What is fundamentalism? One immediately thinks of the Near East and of Islam.

The term however

first surfaced in American protestant circles in connection to a movement that took shape before the
first world war. The followers of this movement occasionally described themselves as
‘fundamentalists.’ Arisen in the heart of the west as a positive and proud self-identification, now this
category is used to brand those ‘barbarians’ who have settled outside of the West, and those who
prefer in reality to be described as ‘Islamists.’

Fundamentalism is commonly defined as the demand that ‘the political principles be derived from a
text considered to be holy,’ which in the process turns into an instrument for the delegitimization of
everyday, centuries-old norms that are thus condemned every time they stray from said text. When
such is the case, one must naturally skip the singular and resort to the plural to provide a
comprehensive description of the phenomenon under question. It is with a growing and worrisome
vitality that the movement that proclaims the ‘purity of Eretz Israel’ and the ‘supremacy of a higher
law,’ as against ‘the law of the state’ is brought to light. This latter movement brings to bear the
‘purity of the Halakha,’ against existing political institutions, while Islamist fundamentalism asserts
the purity of the Sharia: in both cases, norms established by human beings are required to be
justified before the untouchable purity of divine law.

We discover a similar dichotomy in the doctrine of the Catholic church. It was for this reason that an
eminent legal theorist (Stefano Rodota) believed to have tracked down ‘a step back in the direction
of fundamentalism’ in the sharp polemic against legislation in support of the termination of
pregnancy contained in the encyclical Evangelium vitae. Just as there is no lack of books establishing
an intimate resemblance between American protestants in the beginning of the twentieth century
and today’s Iranian shiists, so is there no lack of lessons that both Johannes Paul II and the leader of
radical Islamism lay out synoptically. Let us start by confronting a few texts. The first: ‘The authority
is postulated by the moral order and is bestowed by God. When its laws […] are in conflict with this
order and therefore against God’s will, it cannot win the conscience of individuals […], in such a case
authority stops being so, turning rather into abuse.’ Here’s the second: ‘The point, unambiguous and
essential to all, is that he who gives up the law of God in favor of a different law created either by
himself or by other human beings, begins to exercise idolatry or tyranny, distancing himself from the
truth, and that he who rules on grounds of such a law is a usurper.’ It is in the same vein that
Johannes Paul II and the Pakistani Maududi, considered one of the most influential representatives
of Islamism, respectively express themselves. According to Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Shiite
revolution, every political regime should recognize the supremacy of the divine law, being ‘not
absolute,’ but ‘constitutional’; in other words, the ‘power’ of human beings – to put it in terms
similar to the Pope’s – should be aware that it is not ‘absolute, but employed [by God].’ Finally let us
see how the influential Rabbi Eliezer Waldman strongly opposed any Israeli retreat from the biblical
city of Hebron: the citizens and ‘the soldiers must obey no order that repudiates from the law of
Thora.’