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# Murat Belge on the fundamentalist mind
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/murat-belge-on-the-fundamentalist-mind/
- Published: 2008-09-15T04:09:09.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:41:38.000Z
- Author: Tony Curzon Price
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 18:41

I had not read Murat Belge's remarkable[ October 4th 2001 essay](https://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-islamicworld/article%5F75.jsp) on Fundamentalism and reactions to it. Murat is a Turkish public intellectual and long-time friend of openDemocracy - he regularly comes in to visit us when he is passing through London. In this essay, Murat disects the spectacle of 9/11 not only from the point of view of Islam's colonial, inferiorist grievances, not only from the resultant ability to form a cold, universalising ideology that legitimates violence, but also importantly from our reaction to it. Hawks obviously play into the hands of fundamentalists by "increasing the distance" to the other; but so do liberal democrats whose tolerant multiculturalism too easily slips into moral relativism. The essay, written less than a month after the World Trade Centre attack, is a masterful account of the bind that violence puts us into.