JOURNAL for the SCIENTIFIC STUDY of RELIGION
Religious Fundamentalism in Eight Muslim-Majority Countries: Reconceptualization and Assessment MANSOOR MOADDEL
STUART A. KARABENICK
Department of Sociology University of Maryland
Combined Program in Education and Psychology University of Michigan
To capture the common features of diverse fundamentalist movements, overcome etymological variability, and assess predictors, religious fundamentalism is conceptualized as a set of beliefs about and attitudes toward religion, expressed in a disciplinarian deity, literalism, exclusivity, and intolerance. Evidence from representative samples of over 23,000 adults in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey supports the conclusion that fundamentalism is stronger in countries where religious liberty is lower, religion less fractionalized, state structure less fragmented, regulation of religion greater, and the national context less globalized. Among individuals within countries, fundamentalism is linked to religiosity, confidence in religious institutions, belief in religious modernity, belief in conspiracies, xenophobia, fatalism, weaker liberal values, trust in family and friends, reliance on less diverse information sources, lower socioeconomic status, and membership in an ethnic majority or dominant religion/sect. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding fundamentalism and the need for further research.
Keywords: fundamentalism, Islam, Christianity, Sunni, Shia, Muslim-majority countries.
INTRODUCTION The literature on religious fundamentalism has considerably expanded in recent decades. Yet, three major challenges continue to hamper establishing empirical generalization and theoretical abstraction concerning its predictors on the country and individual levels. First, the movements so characterized vary historically, cross-nationally, and across religions. Examples of such variability are numerous, particularly in contemporary Muslim-majority countries: the Society of the Muslim Brothers in Arab countries, Jama’at Islami in Pakistan, Front Islamique du Salut in Algeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the National Islamic Front in the Sudan, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, alShabaab in Somalia, and Boko Haram in Nigeria in Sunni Islam; the Fedayeen-e Islam and the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen in Shia Islam. Also included are such myriad transnational terror groups as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Ahmad 1964; Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003; Kepel 1985; Mitchell 1993 [1969]; Roy 1994; Sivan 1985).
Acknowledgments: Comments by Mark Chaves and anonymous reviewers for JSSR are gratefully acknowledged. This article is part of a larger collaborative comparative cross-national research project, involving Mansoor Moaddel (PI), Arland Thornton (Co-PI), Stuart Karabenick, Linda Young-Demarco, Julie de Jong, Judy Baughn, and Zeina Mneimneh, and was funded by the Office of Naval Research, Africa Command of the U.S. Armed Forces, Jack Shand Research Grant of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language, Eastern Michigan University, Göttingen University, and the University of Michigan. Correspondence should be addressed to Mansoor Moaddel, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742—1315, USA. E-mail: moaddel@umd.edu Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2018) 57(4):676–706 C 2018 The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion