Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (24 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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40. See Victor Turner and Edith Turner,
Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 171.
41. Kurtz,
Politics of Heresy,
pp. 18183.
42. Peter Hebblethwaite, "A Roman Catholic Fundamentalism,"
Times Literary Supplement
(August 511, 1988): 866.
43. Ibid., p. 866.
44. For
Opus Dei
as an integralist group, see Peter Hertel, "International Christian Democracy," in Gregory Baum and John A. Coleman, eds.,
The Church and Christian Democracy
(Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1987).
45. For a treatment of Tradition, Family, and Property, see Mainwaring,
The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil,
pp. 70, 171. The classic treatment can be found in Charles Antoine,
O. Integrisme Brasiliero
(Rio de Janeiro: Editiones Voz, 1980).
46. Personal communication to me from the publisher of the
Wanderer
.
47. Kurtz,
Politics of Heresy,
p. 12.
48. Daly, "Catholicism and Modernity," pp. 79596.
 
Page 96
5
The Islamic Resurgence: Civil Society Strikes Back
Emmanuel Sivan
1
In the Middle East and North Africa, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed the highwater mark of the mass-mobilizing state, all-pervasive bureaucracy, mass production factory system, and official culture. This was the pinnacle of an evolution begun in the 1820s and greatly catalyzed since the decolonization. The gist of that process consisted in redrawing the age-old boundaries between state and civil society, with the formerwhich until the early nineteenth century had largely been a "watchdog state"invading domains hitherto deemed the game reserve of voluntary associations and institutions: education, welfare, economic activity (especially production), popular culture, even family life.
What made the state's assault upon the already shrinking boundaries of civil society so effective and devastating was a combination of factors:
1. The new nationalist state was characterized by sincere and combative anti-imperialism, and hence could not be impugned as "collaborationist" and openly "westoxicated" as the old upper-class rulers used to be.
2. The elite of the new state was plebeian in origin and thus able to
 
Page 97
address the masses in their own idiom. It was, furthermore, the carrier of a new and galvanizing indigenous ideology, Pan-Arabism, capable of attaining cultural hegemony and developing into a sort of secular religion with its own symbols, rituals, calendar (Gregorian rather than Islamic)all in all, shaping man's notions of time and place, basic values, and everyday behavior.
3. The new ruling class was usually military in profession with all that this implies in terms of relative efficiency, cult of order, and penchant for ruthlessness and for disrespect of legality. It had at its service new population-control techniques learnt from like-minded European regimes of the right and of the left (as evidenced in the reorganization of the secret police, introduction of listening and other intelligence devices, detention camps, etc.). Repression could now be all-pervasive.
4. Last but not least, the technological revolution in audio-visual communications (notably the transistor radio and television), which coincided with the advent of the nationalist state, tended to favor the blatantly interventionist ambitions of the new masters. Assuring themselves of a virtual monopoly on the press and book publishing (supplemented by an ever-vigilant censorship vis-à-vis those media organs still held in private hands), these rulers perceived immediately the brainwashing potential of the new audio-visual media. These media could penetrate every nook and cranny, reaching the illiterate majority of the populationmainly women, small children, and rural residentsthose hitherto outside the scope of the educational system (and, it goes without saying, of the printed medial due to their virtual seclusion from the public place, and/or their geographical distance. Thus privacy and periphery became less meaningful ramparts for civil society, not only with regard to repression but also to persuasion, all the more so as the fare that the new media were to sell was attractive in substance and in packaging: the nationalist gospel as focus of solidarity (deftly couched in Islamic terms hiding its secularized subtext) on the one hand; a consumerist ethoseconomic, state-controlled modernization as the avenue for the good material lifeon the other.
How pervasive is the state's influence on civil society? This cannot yet be established with a reasonable degree of precision. And

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