Religious Fundamentalism: Peter Herriot

In reading Peter Herriot's Religious Fundamentalism: Global, Local and Personal, (I admit I have not finished it), Herriot provides a lot of interesting insight into the formation and development of fundamentalist ideas and movements. By examining different fundamentalisms from around the world, Herriot comes up with 5 main features of fundamentalisms (reactive, dualist, importance of a holy book, reading of the holy book is selective, and the belief that God to fully establish His rule over the world in the future). He also stresses that fundamentalism is a twentieth century idea, as fundamentalisms are reactions against modernity.

Most interestingly, Herriot discusses the development of the self, and how in order to fully function in a fundamentalist organization, an individual must fully identity with the fundamentalist group. From this, a group or social identity is more important than an individual identity. This is necessary in order to have complete dedication to the group's cause, as well as to build up the individual's self-esteem that their actions are morally correct. From here, Herriot analyzes Sayyid Qutb as a case study, and shows that throughout Qutb's writings, one can trace a growing sense of group identity (as a believing Muslim) and less on his individual identity (as a successful scholar and teacher in Cairo). This change, especially marked by Qutb's visit to the U.S., caused a change in the way Qutb viewed Islam, particularly in his writings about jahiliyyah. The more Qutb discusses jahiliyyah and the more he identified it as a group aim, the more fundamentalist his writings became.