be a crucial feature. In fact I would suggest that radical religious movements have much in common with a number of other movements- socialist, fascist, conservative, nationalist, that also want to use modern state power for total transformation of society. Indeed, it is the focus on capturing state power that seems a defining feature of these movements and it is thus state formation as the framework of these movements that has to be understood. The modern state is directed to large-scale social transformation and, by and large, has the capacity to have such an impact (obviously with a large number of unintended consequences). No modern political movement (religious or otherwise) can ignore the state.

While state formation in different societies has different trajectories there are also some general shared features. First of all, societies find themselves in a global order of nation-states, in which notions of borders, citizenship, elections, central state power and the enforcement of state law are operative. This implies that in many cases radical movements are nationalist. South Asia has a number of examples: Muslim nationalism resulting in Pakistan, followed by Bengali nationalism resulting in Bangladesh, Hindu nationalism or Hindutva characterised by attacks on Muslims and Christians before elections, Sikh nationalism demanding a separate nation-state called Khalistan, Sri Lankan Buddhist Sinhala nationalism opposing Tamil Hindu nationalism, and so on and so forth. Borders, minority rights, electoral violence, centralisation and decentralisation, are all issues coming up here. I would propose that it is not essential whether the focus of mobilisation is religion, language, regional identity or a mix of all these things and thus I would not claim a specific status for radical religion. Essential is the nationalist framework for political contestation.

Secondly, all societies find themselves in a new phase of globalisation that complicates state formation but does not undo it. Two major developments in this regard are connectivity through the internet and other forms of IT-enabled communication and the formation of transnational networks by migration. These developments may enhance the possibilities of radical movements to mobilise resources on a global scale and also to address the global political order. In the South Asian example the Sikh Khalistanis as well as the Tamil Tigers have been involved in transnational mobilisation of resources. But also the Hindu nationalists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad have always seen their nationalist mission in global terms. This is not new or particularly religious, since much of this is already found in the Comintern, but the rise of the network society makes at least some movements less tied to specific spatial or social locales both in their operation and in their objectives. Since the U.S. has become more and more the hegemon of the new world order it is clear that it is addressed both for specific regional problems, lobbying for Kashmir or Israel for instance, and for specific utopias like another Islamic world order.

If religion is only a variable in all the movements that try to gain political power should we then pay specific attention to religious movements? I think that there is some need to do so for the simple reason that with the so-called 'End of History', the socialist utopia is not anymore carried by communist or socialist movements and religious utopias seem to be flourishing everywhere. This is so also because mainstream social scientists continue to be inspired by secularist ideals and thus have difficulties to apply their perspective to religious movements. Therefore there is also a theoretical need to pay attention to religious movements. While I think that in their recruitment patterns, their resource mobilisation, and their creative response to opportunities religious movements can be studied like other social/political movements, their ideological core makes them religious movements. Striking in the ideological core is the reference to religious traditions.

Often in South Asia and elsewhere we find a reference to a traditional, just, state. This is the background to references to the Islamic state (dawla) or to Ram's Rule (Ramrajya). The first thing that has to be observed here is that references to earlier political forms show a deliberate misunderstanding of the radically different nature of the modern, developmental state. Those who call for the foundation of an Islamic state often use the Arabic term dawla that refers to 'dynasty' and indeed the pre-modern societies are governed by sultans, nawabs, rajas and the like. The modern state, on the contrary, is an instrument of the will of the people and penetrates deep into people's lives with a number of developmental projects, such as education and health care. It is, even when it is a weak state in Gunnar Myrdal's sense, still a beast of a completely different nature than the pre-modern state.

