The following is my scholarly article (in contradistinction to my political articles) on paradigms in the study of Islamic fundamentalism. There is a debate on the similarity between European fascism and Islamic fundamentalism. You may read the scholarly discussion on this issue in Paradigm Three. The article was published in 1998: PDF file
The Teacher
Teaching the Politics of Islamic Fundamentalism
Masoud Kazemzadeh,
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979, in which a group of fundamentalist Shi’i clerics outmaneuvered liberals, socialists, and non-fundamentalist Islamists, Islamic fundamentalism has become the dominant force in much of the Islamic world. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism has generated several issues of analytical significance for political scientists. Many scholars believe that Islamic fundamentalism will precipitate violent international conflicts (Karabell 1996-97). Samuel Huntington (1993) has gone so far as to argue not only that the coming clash between the West and the Islamic world will be the defining characteristic of the post-Cold War period but also that the Islamic world has “bloody borders” with Orthodox Christian,Islamic fundamentalism may have retarded democratization in the Middle East. Islamic fundamentalist movements promise to replace incumbent authoritarian regimes with totalitarian ones which make political dissent blasphemy, assassinate their opponents, and carry out inquisitions of university professors, journalists, and intellectuals (Middle East Watch 1993). This has led the incumbent authoritarian regimes to halt or reverse earlier steps towards political liberalization and democratization. This situation has produced scholarly and popular debates on the relationship between democracy, Islam, and Islamic fundamentalism (see, for example, AbuKhalil 1995; Esposito and Piscatori 1991; Kazemzadeh 1996; Tessler and Brand 1995: Voll and Esposito 1995) >>> Full text PDF file
