The similarities between the Salafis and the Christian fundamentalists are extreme. They're identical.
There's also Jewish fundamentalists ("Haredi"), who are *exactly the same*, and Hindu fundamentalists ("Hindutva"), who are *very similar*, and even Buddhist fundamentalists (in Sri Lanka mostly).
So there's a broader theory here. (This is not original, but I can't remember where I read it.) Fundamentalism is a reaction to science; to modernity but specifically scientific modernity. Islam had the first Golden Age of Science, and as it started to make real progress, Salafiism arose in reaction.
And destroyed the Golden Age of Science.
So then the Christian world had an age of science... and then fundamentalism arose, opposing it, and threatening to end another age of science.
Judaism didn't have fundamentalists until Jews were liberated from the ghetto and given the option of being scientists -- then, suddenly, a whole "let's go back to the ghetto" anti-science fundamentalist movement starts.
As India modernized, it developed fundamentalists, which it hadn't had before.
When Korea became a scientific society, Protestantism had already arrived, so they just generated Christian fundamentalists.
In China they have taken several different forms, including Christian and Maoist. Russia has both Orthodox fundamentalists and Leninist fundamentalists.
Japan's an interesting case and I'm not sure whether they developed home-grown fundamentalists or what they look like.
While "going back to the pure root" is an ancient concept, the modern version of it, as Salafi or Christian-fundamentalist, is subtly different from older concepts -- the idea of Biblical or Quranic literalism wouldn't have made sense to people of earlier eras. When they "went back to the pure root" they generally went with divine revelation and mystic interpretation, and you got stuff like the Sufis instead.
The sort of modern literalism was actually probably not possible before the scientific era. Fundamentalism as we know it today *depends* on the modern, logic-based thinking, (but without the modern, empirical-evidence-based thinking).
The similarities between the Salafis and the Christian fundamentalists are extreme. They're identical.
There's also Jewish fundamentalists ("Haredi"), who are *exactly the same*, and Hindu fundamentalists ("Hindutva"), who are *very similar*, and even Buddhist fundamentalists (in Sri Lanka mostly).
So there's a broader theory here. (This is not original, but I can't remember where I read it.) Fundamentalism is a reaction to science; to modernity but specifically scientific modernity. Islam had the first Golden Age of Science, and as it started to make real progress, Salafiism arose in reaction.
And destroyed the Golden Age of Science.
So then the Christian world had an age of science... and then fundamentalism arose, opposing it, and threatening to end another age of science.
Judaism didn't have fundamentalists until Jews were liberated from the ghetto and given the option of being scientists -- then, suddenly, a whole "let's go back to the ghetto" anti-science fundamentalist movement starts.
As India modernized, it developed fundamentalists, which it hadn't had before.
It's a pattern.
When Korea became a scientific society, Protestantism had already arrived, so they just generated Christian fundamentalists.
In China they have taken several different forms, including Christian and Maoist. Russia has both Orthodox fundamentalists and Leninist fundamentalists.
Japan's an interesting case and I'm not sure whether they developed home-grown fundamentalists or what they look like.
While "going back to the pure root" is an ancient concept, the modern version of it, as Salafi or Christian-fundamentalist, is subtly different from older concepts -- the idea of Biblical or Quranic literalism wouldn't have made sense to people of earlier eras. When they "went back to the pure root" they generally went with divine revelation and mystic interpretation, and you got stuff like the Sufis instead.
The sort of modern literalism was actually probably not possible before the scientific era. Fundamentalism as we know it today *depends* on the modern, logic-based thinking, (but without the modern, empirical-evidence-based thinking).