Are authoritarianism and militancy key characteristics of religious fundamentalism? A latent class analysis of an Egyptian Muslim sample.

We investigated whether authoritarianism and militancy are essential characteristics of religious fundamentalism by exploring subtypes of religious fundamentalism in a sample of n = 152 Muslims from Egypt. We applied Hood and colleagues' intratextuality as a basic type of fundamentalism and selected a range of differentiating factors, such as closed-mindedness, militancy, and religious reflexivity, to characterize different subtypes. A survey with questionnaires was conducted in Cairo, Egypt, in the summer of 2013. Latent class analysis was applied to the data set. A solution with three subtypes fitted the data best. Subtype 1 had flexible and open-minded characteristics, Subtype 2 matched the typical characterization of religious fundamentalism with features of authoritarianism and extremist thinking, and Subtype 3 was a moderate version of Subtype 2 without authoritarian features but still with a high level of closed-mindedness. These results show that authoritarianism and militancy are not essential parts of religious fundamentalism and suggest that a more differentiated concept of religious fundamentalism is reasonable.