Monotheism and Fundamentalism: Philosophical Reflections on the Postulations of Jan Assmann

Abstract

Can there be monotheism without fundamentalism? Jan Assmann responds to this question in the negative. In his estimation, fundamentalism/fanaticism is the direct product of monotheism. For him, the history of human civilization became stained with feuds over faiths at the inception of monotheism as a way of practicing religion. Thus, in pre-monotheistic times (the time of polytheism), people hardly ever had any reason to fight or quarrel over the question of the superiority of faiths. As such, he sees monotheism as a form of counter-religion. Due to this attack on monotheism, he is often described as one of the horsemen of atheism in contemporary times. This kind of thinking suggests that part of the crises we face in the world today are not purely products of Islam, but a problem of monotheism on the whole. Establishing this point, most especially, at the epistemic level is the aim of this piece. At core, the contention of this paper is that one way to deal with this crisis at the heart of monotheism is by advocating ‘monotheism without fundamentalism' and this will warrant the epistemic adjustment of some of our familiar categories.