The reasons for the recent and simultaneous appearance, or rise in influence, in much of the world of "fundamentalist" or doctrinally and socially conservative religiopolitical mass movements have been analyzed for individual groups but rarely in a way that compares all the main religions and the regions in which they are strong. 1 Rarer still have been analyses of why such movements have expanded in most areas only since the 1970s, what causes exist in areas where these movements are strong and why they differ from those regions where they are weak or nonexistent, and what, aside from religion, produces different types of movements. Here we will try to see if there are common factors in time and in space that help explain these movements and will look for causes of their similarities and differences. Explanations presented here will stress differences between religious nationalism (or communalism) directed primarily against other religious communities and conservative religious politics directed primarily against internal enemies. Differences between types and levels of preexisting religious beliefs will be examined to suggest why some areas have such movements and others do not. Worldwide factors that help to account for the recent rise of religious politics will also be explored. To deal with such large problems in one essay requires the simplification of complex and varied movements and permits only a brief treatment of their his-696

Within the Muslim world, revolts with a religious aspect or ideology have had a long history. My current comparative research on this topic indicates that these revolts, common in the early centuries of Islam, became less frequent thereafter. These revolts may generally be characterized as either "left" sectarian or "orthodox" revivalist. The latter revived after circa 1700. It is part of my thesis to see three phases to these modern revivalist revolts and to say that all three phases were, in different ways, tied to interaction with the West, although this was far from being their only cause. These three phases were the pre-colonial phase, early resistance to colonialism, and the recent Islamic revival. The scope here covers the whole Muslim world, and the approach is comparative.Before discussing these movements I will give some background about the relations between Islam and politics, which influenced the movements. It is widely believed that Islam and politics are unusually closely intertwined in all spheres and periods, with the partial exception of the past century. This view understates the close church-state relations of the Eastern Orthodox churches and of religion and politics in the pre-modern West, with the difference between Islamic and Christian lands being partly when and how they reached modernity. In practice, despite the often-cited special role of Roman law and the existence of a clear relationship between church and state in the West, Christianity and Islam had rather similar levels of relations between religion and politics in pre-modern times.The supposed near-identity of religion and politics in Islam is more a pious myth than reality for most of Islamic history. After the first four pious caliphs, there arose essentially political caliphal dynasties that worked through political appointees and broke religious rules when they wished. The body of 'ulama helped to create the schools of law partly to create a sphere independent of such essentially temporal rulers, but the 'ulama's rulings generally had less force than those of rulers. The independence of rulers from religious control grew as tribal and military converts took increasing power. Authors of 0010-4175/94/3308-9326 $5.00

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract