Fundamentalism, just like terrorism, has been one of the most popular concepts in the recent political rhetoric. We all talk about fundamental groups, fundamental movements, fundamental attacks, and are quite afraid of the damage that fundamentalism can cause. However, when it comes to define fundamentalism nothing but just the cave men in Afghani mountains comes into mind.

Besides the ambiguousness of the concept itself, fundamentalism is very often linked to with other “though” words like “religious” extremism/ terrorism, which further confuses the situation…

A careful conceptualization carries particular significance since the ambiguous use and incomplete understanding of very crucial concepts further intensify the already present tension in many circumstances. The original understanding of fundamentalism is quite different from what we understand from the concept today. It can be broadly defined as strict adherence to some basic fundaments, namely constructs of a particular faith, ideology, identity. 

Fundamentalism emerged as a resistance of Orthodox protestants in the early 1900’s in the United States. The group had published a series of pamphlets under the title of the Fundamentals, in response to a number of social problems of the time. These fundamentals were a set of twelve pamphlets under the title, the Fundamentals: A testimony to the Truth.  The key characteristic of fundamentalist movement was its firm, principled and militant opposition to the inroads that modernism, liberalism, and higher biblical criticism were making in the Christian churches, and the supposedly bible-based Christian culture of the United States at large. Initially, the fundamentalist movement wanted a return to the “real” protestant faith in the early 1900’s. In other words, Christian fundamentalism emerged “as a response to the situation of disrupted tradition, which is a quite typical context of the rise for fundamentalist movements’ world wide”. Even though fundamentalism is seen as an Islamic feature in the contemporary era, there are also strong fundamental formations in the Jewish tradition as well as the Hindu belief. A negative attribution began to emerge when western journalists used the term to define the Iranian Revolution in late 1970’s. The concept turned from a self definition to a quite negative, accusing phrase in the later years.

As for to the evaluation of the contemporary usage of the term, fundamentalism can be considered as trying to keep the status quo in a more or less passionate manner. Fundamentalists usually create a mystified past and try to return back to that glorified times. Though such a though closeness and a mystified past, fundamentalism is indeed a quite modern phenomena. It has just a short history of a century and became really effective slightly more than three decades ago. Furthermore, fundamentalists like modern technology, particularly internet, much more than any other movements and grow in parallel with them.

Many scholars, studying in this field name fundamentalism as a social movement, which mostly emerges right after significant social changes within he society. It is worth noting that the most important fundamental movements only emerged in the 1970’s, with the rapid social changes all around the world.

Religion is most of the time situated in the middle of almost all the fundamentalist movements in the contemporary era. But it will be not very wise to blindly accuse religion, particularly just one religion, as the source of crazy  forms of fundamentalist movements. When different fundamentalist movements are analyzed, in detail and without prejudice, it is explicit that not religions themselves, ut the social conditions are crucial in their development. There are religious people all around the world, but (religious) fundamentalists emerge only from the problematic areas. Sometimes in the form of suicide bomber, sometimes in the form of merciless terrorists and sometimes in the form of inadaptable migrants.