Fundamentalism - Islamic

Islamic

The Shia and Sunni religious conflicts since the 7th century created an opening for radical ideologists, such as Ali Shariati (1933–77), to merge social revolution with Islamic fundamentalism, as exemplified by Iran in the 1970s. Islamic fundamentalism has appeared in many counties; the Wahhabi version is promoted worldwide and financed by Saudi Arabia.

The Iran hostage crisis of 1979–80 marked a major turning point in the use of the term "fundamentalism". The media, in an attempt to explain the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution to a Western audience described it as a "fundamentalist version of Islam" by way of analogy to the Christian fundamentalist movement in the U.S. Thus was born the term "Islamic fundamentalist", which would come to be one of the most common usages of the term in the following years.