Fundamentalism Poem by gershon hepner

Fundamentalism implies
failure of imagination,
surrendering to lies,
believing that creation
has been explained
in texts that we
from God have gained,
when, B.C.E.,
He wrote
the text
they quote,
fundamentally unperplexed.

Rachel Donadio writes about Hanif Kureishi, whose first novel “The Buddha of Suburbia” led some to consider him a post-colonial Philip Roth, and whose “My Beautiful Launderette” and “My Son the Fantic” turned out to be prophetic. He recently received a CBE from the Queen, in the NYT Sunday Magazine, August 10 (“My Beautiful London”) , and has written a new novel, “Something to Tell You”:
Although Kureishi recognizes the sense of powerlessness and sting of racism that have helped push many young British Muslims toward radicalism, he is intolerant of such intolerance. “The antidote to Puritanism isn’t licentiousness, but the recognition of what goes on inside human beings, ” Kureishi wrote in the title essay of “The Word and the Bomb.” He added: “Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination.”


8/11/08