Islam in the modren world - Essay Example

They are representative of a radical and extremist wing of fundamentalism, which is made up of Muslims who believe that an Islamic state needs to be imposed on the Muslims in their country. They believe that this Islamic state should be imposed on its people by violence if the situation demands it and should be imposed from above. Islam’s current passage into modernity has gone through three distinct stages. These are revivalism, reform that included nationalism, and finally fundamentalism (Lawrence 20).

Each of these stages has emerged out of the failures of the previous ones. These failures include the inability to attain a self-sustaining scientific and economic infrastructure, an inability to attain true independence, and a realistic alternative to a worldwide system, which leads to the marginalization of Islam and their ignorance around the world. The fundamentalist movement is aided and fuelled by a combination of factors including economic, social, and religious stressors of countries practicing Islam.

These involve high unemployment of the youth, poor human rights records by their governments, unelected and autocratic leadership, extreme poverty for the majority of Muslims compared to extreme wealth for the well-connected members, millions of displaced Palestinian refugees, and a lack of a democratic system of government (Lawrence 40). Probably the most significant stress factor of all has to do with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which has dragged on for the majority of the last six decades since the founding of the Israeli state in the 40s.

This conflict has helped to fuel a lot of anger, hostility, distrust, unrest, instability, and wide spread feelings of victimization in the Middle East. The elusiveness of a peace process settlement, the status of the city of Jerusalem’s Muslim section, the status of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount’s Dome of the Rock- the third of the sacred sites of Islam, and the continued unchecked expansion of settlement by the Jewish State act as major flash points (Lawrence 41). Another stress factor fuelling these movements is the American military in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is viewed by a majority of the radical wing of Islam fundamentalism as blatant desecration of holy ground.

The formation and the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism for the Palestinians in the Diaspora, as well as within Palestine, and the emergence of various fundamentalist political groups within the occupied territory began in the later part of the 70s (Lawrence 49). Defeat by the Israelis had forced the Palestinian, and their Arab backers to acknowledge their weak points. Most fundamentalists will attribute their inherent weakness to the spread of secularism and the region’s failure to embrace the teachings of Islam and to apply its teachings.

Two movements emerged, in this context, especially from the Palestinian side: the Islamic Jihad and Hamas. These movements are focused on the perpetration of violent acts to show their resistance to occupation of their lands by the Israelis. However, in the aftermath of what were bloody suicide bomb attacks perpetrated by members of these two movements inside Israel, the Palestinian Authority was forced to subject the two movements to punitive measures. These included a blanket ban on the military wings of the movements, closure of various institutions used for their recruitment,