The Corruption Within: How Fundamentalism Hijacked Islam

The Western press has spent three decades presenting Islam as uniquely prone to violence. Muslim governments and intellectuals have spent the same three decades blaming that reputation on geopolitical manipulation. Both positions contain enough truth to feel satisfying, and choosing between them has allowed everyone to avoid the harder question: why politicized fundamentalism has become so destructive across so many Muslim majority societies.

Fundamentalism is not unique to Islam. The five volume study Martin Marty and Scott Appleby produced at Chicago between 1991 and 1995 found the phenomenon across Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and Mark Juergensmeyer has spent a career documenting religious violence across traditions. But the distribution of the damage is not even. The Global Terrorism Index for 2026 ranks Pakistan, for the first time, as the country most affected by terrorism in the world, with 1,139 deaths in 2025. Six of the ten most affected countries are Muslim majority, and two more, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, face insurgencies waged by groups claiming Islamic sanction. Neither standard position explains that asymmetry.

The answer does not lie in the faith. Islam is not a religion that breeds violence, and any serious engagement with its scripture, its prophetic tradition, and fourteen centuries of scholarship establishes that beyond dispute. But here is what Muslims do not say loudly enough: the conditions that make the tradition vulnerable to misappropriation are real, and they are structural.

Begin with the text itself. The Quran is written in a form of Arabic that nobody grows up speaking. Arabic is the textbook case of what linguists call diglossia, a language split between a formal register learned in school and the dialects people actually use at home. A child in Cairo or Beirut or Riyadh acquires Egyptian or Levantine or Gulf Arabic. Classical Arabic has to be studied, the way a European student studies Latin. And the Quran sits at the far end even of that formal register, drawing on the poetry of the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. Its vocabulary and allusions were common knowledge to the text‘s first audience and are now the property of specialists. Few people say this plainly: a fluent modern Arabic speaker can read every word of the Quran and still miss much of the meaning.

One passage distinguishes between verses that are clear and definitive and verses that are allegorical, open to more than one reading, and warns against those who chase the ambiguous ones seeking discord (Quran 3:7). The text announces its own interpretive difficulty in its own pages.

The scholarly tradition that grew up around the text understood the stakes precisely, and gave the work of interpretation its own name and its own discipline. Tafsir, the science of Quranic exegesis, developed rules: interpretation had to be anchored in linguistic scholarship, in the historical circumstances under which a passage was revealed, in the wider body of legal reasoning, and in the accumulated judgment of qualified scholars across generations. Naming the discipline matters, because it establishes what fundamentalism actually discards. Not a mood of reverence or a habit of caution, but a body of method built over a thousand years.

The constraints were explicit and severe. Reports transmitted in the collection of al-Tirmidhi warn the man who speaks about the Quran without knowledge to take his seat in the fire, and hold that a man who interprets by his own opinion is mistaken even when he lands on the right answer. Tirmidhi graded the first report sound and the second uncommon, and later critics have questioned individual narrators in both chains, but the principle they express was never in doubt. Al-Suyuti, a fifteenth century Egyptian scholar, listed fifteen separate disciplines a man had to master before he was fit to comment on a single verse: grammar, rhetoric, legal theory, the history of each revelation, the variant readings of the text, and more. The barrier to entry was deliberate, and it was high.

This was never a perfect consensus. Scholars argued for centuries over what counted as illegitimate tafsir, and heterodox readings existed throughout. But the framework broadly held, and what it held was a distinction between reading the text and being qualified to interpret it.

That framework has been eroding for well over a century, for three reasons.

The first is colonial. Wael Hallaq‘s work on Islamic law traces how European administrations dismantled the institutional base of Muslim scholarship, above all the endowments that funded religious schools and paid their scholars. By the estimates Hallaq cites, somewhere between forty and sixty percent of all real property across the Islamic world was held in such endowments by the eighteenth century. Expropriating and centralizing them, as the French did in Algeria and the British did across India, defunded the class of scholars the tradition relied on to reproduce itself, and replaced Islamic courts with colonial ones.

The second is technological. Print, then broadcasting, then the internet placed scripture in every hand without placing the tools of interpretation there alongside it. The anthropologists Dale Eickelman and Jon Anderson described the result as a fragmentation of religious authority: a public arena in which virtually anyone can speak about Islam and be heard, and in which a trained scholar competes on equal terms with a confident amateur. Access was democratized. Competence was not.

The third is political, and it is the one this essay dwells on. States seeking legitimacy have cultivated simplified religious narratives on purpose, and the results have outlived the governments that commissioned them.

The combined effect is a landscape in which a preacher with no scholarly training can construct almost any argument he wants from the literal surface of the text, strip it of context and legal constraint, and present it as the word of God. Some do this out of ignorance. A minority do it deliberately. The outcome is identical either way: communities handed a version of their faith that no serious scholar would recognize, stripped of its mercy and its intellectual rigor, and told that God demands of them what he never demanded.

