Understanding Islamic Fundamentalism: A Matter of Sociology

Understanding Islamic fundamentalism of today requires the frame of a clash not between civilizations, but between different forms of psychological organization. It is therefore a matter of sociology, explainable through the innovative approach of dynamic sociology. The term jihad is for fundamentalists an armed revolution, both against those regimes of Islamic world guilty of apostasy, and against all non-Islamic countries. At the root of nowadays’ fundamentalism it is not the opposition between different religions, cultures or civilizations considered on the same level, but something much more radical: the idea of blasphemy of the form of psychological organization of subjectivity itself, on which our lifestyle is based. Subjectivity is the result of the peculiar western historical path of development, founding the secularized idea of a human being with own civil, political and social rights and thus self-referent in his life choices from the constraints of any religion or traditional community. Something that fundamentalists consider as the premise of the “degrading path” leading to conceive “societies without God”. Nowadays, subjectivity has penetrated in depth inside most Islamic societies, and they have many of its typical institutions, together with traditional ones. The new Islamic fundamentalist looks often fully integrated in the societies of subjectivity, but retains an ascriptive or re-ascriptive form of psychological organization, which allows him to ignore the values and norms of surrounding society, and freely act through the taqiya or “dissimulation”, a principle justified by an influential Islamic jurisprudential approach. The modern jihadist, oriented by a Wahhabi-salaphite ideology and double tied to his shayk-master, operates in a strongly ritualized frame of actions and social behaviours and kills without regret, negating any dignity to his victims. And when the fundamentalist movements take the power, they dissolve the secular western style organization of state, to create a new ascriptive quasi-state entity (AQSE), as the Emirate of Talebans or the Caliphate of ISIS.