Islamic Fundamentalism

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/opinion/21gerecht.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=islamic%20fundamentalism&st=cse&scp=8

In this NY Times article, Reuel Marc Gerecht describes the current situation in Iran with the Islamist regime that is holding power and the reformists led by Mir Hussein Moussavi. Gerecht describes the current regime as the Islamic Fundamentalists that took power from the secular dictatorship that was in power. Throughout the article, he also describes the main reason why the Fundamentalists were able to seize power from the dictatorship that was in power. This reason is the way that democracy has opened the door for the Fundamentalists to get the people to support them against the secular government. Democracy offers a means for the Fundamentalists to become more legitimate and thus gain far more support from the people. The Fundamentalists support the change to Democracy because they believe either that the people will make "good" decisions or that is the only peaceful means to get power.

In Sayyid's article, "Framin Fundamentalism", he describes a philosophy on Islamic Fundamentalism proposed by Gita Sahgal and Nira Yuval-Davis. Sahgal and Davis describe Fundamentalism as a social movement that would be opposed to a system of government that offers multiple points of view on policy making. According to them, Islamic Fundamentalism is opposed to a government that is not strictly sharia based. This would go against the article previously mentioned. Since Democracy is a government that allows a massive number of points of view to be present and get elected to office, a purely sharia based system of governance is very difficult to obtain. Thus Islamic Fundamentalists will not have what they want in a Democracy. This can be seen in the situation described in the news article by Gerecht. After the Fundamentalists took control in Iran they basically took the fairness out of the elections and made it so they were the only power in the Iranian government and Democracy was really no longer present.

Like Sayyid, I believe that Sahgal's and Davis' view on Fundamentalism is very shallow and not in depth at all. He believes that Islamic Fundamentalism has become a term that is used to describe many things that it is not. Sayyid basically replaces Islamic Fundamentalism with the term Islamism which he defines as people who use Muslim ideas as the center of their political practice. This approach to Islamic Fundamentalism/Islamism offers a very viable way for Democracy to work with this philosophy. People can use religion as a basis to making decisions as long as they can accept that a popular majority may exist in the opposite direction thus making some decisions to be made that are not religion based. This goes against Sahgal and Davis' philosophy that Democracy and Fundamentalism cannot co-exist because the Fundamentalists wish for a purely sharia based government.