This is not Islam. It is a corruption of Islam, and the distinction is not apologetics. It is analytical. Treating fundamentalism as an expression of the faith rather than a deviation from it produces the wrong diagnosis, and a wrong diagnosis has produced three decades of wrong responses.

Pakistan is the instructive case, because there the corruption was not organic. It was policy. General Zia ul-Haq seized power in 1977 and within three years had rewritten the criminal law along religious lines, created a court to test legislation against Islamic injunctions, and begun channeling state revenue toward one particular strand of Sunni institutional life. That strand was Deobandi, a revivalist movement founded in northern India in 1866. It is large, internally varied, and overwhelmingly not militant, but its Pakistani institutions became the beneficiaries of state patronage and Gulf money at exactly the moment both were being harnessed for war. The pluralist, mystically inflected culture that had characterized much of the subcontinent‘s Muslim life lost that patronage, and so did the scholarly institutions that might have counterbalanced it.

The seminaries multiplied. Pakistan had roughly 250 religious schools at independence in 1947 and some 2,800 by the end of Zia‘s rule, funded for the first time by the state and by Gulf charity, flowing in alongside the American and Saudi money that was arming the Afghan resistance through Pakistan‘s intelligence service. Vali Nasr‘s research on Sunni militancy documents the state‘s tolerance and cultivation of Sunni sectarian organizations useful against Iranian influence after 1979. Ayesha Jalal‘s account of jihad in South Asia describes the same instrumentalization. She argues that the managers of the modern Pakistani state chose to manipulate and control religion, and that they backed the self-styled jihadis fighting to liberate co-religionists in Afghanistan and Kashmir, until jihad became a pliable instrument in the hands of the politically motivated.

The state knew what it was cultivating. Producing young men prepared to fight in Afghanistan, and later in Kashmir, was not a side effect. It was the objective. What it did not intend, and has been unable to contain since, was the turn of that apparatus against Pakistan itself.

On December 16, 2014, gunmen from the Pakistani Taliban entered the Army Public School in Peshawar and killed 132 children. It was not an act of Islam. It was committed by men whose understanding of Islam had been built deliberately over decades, in institutions their own state had funded, for purposes their own state had chosen. Just over two years later, in February 2017, a suicide bomber walked into the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sindh, one of the most revered Sufi sites in Pakistan, while hundreds of devotees performed dhamal, the trance dance done to the quickening beat of the drum that pilgrims trace to the saint himself. At least 75 people died. Islamic State claimed the attack and announced that it had targeted a gathering of Shia, applying both doctrines the Amman Message expressly forbade: that Muslims of another sect may be declared unbelievers, and that those who practice Sufism may be treated as apostates.

No school of Islamic law sanctions either attack, and the scholars had said so collectively and in writing a decade before Sehwan. The Amman Message, issued in 2004, recognized eight distinct schools of Islamic jurisprudence as legitimate and held that it is neither possible nor permissible to declare an apostate of anyone who practices what it called real Tasawwuf, a category it declined to define. Ten years later, 126 scholars addressed an open letter to the leader of the Islamic State, refuting the organization point by point across twenty four separate arguments, among them the killing of civilians. The Quran addresses one decree to the Children of Israel, and the tradition reads it as universal. Whoever kills a single soul, unless as punishment for murder or for spreading corruption in the land, it is as if he had killed all of humanity, and whoever saves a life, as if he had saved all of it (Quran 5:32). In the jurisprudence built on that verse, lawful killing is confined to punishment adjudicated by legitimate authority, which is precisely what the men who bombed a shrine and shot 132 schoolchildren did not possess.

An objection deserves answering. If fundamentalism is a corruption rather than an expression of the faith, who decides which reading is authentic, and does the argument not simply privilege one interpretive tradition over another? The answer is that the tradition supplies the standard, and it does so plurally rather than narrowly. The Amman Message did not name one correct school. It named eight. What it insisted on was that interpretation operate within a discipline, conducted by people trained in it, according to methods that discipline recognizes. A reading that discards those methods is not a competing interpretation. It is a claim made from outside the discipline that gives interpretation its authority. That is the standard any serious discipline applies to itself, and Muslim scholars applied it for a thousand years before anyone found it inconvenient.

To blame Islam for terrorism is as dishonest as blaming Judaism for the crimes of Jewish extremists or Christianity for the men who bomb abortion clinics. A faith of nearly two billion people cannot be reduced to the acts of those who have corrupted its teachings. But the reverse holds too. Just as citizens bear responsibility for what their governments do in their name, Muslims bear responsibility for what is done in the name of our faith, and that responsibility is not discharged by pointing at the press.

The failure is shared. It belongs to states that cultivated extremism as an instrument of policy, to scholarly institutions that withdrew from public life rather than contest the theological ground, and to communities that have treated criticism of fundamentalism as an attack on the faith when it is the opposite. It belongs most of all to those of us with the education and the platform to say so plainly, who have too often chosen the comfort of silence.

What was built over a thousand years can be rebuilt. But nobody rebuilds what they will not admit is broken.