Parallel Histories in the Development of Abrahamic Extremism?

Social constructionists (like Assman, Berger & Luckman, Berreby, Burrow, Cooley, Durkheim, et al; see the bibliography below) have argued for decades that almost all major religions have been co-opted for political purposes, including "real estate" and wealth acquisition or protection. In the brief essay that follows (originally composed to answer a question about extremist Islamic cults on a Reddit sub), I try to summarize the history of such co-opting since the advent of the western, Abrahamic religions about three millennia ago. 

From the perspective of one who's read a lot (so far; still reading) on both cult dynamics and cult history, it looks to me (as well as Huston Smith, Bart Ehrman Thomas Cahill and Karen Armstrong; look them up?) like Islam is on a track that parallels the other four major institutionalized, Abrahamic belief systems: Judaism, Roman Catholic Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity and reformist Protestantism.

All five schemes have moved through periods of assertive (often quite aggressive and truly violent) and emotionally charismatic, evangelical fundamentalism. All of the Abrahamic belief systems have sponsored major efforts to subjugate or eradicate the populations of non-believing "savages" in the regions into which these religions expanded: Judaism largely during the post-Exodus period and the establishment of the first Temple, Roman Catholicism in the 3rd through 6th centuries (and again in the 11th through 16th in response to the the perceived threat of Islam in southern Europe), Eastern Orthodoxism in the 5th through 16th both "originally" and later in response to the same Islamic threat, and Protestantism in the 18th through 21st centuries both "originally" and in response to the Islamic threat.

It is very useful to look into Islam through the eyes of historians like Peter Frankopan, Jay Rubenstein, Barnaby Rogerson, Kevin Phillips, Barbara Tuchman and Daniel Yergin to wrap one's mind around the long history of the reciprocal reactivity between the various Abrahamic religious establishments. Like Judaism, Islam was not created to be a "spiritual" belief system. Several "social constructionist" authors among those in the bibliography below have asserted that both Judaism and Islam were devised from the outset to be hierarchical mechanisms for cultural organization and elitist wealth accumulation, and that Roman Catholicism was utilized by such as Ferdinand & Isabella to finesse colonial expansion in the Western Hemisphere. (Quran author Muhammad of Mecca was married into a very wealthy trading family that appears to have sponsored his writing. And Moses was a cultural Egyptian raised in the house of the pharaoh, an elitist accumulator of wealth if there ever was one.)

That said, Muhammad and his devotees were originally quite disposed toward fair treatment of the Jews, Catholics and Orthodoxists despite Islam's very aggressive political expansions across North Africa and into southern -- and then northern -- Europe in the 8th through 14th centuries. But as the Catholics, Orthodixists and Jews began to push back against Islamic political expansion, the fair treatment policy went away in favor of "full-on smiting," pretty much as the Jews themselves had done in Canaan during the post-Exodus era.

Things quieted down in the late Ottoman era and might have remained that way had it not been for the discovery of petroleum in the Islamic Middle East in the early 20th century... and (from the Islamic point of view) the "economic rape" of the Middle East by the oil-thirsty Jewish and Christian European colonialists, especially during the period that began with World War I and ended right after the Vietnam War. (In fact, say some historians, it was the first "oil crisis" that forced the US out of Vietnam.)

The Israeli, British & French intervention into Egyptian politics and the US CIA's intervention in Iranian politics in the mid-1955s was the major flash point for what has become "The Situation" ever since the 1970s: An uneasy detent at official levels with a series of flare-ups fostered by leveraging existing Islamic evangelism, fundamentalism and charismatic emotionalism and oil money to fuel the development and maintenance of such extreme "political cults" as Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the PLO, Al Queda, and ISIS to push back against Western Jewish and Christian economic dominance in the region.

References & Resources:

Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; New York: MJF Books, 1993.

Steven Arterburn & Jack Felton: Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious Addiction; Nashville: Oliver-Nelson, 1991.

Jan Assman: Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism; Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1998.

Aaron Beck: Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility and Violence; New York: Harper-Collins, 1999.

Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckman: The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge; New York: Doubleday, 1966.

David Berreby: Us & Them: The Science of Identity; U. of Chicago Press, 2005.

Boethius of Rome: Consolation of Philosophy, somewhere in what is now Switzerland or southern Germany: The Holy Roman Church, c. 524.

Jean Bottero: The Birth of God: The Bible and the Historian; orig. pub. 1986; Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 2010.

Trigant Burrow: The Social Basis of Consciousness; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927.

Thomas Cahill: Mysteries of the Middle Ages and the Beginning of the Modern World; New York: Random House, 2006.

Robert Cialdini: Influence: Science and Practice, 4th Ed.; New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Charles Cooley: Human Nature and the Social Order; Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1902, 1986.

Arthur Deikman: Them and Us: Cult Thinking and the Terrorist Threat; Berkeley, CA: Bay Tree Publishing, 2003.

Emile Durkhem: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; orig. pub. 1912, London: Allen & Unwin, 1915.

Jacques Ellul: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes; orig. pub. 1965; New York: Vintage, 1973.

Bart D. Ehrman: The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Peter Frankopan: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World; New York: Vintage, 2017.

Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion; orig. pub. 1927, New York: Norton, 1961.

David Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922; London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1989.

Erich Fromm: Psychoanalysis and Religion; orig. pub. 1950, New Haven CT: Yale U. Press, 1973.

Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (ed.): The Invention of Tradition; Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1983.

Eric Hoffer: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements; New York: Harper and Row, 1951, 1966.

Ralph Hood, Jr.; Peter Hill; W. Paul Williamson: The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism; New York: Guildford Press, 2005.

Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.

Philip Jenkins: The Great & Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade; New York: HarperOne, 2014.

Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad: The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power; Berkeley, CA: Frog , Ltd., 1993.

Gustav LeBon: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind; orig. pub. 1895, Minneola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002.

Daniel Lerner: The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East; Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958.

Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince: On the Art of Power; orig. pub. 1512, New York: Bantam Classics, 1984.

William Manchester: A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance -- Portrait of an Age; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1992.

Walter Martin: The Kingdom of the Cults; Minneapolis: Berthany House, 1967, 1977, 1987.

William McDougall: The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology; orig. pub. 1920, North Stratford: Ayer Company, NH, 1973.

Jack Miles: God, A Biography; New York: Random House 1996.

Jack Miles: Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God; New York: Random House, 2001.

C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956, 2000.

Franz Neumann: Anxiety and Politics, in Maurice Stein et al (editors): Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society; Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960.

Richard Overy: The Times Complete History of the World, 8th Ed.; London: The Times of London, 2010.

Elaine Pagels: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations; New York: Viking, 2012.

Talcott Parsons: Social Systems and The Evolution of Action Theory; New York: The Free Press, 1975.

Kevin Phillips: The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, & The Triumph of Anglo-America; New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Kevin Phillips: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money; New York: Penguin, 2007.

Kurt Riezler: The Social Psychology of Fear, in Maurice Stein et al (editors): Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Person in Mass Society; Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960.

Barnaby Rogerson: The Last Crusades: The Hundred-Year Battle for the Center of the World; New York: MJF Books, 2009.

Jay Rubenstein: Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse; New York: Perseus - Basic Books, 2011.

William Sargant: Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain Washing, orig. pub. 1957, Cambridge, MA: Malor Books, 1997.

Victor Sebestyen: 1946: The Making of the Modern World; New York: Pantheon, 2014.

Huston Smith: The World's Religions: The Revised & Updated Edition of The Religions of Man; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Wilfred Trotter: Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War; orig. pub. 1916, New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005.

Barbara Tuchman: Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour; New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1976.

Barbara Tuchman: The Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

Max Weber, Talcott Parsons (translator): The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1930.

Daniel Yergin: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Daniel Yergin: The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World; New York: Penguin Press, 2011.

One may look over synopses and reviews of these books at this location.

One may also look over a selection of books on cult dynamics at this location.