Christian Wahhabists.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Comparing Puritans and Islamic fundamentalists

There has been a lot of loose talk, since September 11, about a "clash of civilizations" between musty, backward-looking, repressive old Islam and the innovative and freedom-loving West. "It is a clash between positivism and a reactionary, negative world view," columnist H.D.S. Greenway writes in The Boston Globe.

Or, as we learn in The Washington Post: While the West used the last two centuries to advance the cause of human freedom, "The Islamic world, by contrast, was content to remain in its torpor, locked in rigid orthodoxy, fearful of freedom."

So it is a surprise to find, on turning to the original text--Samuel P. Huntington's 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster)--a paragraph-long analogy between the Islamic fundamentalist movement and the Protestant Reformation: "Both are reactions to the stagnation and corruption of existing institutions; advocate a return to a purer and more demanding form of their religion; preach work, order, and discipline."

Whoa, there! Weren't the Protestants supposed to be the up-and-coming, progressive, force vis-a-vis the musty old Catholics? And if we were supposed to root for the Protestants in our high school history texts, shouldn't we be applauding the Islamic "extremists" now?

Huntington doesn't entertain the analogy between Islamic fundamentalism and reforming Protestantism for very long. But let's extend the analogy, if only because it implicitly challenges the notion that we are dealing with two radically different, mutually opposed, "civilizations."

Like the Protestants of the sixteenth century, the Islamic fundamentalists are a relatively new and innovative force on the scene. Wahhabism--the dour and repressive creed espoused by Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, and other Islamic fundamentalists throughout the world--dates from only the mid-eighteenth century. Deobandism, the strain of Islam that informed the Taliban (and which has, in recent decades, become almost indistinguishable from Wahhabism), arose in India just a little over a century ago. So when we talk about Islamic fundamentalism, we are not talking about some ancient and venerable "essence of Islam"; we are talking about something new and even "modern." As Huntington observes, the appeal of fundamentalism is to "mobile and modern-oriented younger people."

Islamic fundamentalism is a response--not to the West or to the "modern"--but to earlier strands of Islam, just as Protestantism was a...