An existentialist perspective of Islamic fundamentalism

Abstract

This paper aims to provide another perspective to understand the islamic fundamentalism, especially its more active and politically engaged current, the jihadism. In this case, an existentialist philosophy has been used as a support to promote reflections on possible nihilistic side of islamic fundamentalism. The more classic narrative of nihilism about the invention of “consolations” as religion itself, the attachment to a false reality that suppresses the notion of finitude of life from the creation of “other worlds” in which without this life is seen as unbearable, it is somehow subverted by the most extremist fundamentalism. Therefore, it is the religion that endows men with meaning, even if this apparent world must have been destroyed, annihilated. Modernity and its technological prosthetics have alienated man from God. Hence, it is necessary, within this conception, that it has to be denied and confronted, even it costs their own lives in many cases.