By Arun Chakraborty
If we value Belief as religion, then we my agree that one or the other religion shapes a person in any society. But if we consider religion as a manifestation of some laid down faith, many may not agree with the statement. In earlier days makeshift viewpoints and customs were considered to be a faith. When people with wider knowledge and virtuosity could amass a number of people around them, those viewpoints and customs were disseminated as faith of some, which later became a religion of many. We may not be aware of the facts around emergence of Muhammad or Jesus or Krishna, but emergence of Buddha, who is figured in our identifiable history, we can see this flight how an individual’s wisdom and virtuosity created a religion as Buddhism is.
Religion is both collective and individual. But religion is not that all pervasive that a society is fashioned by it. There are several parameters to identify a society; religion can only be one of them, it cannot be the Only. So saying all society is fashioned by religion is a big No!
Take any religion. In the beginning war was not only to establish one’s might but also to establish one’s own religious superiority. That’s why everyone justified his war to be a war of ‘good’ over ‘evil’. They even considered extermination of non-followers as a good and allowable religious act. Thus religion, by its teaching and ethics, went on encouraging a kind of intolerance. This intolerance has now the modern political connotation as communality. Respecting religious ideas and ideals cannot be considered as religious fundamentalism. So respecting one’s own religious ideals is not called fundamentalism, but when one forces others to accept what he or she believes in is certainly an act of fundamentalism. We may say, Fundamentalism rides on intolerance of others’ beliefs and ideals.
Religion to me is an environmental phenomenon. Man, in the beginning of the civilizations, remained unanswered to many of his queries about various on going happenings within and outside his personal location. Possibly the known genesis of religion is found at the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey. Göbekli Tepe is vaguely reminiscent of Stone Age, except that it was built much earlier and is made not from roughly sculpted blocks but from limestone pillars with bas-reliefs. It was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture. We may call it a temple—the first structure made by human beings. When these pillars were erected, nothing of comparable existed in the world. The limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars, they found strange and powerful than men.
At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands living by scavenging plants and hunting wild animals. The most interesting part of it was that the construction must have required more people coming together in one place. They didn’t know writing, use of metal or pottery. Yet they cut, shape, and transported 16-ton stones hundreds of feet having no wheels or beasts to carry. This shows how religion is born from union of human being to fight out the common evil enemy together irrespective of their ability of writing or reading.
Religion became a business module in modern times. It was made so by a group of unscrupulous minds. They existed in all the religions earlier and they do exist even today. Fall of the Soviet Union and socialism was more a ripple than a wave of fundamentalism. The seed of fundamentalism was sowed a few years before USSR was disintegrated.
For many years Iran played a significant role in controlling a significant part of global imperialism, which had been the soul background of U.S. and European hostility toward Iran today. European imperialists through World War I competed with each other on who would control Iran and its oil. After World War II, in 1953, U.S hurried for control over Iran and for that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government and put, what they love to do everywhere, a tyrannical client as its stooge, the Shah, instead. Next 25 years U.S. successfully dominated Iran via this Shah, which ultimately blasted down in 1979 by a revolution. At this juncture the Iran’s Revolution itself and America’s resistance to it both fueled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Soviet Union’s collapse was 11 years later. In fact, it was not collapse of Soviet Union but greed of the U.S. to dominate over oil rich and strategically placed Iran that gave birth of Fundamentalism. The Islamic fundamentalism first took wings under die hard Ayatollah Khomeini, who, within two weeks of Sha’s fall, on his return from exile, founded the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Soviet Union’s collapse contributed to the spread of fundamentalism in a different way. Within two years of fall of Berlin Wall, Soviet Union collapsed and disintegrated. This disintegration gave birth of Nationalism, within the erstwhile Union and outside. This Nationalism eventually became the prominent identity for many. Nationalism spread like wild fire because after the end of cold war between the big two no country had to join or align with either of the two. They felt free to grow according to their own requirements and independent regulators.
Obviously Nationalism took form of ultra-nationalism, and too often, which at many places ended in religious fundamentalism. These days we find Islamic fundamentalism became very popular world wide, because they find it a way to counter the only global hegemonic power, the U.S., which is the frontrunners of the global economy and controlling and expanding the capitalist market economy. Afganistan is a fit case to prove it.
Soviet Union was important in containment of fundamentalism. Religious forces found communism a more acceptable form of regime. But with the demise of USSR, Islamic fundamentalism replaced ‘communism’ in the demonology of imperialism. At this the imperialist powers were terrified at the prospect of potentially hostile fundamentalist regimes. They are emerging power in the Middle East or north Africa which may, the imperialists found, may be forced by the pressure of the working class and poor peasantry to take action to establish their own economic interests.This fright forced the western capitalist economy to step in to safeguard their interest. Imperialism and the governments of the area were facing a rising tide of opposition expressed in the language of Islam.
The economic recession at the end of the 1980s exacerbated the problems for the colonial countries, as imperialism tightened its squeeze. The collapse of Stalinism has given much freer rein to imperialism. It removed any limited room left for diplomatic and economic maneuver, which the colonial countries had before. The collapse of the planned economy has also had an affect on the consciousness of the masses in the region. While the fundamental strength of the working class internationally remains intact, the apparent failure of ‘socialism’ has served to confuse many workers and youth and led them to look for other solutions-- the fundamentalism.
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