“Fundamentalism"
in its strictest technical use refers to a movement within
American Protestant Evangelicalism of fairly recent origin.
The word has come to be linked with various literalists,
evangelical and charismatic groups and televangelists.
Thence it has been applied to religious extremists who
claim to be returning to fundamentals
Here
it is necessary for our purposes to interject that the
word "fundamentalist" has been applied to Sikhism
too by both media and scholars especially in the time
leading up to and since the tragic Operation Blue Star.
He
opined that a religion which used a mool-mantra and was
given to mulvad obviously got down to fundamentals, the
word "Fundamentalist" could, hardly be used
in the same way as it was of American Fundamentalists.
His
explanation was that “when some thinkers in great cultures
and civilizations, including western culture, see their
societies disintegrating, their young being lost to them,
their best traditions destroyed, they turn desperately
to their religions as a means of hope and a way of working
for survival, recovery and resurgence.”… “Broadly and
approximately Fundamentalism may be considered such a
movement or a manifestation of this tendency.”
“During
Guru’s period the Punjab faced yet more of the Muslim
invasions which had gone on since the days of Mahmud of
Ghazni, and the Europeans arrived and began to weave India
into their world web. In the nineteenth century they broke
in with full force bringing their world diseases, economics,
their philosophical, religious and political ideals and
failures. “But the response in Sikhism was not just one
of meeting one emergency after another, or the evolution
of an overall response by anyone person nor of a committee
nor of a group of leaders. Rather at base it was the continued
unfolding of the enseeded, encoded nature of Sikhism as
originally propounded by the first Mahala and the other
nine. After the tenth it was vested in the Book and in
the Sangat and the same Spirit told forth the same truths
as they applied to that stage of life. Let us give but
one brief example. It was not one person, however brilliant,
saying Hum Hindu nain hai late in the nineteenth century
but the First Teacher coming up from the Three Day Waters
saying Hai nain Hindu, Hai nain Mussulman which is basic.
The nineteenth century remark is but a working out of
the early teaching. in that dichotomy we find posited
a third something (the tertium quid of our title): Sikhism.”
