Questions for Martin E. Marty, a Scholar of Religion
(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/magazine/30QUESTIONS.html)
By PAUL SCOTT

Were the attacks on New York and Washington about fundamentalism?

Yes. Words like ''extremism'' or ''fanaticism'' miss what followers are extreme or fanatic about. ''Fundamentalism,'' however, connotes a fundamental religious vision behind the movement. It would be hard to sustain this kind of calculative act if they weren't fired by a religious vision. Try to picture day after day going to flight school to learn how to smash yourself into a skyscraper, knowing you're going to die. You have to have the promise of paradise for that. You have to have the promise that God is on your side. But I cannot say it emphatically enough: this is not Islam. This takes Islamic texts -- it takes elements in its tradition -- and skews them.

So fundamentalism isn't about the fundamentals of anything?

The biggest mistake the casual observer makes about fundamentalisms is that people think this is the ''old-time religion.'' In fact, no religious forces are more effective at using the technical instruments of modernity. They will preach sermons against science and technology, but they will seize these instruments, which is why we see them as very modern movements.

Then why are observers so quick to assume that a fundamentalist movement is indeed espousing the fundamentals of its faith?

The average person doesn't understand that Catholicism and most of Protestantism and Judaism are developing faiths -- development is built into the first generation. Islam has a loyalty to every word of the Koran, but its history has unfolded in different ways in different social climates. The fundamentalist, however, says there was a moment in history when a particular book, leader and original social community was perfect, which in my opinion never existed. In the period of the early Christians, Paul and Peter are fighting like mad in Acts already. But fundamentalists teach that there was that perfect moment, and in their selective retrieval they go back to that perfect moment. They say, ''We don't change at all,'' and people say, ''Yeah, while all the other people are compromising with modernity, these people really reach deep.'' But the hymnity, the songs, the scriptural base -- it's all a very particular interpretation, and the fundamentalist convinces us that it's always been there.

What are the family similarities, as you've called them, of the fundamentalist faiths?

First, every fundamentalism that we could find grew on soil that was conservative, traditional, classical or orthodox. Then, something comes along which is perceived by the people in such cultures as a total threat to the group, to the world's future. They don't pick at little things. Third, and this is a key feature, they then say, ''You must react.'' It isn't about being conservative. The Amish are the most conservative Protestants around, and they don't fight for the Lord. They just want you to not butt in on them. But fundamentalists say you must react. You must be the army of the Lord; you're failing God if you don't. Fourth, you select those features from the past that you think will most effectively fight off the threat and convince others of the threat.

Do the recent attacks give you pause in comparing Christian, Jewish, Islamic and other fundamentalisms?

I couldn't be more emphatic than to say these fundamentalisms are very, very different from one another. Then why study the form? Because we wouldn't have noticed that they are not ''the old-time religion'' had we not compared them. We wouldn't have noticed that they all use the instruments of modernity so effectively. We wouldn't have noticed that they are all extremely patriarchal. But some of my best friends are Protestant fundamentalists. We are not saying that just because this form of Islamic fundamentalism shoots at people, that other fundamentalist people are waiting to do so also.

But with so many differences in the expressions of fundamentalisms, what good are comparisons?

You can find out, among other things, what are the terms by which you can help prevent people from finding the totalist position attractive, from the frustration that leads into terrorism. The more ugly we are to them the more easy it is for them to find recruits. I think that 20 to 30 years ago nonfundamentalists in America did make a great mistake by typing them, by hillbillying and backwoodsing and holy-rollering them. It was a terrible indignity; it was unfair to who they were. And if our study can show that people of similar dispositions on many levels can differ greatly in strategy tactics and goals, that's a lot better. Paul Scott