Faith, Knowledge and the Plural: The Problem of Fundamentalism
Keywords:
Faith, KnowledgeAbstract
The foremost challenge to ‘the plural’ in contemporary social contexts is the rise of different forms of religious fundamentalisms world-wide. These fundamentalisms are often represented as cultural nativism in resistance to the crisis of difference in the social sphere. Be it Hindutva in South Asia, Christian Evangelism in Europe and America and/or reactionary Islamic Jihad in West Asia, all assert a cultural or religious difference that consolidates to subjugate socially marginalized people. Often these sinister campaigns are posited against cultural and religious anonymity inserted by cultural homogenization and imposed on a variety of people the world over. Consequently, violent animosities between communities breed cultural stereotypes that structure the power-play of social hegemonies revolving around the discursive confusion between faith and knowledge. Popularly represented as the growing disconnect between the sacred-transcendental and the material-human, this confusion prevents any empowering border-crossing between cultures and religions, disenabling syncretizing of religious and cultural spaces in the social sphere. Religious and/or cultural communities turn either inwards in alienation or outwards in violent assertion, encrusting divisions and co-opting differences, respectively. Fundamentalism, then, is a complex terrain that demands critical attention because of its complicated uses of faith and knowledge.
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