Sunny and Shia Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism in its most basic definition refers to the attempt to return to the basic ideals and principles of a specific tradition. Therefore, a fundamentalist is a person who believes that it is crucial and necessary to return and adhere to their tradition’s fundamentals because something specific, usually another tradition, is challenging the fundamentals of that person’s tradition. “By and large, fundamentalism was a response to the loss of influence traditional revivalism experienced in America during the early years of the twentieth century” (Internet Archive Wayback Machine). Not one person can be given the credit with the founding of Fundamentalism; it essentially created itself by the revivalism that Protestant America was experiencing at the time. It is also important to know that there are two forms of fundamentalism: religious and secular. Obviously, religious fundamentalism tends to stem off from ideals in an existing religion like Christianity and secular fundamentalism is not affiliated to any religion whatsoever. An example of a secular group is The New Atheist who attempt to prove worldly questions through science. The difference between these two forms will be later discussed in this paper in much more detail. Another way to better understand what defines both religious and secular fundamentalism is through these ten traits (secular fundamentalism can only share the first eight traits).

The traits are as follows:

I. A reluctance to compromise (i.e. Sunni and Shia fundamentalists; They cannot compromise with who should succeed Mohammed and so they’ve been in conflict for hundreds of years now)

II. A sense of having been chosen to fulfill a cosmic mission (i.e. Christian fundamentalists like Evangelical Chris...

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