Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Read Free Book Online Page A

fundamentalists were the strongest, among Baptists and Presbyterians.
    Karen Armstrong concludes her historical discussion of fundamentalism with the observation that fundamentalism is not a throwback to a premodern culture but a response to an enforced secular modernity. In other words, there would be no fundamentalism without modernity. Furthermore, fundamentalism emerged as a struggle inside religion, not between religions, as a critique of liberal forms of religion that religious conservatives saw as accommodating an aggressive secular power.
    Begun in the late nineteenth century, these debates rapidly turned into contests for power and influence across the institutional landscape of America, in universities and public schools, seminaries and churches, elections and the press, courts and legislatures. The outcome was mixed and unstable: fundamentalists won partial legislative victories in several states. Then they won a full victory in 1925 when the Tennessee legislature passed a law that made it a crime to teach evolution in state-funded schools. A few months later, the law was challenged in court when a young biology teacher, John T. Scopes—having decided to strike a blow for free speech against religious convention—confessed that he had broken the law when substituting for his school principal in a biology class.
    Brought to trial in July 1925, Scopes was defended by the great rationalist lawyer Clarence Darrow, sent by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). On the side of the law was the well-known Democratic politician and Presbyterian leader William Jennings Bryan, who had already launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools. The Scopes trial not only invoked important principles of liberal democracy against one another, it also made for a public debate on the dichotomy in modern Western thinking. If Darrow claimed to stand for free speech, Bryan championed “common sense” as understood by ordinary people. If Darrow stood for progress, Bryan contended that there was a link betweenDarwinist theories of progress and the German militarism that had surfaced in the carnage of the First World War. Known for the lecture with which he had toured the United States, “The Menace of Darwinism,” Bryan argued that the notion that the strong could or should survive had “laid the foundation for the bloodiest war in history.” He warned that “the same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brutal ancestry” and is “eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible.” In the final analysis, though, the trial provided a public spectacle of a historic “contest between God and Science.”
    Put on the stand by Darrow, Bryan was forced to concede that a literal interpretation of the Bible—holding, for example, that the world was six thousand years old and created in six days—was not possible. Bryan was ridiculed publicly and died a few days after the trial, and Darrow emerged “the hero of clear rational thought.” Even though the fundamentalists won the legal battle, they lost the cultural one. Susan Harding, writing in The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics , comments on how the triumph of modernism at the same time involved a caricature of “fundamentalism”:
The modern point of view in America emerged in part from its caricature of conservative Protestants as Fundamentalists. They were the “them” who enabled the modern “us”. You cannot reason with them. They actually believe the Bible is literally true. They are clinging to traditions. They are reacting against rapid social change. They cannot survive in a modern world…. Before the Scopes trial, it was unclear which of the opposed terms, Fundamentalist or Modern, would be the winner and which the loser, which was superior and which was inferior, which term represented the universal and the future and which the residual, that which was