The mythologies of religious radicalism: Judaism and Islam

The study of radicalism is part and parcel of the comparative study of religion. The essential impulse shared by all Jewish and Islamic radicals is what one may dub, ‘innovative traditionalism’, that is, a political radicalism born out of a religious tradition, which transcends that tradition in an attempt to preserve its authenticity in the face of contemporary challenges. Sunni and Shiite radicalism was born out of an anti-accommodative attitude towards political power which had always existed within these two strands of Islam. The ultra-orthodoxy of the Haredim and the Neturei Karta is a successor to a long tradition of Jewish exclusionary life in the Diaspora; a tradition which until the Age of Enlightenment and secular nationalism was the major living tradition of Judaism, resigned to life outside of history as long as God has not performed the miracle of Messianic redemption.