Fundamentalist movements recruit where land pressure and urban media dismantle peasant life

Evidence

In the Muslim world, Bernard Lewis argues, there has been “a recurring tendency, in times of emergency, for Muslims to find their basic identity and loyalty in the religious community —that is to say, in an entity defined by Islam rather than by ethnic or territorial criteria.” Gilles Kepel similarly highlights the centrality of the search for identity: “Re-Islamization ‘from below’ is first and foremost a way of rebuilding an identity in a world that has lost its meaning and become amorphous and alienating.” … It is no accident that these movements are all based in countries where population pressure on the land is making continuation of old village ways impossible for a majority of the population, and where urban-based mass communications, by penetrating the villages, have begun to erode an age-old framework of peasant life.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 268

Categorization

• XREF: McNeill’s population-pressure-and-media explanation aligns with the reader’s interest in how communication technology reshapes community from Carey’s essays. — connects to: Open-space protest partly expressed anxiety over vanishing agrarian culture — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 509