What is it about the ideology of religious
fundamentalism that allows it to travel so indifferently among such disparate
political groups? I believe that it is an incarnation of a demon that has
stalked liberal democracy everywhere throughout this century: an ideology that,
for want of a better word, I shall call supremacism. It consists essentially in
the belief that a group cannot ensure its continuity except by exerting
absolute cultural and demographic control over a particular stretch of
geography. The fascist antecedents of this ideology are clear and obvious. Some
would go further and argue that nationalism of every kind must be regarded as a
variant of supremacism. This is often but not necessarily true. The
non-sectarian, anti- imperialist nationalism of a Ghandi or a Saad Zaghloul was
founded on a belief in the possibility of relative autonomy for heterogeneous
populations and had nothing to do with asserting supremacy.
- An except from ‘the fundamentalist challenge’
in The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh
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