The Increasing Religious fundamentalism across the world

We are moving towards a modern and tech-driven era where living your life is relatively more comfortable and easy in a materialistic way than the previous decades. Modernity and the free sharing of ideas brought a diverse world into a more cohesive way. The People share their ideas freely in more transparency without fear of any repercussions. We are now living in a more liberal and free world. Modernity, most specifically in the European and American spheres, brought a revolution and liberation from superstition, more rigid provincial and, tribal and, community, and local identity. Now, people feel more connected to the outside world; they also value their individualistic identity and their rights and responsibility for society. Society as a whole is moving toward technological advancement, and its people are much more self-determined for their future.

In the same world where we are living, we are witnessing an imbalance between the two sides of the globe; on the one hand, the Western world is too open and liberal. It proposes liberalistic values, free-thinking, and freedom of speech. Most countries are democratically elected with leaders acting in accordance with the supreme law, which is the constitution of any country- the living soul of that country. The increasing scientific revolution, modernization, and liberal values eventually led to the diminishing role of religion from the public sphere to more private ones. The exploitation in the name of religion became less and less pertinent, and the scientific temper was promoted among society, thus making it more rational and liberal. The virtue of Tolerance and liberalism in the Western world evolved over time through a variety of social, economic, and political forces. Their emphasis on rationality and individual rights and duties laid the foundation of modern liberal values. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution, increased urbanization, and the rise of the middle class also played a dominating role.

Now, If we look at the Middle East and South Asia being not that at par with their Western counterpart, it also shows vast differences also among themselves. Most Muslim-majority countries are tilting towards conservatism. They are ruled mainly by either royal families or dictatorial army generals. The failure of secular governments to deliver on the basics for their citizen, coupled with some oil-rich gulf nations pouring tons of money into proselytizing an extraordinarily conservative and intolerant brand of Islam. After the horrific tragedies of the 20th century, including the two world wars, we are witnessing a wave of tumultuous violence in these Muslim-majority countries, including the rise of extremely radical organizations like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko-Haram, and more of such. These radical terror organization has no value for any human rights, nor do they uphold any morality upon themselves. They are bloodthirsty religiously indoctrinated maniacs whose sole aim is the destruction of the civilized world. We have witnessed the horrors of ISIS in Iraq and Syria through their own created propaganda videos, the poisonous and destructive ideology of these terror organization were quite successful to most extent attracting a section of Muslim youths to join their sinister motives, and that resulted in their recruitment of many young ones from across the world to join their caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

What we are witnessing in the Middle East and Asian subcontinent is increasing religious extremism and radicalization. People are becoming less tolerant and more aggressive. We are seeing a kind of regressive and conservative environment among the masses of these countries. So the grave question that is presenting itself among the more civilized and tolerant world is what are the primary sources and reasons that are playing crucial roles in increasing fundamentalism across the globe.

The most prominent reason is the spread of Wahabism in Islam. They are the ones promoting what its adherents view as the precepts of early Islam; Wahabism maintains a strict and puritanical view of religious rites. It eschews “innovations,” including practices viewed as polytheistic, such as worship of saints, mysticism, and decoration of graves. It also prohibits dancing and music. This strict ideological group believes that all those who don’t practice their form of Islam are heathens and enemies. Analysts presume that Wahabism rigidity has led it to misinterpret and distort Islam, and that resulted in the rise of terror groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and their leaders such as Osama-bin Laden and Abu-bakr-al-baghdadi.

The Sinister Role of Oil-Rich Gulf Nation

Just like fire needs fuel to spread. Similarly, this ideology of hatred emanates from an extremely radical section of religionist with their wrong interpretation or whatever, it has its promoter in the form of specific oil-rich arab nations. The oil-rich gulf nations, namely Saudi Arabia and Qatar, sitting atop on unlimited wealth that hardly pushes them towards any social and economic reform and are thus filled with a regressive and conservative societal environment. These nation throws tons of money into poorer Muslim countries and also in other Asian or Western countries to propagate the teaching of their form of Islam and to build more mosques and madrassas where they promulgate only austere and puritanical version of Islam untouched with rationality and science of today’s and thus generating a following of austere belief system. These Wahabis now have their head filled with the glorious stories of Islam in the first centuries of Islam when men were riding around performing heroic deeds and acts of bravery and courage, conquering lands left and right; they consider that era as pious and reverent and now it seems that they wanted to bring back those old days and thus lacking the sense of understanding of the current time. This series of events only led to the increasing religious fundamentalism where certain people are not even scared of doing horrible and unimaginable acts in the name of god that too in the 21st century. What the Saudis and co. had in mind wasn’t the bright and colorful Islam of Rumi or Sufism, instead what they had in mind was something darker, the proselytization of a fundamentalist brand of Islam that is far more brutal, punitive, intolerant, and repressive and the end result has been a society and culture in much of the Muslim world and its masses steadily drifting towards conservatism and profound intolerance.

Journalism and Media are lacking in their fundamental moral duty and drifting toward certain biases

Journalism usually attracts liberal and progressives in pretty much the same way they make up the majority of teaching roles and students in humanities and in public services. The thing I noticed in Western media and left-leaning people is that they don’t intend to understand the grim reality this religious fundamentalism poses to the civilized world. They consider it to be some kind of right-wing hoax to target a particular religion for political gain and negate the role of a particular religion in violence. So, Instead of understanding, they make it look like the past imperialism of the Western nations and American militarily intervention in some Muslim countries created a long-lasting resentment among the Muslim world. So What happened now is that even talking about Islamic fundamentalism makes you a sort of Islamophobic, and due to that, we are not only committing grave damage to the liberal and civilized world but making its masses more prone to the incoming onslaught. The arab funded media outlets like Aljazeera, Middle East Eye, TRT, etc are fully controlled by their theocratic rulers, which makes the minor scope of their being unbiased and thus traveling on the same bandwagon of impartiality and are foremost in utter biasedness.

Tackling this religious fundamentalism

The problem with religious fundamentalism or hardcore believers is that they don’t consider much of the outer reality as accurate. Their hard stance on their belief gives less scope for their reformation. The first and foremost thing to be done is the propagation of a notion in people’s minds that every human being is free to believe what they want to unless it doesn’t harm the moral principal values of the civilized world. There shouldn’t be a supremacist view of your religion as the only true religion as compared to others, and your religion must be consistent with the enlightened values of tolerance of the modern Western and Eastern world.

The world defeated fascism and Nazism by getting rid of its harmful ideas and by defeating it militarily. The re-education program of indoctrinated masses and rehabilitation of the affected society and devising such measures as to make it harder for fundamentalists to propagate their sinister motive among new minds(children).