McWorld 14 Essential Jihad: Islam andFundamentalism NOWHERE IS THE tension between democracy and Jihad more evident than in the Islamic world, where the idea of Jihad has a home of birth but certainly not an exclusive patent. For, although it is clear that Islam is a complex religion that by no means is synonymous with Jihad, it is relatively inhospitable to democracy and that inhospitality in turn nurtures conditions favorable to parochialism, antimodernism, exclusiveness, and hostility to “others”—the characteristics that constitute what I have called Jihad. While Jihad is a term associated with the moral (and sometimes armed) struggle of believers against faithlessness and the faithless, I have used it here to speak to a generic form of fundamentalist opposition to modernity that can be found in most world religions. In their massive five-volume study of fundamentalisms, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby treat Sunni and Shiite Islam but pay equal attention to Protestantism and Catholicism in a variety of European, and North and South American forms, to Hinduism, to the Sikhs, to Theravada Buddhism, to Confucianist Revivalism, and to Zionism.
