Fundamental problems

What about the division between church and state in Islam? I understand that the Quran doesn't have a "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's/God what is God's" division and that Khatami's insistence on the rule of law in Iran has created quite a stir.

Everything has changed under the process of modernization. In fact, even though ideologically [in Islam] there can be no separation between church and state, both Sunnis and Shiites developed a separation very early on. In the Sunni world, the separation was de facto; Islamic law developed as kind of a counterculture to the aristocratic courts. In the Shiite world, there was a separation of church and state on principle. It was held that since every state was corrupt, clerics should take no part in them, that the religious should withdraw until the messiah came and established a proper Muslim state.

The Ayatollah Khomeini's insistence that a cleric could lead a state was revolutionary.

Do you mean to say that religion hasn't been a big part of the state in Islamic society?

Fundamentalist movements have tried to drag religion back into the center of public concern and policy across the world. The United States did this first in the early 20th century, really during World War I. Islam was the last of the three monotheistic religions to produce a fundamentalist religion in the late 1960s after the shock of the Six Day War. Religious fundamentalism took hold on both sides of the war. In Egypt, the feeling that [President] Nasser's secular policy was bankrupt made many Egyptians feel that they wanted to get back to their roots. The same thing happened in Israel with orthodox sects.

Has fundamentalism grown rapidly across the Islamic world since the 1970s or has it been isolated in countries like Iran and Egypt?

Don't imagine that the entire Muslim world is fundamentalist. And our perception is that only the United States and United Kingdom have happy fundamentalists, but that's not entirely true. It's the same in the Muslim world. Not all fundamentalist movements are violent, for example, most American movements and most ultraorthodox Jewish organizations in New York and Israel aren't violent.

Some of the Egyptian student movements confined themselves to providing assistance to students, and the Muslim Brotherhood was largely occupied with providing social services to the general population until it got quashed and incarcerated by Nasser. Until then their main concern was to open clinics and teach people factory laws. Many student bodies were trying to get better conditions for students because universities in Egypt are extremely overcrowded and offer very little space for quiet study. Islamic student organizations will provide quiet study time in mosques and study handouts where books are lacking. There's also an enormous concern for women in overcrowded classes because they're frequently harassed. The vast majority of fundamentalists don't take part in terror. They're just trying to take part in a religious world that also exists in their material lives.

What changes fundamentalist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas from social services organizations into terrorist organizations?

If the country is at war. The United States has been fortunate because it hasn't been at war for a long time. But in the Middle East, political tension and warfare have been almost a constant for the past 30 years. Every fundamentalist movement is rooted in fear. Fundamentalists believe that on some level modern liberal secular society wants to wipe out religion. Even American fundamentalists have that fear. Some people in small-town America feel colonized by the alien ethos of Washington, Yale and so on.

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