What is Fundamentalism?

What is Fundamentalism? Fundamentalism is the laying of emphasis on strict adherence to the fundamental principles of any set of beliefs. The term was originally applied to a particular group of Christian theologians who gained prominence in the United States in the nineteenth Century. They published a series of booklets between 1909 and 1915 called The Fundamentals: Testimony to the Truth. In these booklets they defined what they believed to be the absolutely fundamental doctrines of Christianity. The core of these doctrines was the literal inerrancy of every word of the Bible. Those who supported these beliefs during the debate of the 1920s came to be called fundamentalists. The term “fundamentalism” began to be applied to Islamic resurgence by the final quarter of the twentieth century. However this term was not used for Muslims in exactly the same sense as it was applied to Christians. There is also some difference of opinion on this point among scholars. However, without going into the details of this, I would like to say that the term Islamic fundamentalism is applied to two different kinds of movements. One is like that of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwanul Muslimun), which rose to bring about a political revolution. The other is the type, which advocates a return to the pristine fundamentals of the faith, for instance, those defined