The second observation to be made is that the references to a religiously based 'just state' are relatively recent in modern Indian history and are actually quite marginal in Indian political thought and practice. The call for going back to the time of the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) or the time of Ram and establish a so-called theocratic state is a very recent demand which has to be understood in the framework of modern political ideas of true Islamic democracy and so on. Contrary to what is often thought, there is no clear definition of the Islamic state in Pakistan. What is one to make of the tradition of dar-al-islam (the Abode of Islam) to which Muslims should migrate (hijrat) if they are in a minority position, or that of the jihad (holy war) against the dar-al-harb (an Abode of Unbelief or War)? None of this makes much sense in India where Muslims were always a minority and there were no Islamic states, but merely Muslim dynasties with Islamic legitimation. It also ignores the fact of current large-scale migration to the dar-al-harb, or the West, rather than away from it.

Similarly the reference to the rule of Rama, the virtuous king (dharmaraja) and the ‘Lord of Propriety’ (maryada purushottam), has very little specific content, even less than in the Islamic context where the establishment of the Law (shariah) can at least be part of a political program, as it was in Pakistan under General Zia-ul-Haq and Nawaz Sharif. Certainly, in Hindu kingdoms the Ramayana may have given some guidance to the behaviour of rulers, but there is little in it that specifies the nature of the caste order and the rules of politics. One should understand references to such traditions in the modern period primarily as a utopian rejection of current political formations rather than as a theological interpretation of the tradition. This is not to say that there are no theological interpretations of the tradition that have political implications. They certainly exist and are important, because they show that the tradition is alive. The violent political projects of activists like Osama Bin Laden, however, do not engage the tradition in such a fundamental manner. It is, in fact, striking how little theological training leaders of the major religious nationalist movements have had. They tend to be journalists, engineers, graduates of the humanities, educated in modern topics rather than in the tradition.

The same is true for leaders of Hindu and Muslim movements who want a just rule. Gandhi was absolutely not a theologian and when he came up with the notion of Ramrajya he used a cultural repertoire in which he had been socialised from his early youth, but not a political theology. In the case of Gandhi and many other great populist leaders one sees the function of a traditional religious repertoire for bridging the gap between elite politics and mass politics. However, it is also clear that this kind of reference to tradition for purposes of mass mobilisation needs to allow for a wide range of interpretations. Similarly, in contemporary Sri Lanka one finds major departures from Buddhist tradition and the invention of new traditions, such as the Sarvodaya movement that purports to give a Buddhist model of development. Here we get to the heart of the matter: I do think that modern references to Ramrajya and Dar-al-Islam are inventions of tradition, but at the same time there are a number of living traditions, in which there are discourses and practices relating to state and violence. However, we are not speaking about separate universes (one of tradition, one of invented tradition) here, but about interaction, conflict, polemics. Some people are willing to use a lot of violence to establish their idea of traditional justice in the form of an Islamic state or of a Hindu state and others who think they are living in harmony with tradition are completely mystified by what the first are doing.

Often radical religious movements refer to traditions of gender as a way of signifying relations of power. An important transformation in these relationships in the nineteenth century is the rise of the gendered distinction between public and private. This distinction is crucial to the development of a modern ideology of the family, domesticity, and the moral order of the nation. A dominant line of interpretation in the study of nationalism is to argue that the nation is often imagined in terms of a brotherhood of men protecting their womenfolk. Men are portrayed as strong and powerful; women as weak and powerless. Protection implies the exertion of male authority, to which women have to submit. The state represents male authority as if it were the father of the nation. While this pattern can be found everywhere, religious traditions shape this configuration in different ways in different cultures. While, for instance, Victorian ideas about 'domesticity', 'companiate marriage' and female education were influential all over the empire, in Hindu India, the ideal of the 'modern' educated housewife was almost always tied to that of Lakshmi. The problem we need to address, therefore, is how such traditions are transformed under the pressure of modernity.

My conclusion is that the opposition ‘secular-religious’ hides more than it shows. Concepts like ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ are historically contingent and get meaning in a shifting field of disciplines and practices in the context of the modern state.

(Peter van der Veer is Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Amsterdam and the director of the Research Centre Religion and Society).

Bibliography

Gabriel Almond, Scott Appleby, Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion. The rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003) Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 ( Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001)