The mistakenly called "fundamentalists" are a modern phenomenon, a response to the crises of modernity and identity. Modernity is a historical process. It refers to the development of societies from one mode of production to another: in our age, from an agrarian or pastoral mode to the capitalist or industrial mode of production. The shift from one mode of production to another mode invariably brings revolutionary changes in society. It compels a new logic of social and economic life, threatens inherited styles of life and forces transformations in the relationship of land, labour and capital. As such, it requires adaptations to new ways of being and doing and demands drastic changes in human values and in relations between and among sexes, classes, individuals, families and communities. It transforms the co-relation and arrangement of living spaces, requires change in how the workplace is organised, how new skills are gathered and distributed, and how people are governed.

When this process of change sets in, older values and ways of life become outdated and dysfunctional much faster than newer, more appropriate values, and ways of life strike roots. The resulting social and cultural mutations are experienced by people both as threat and loss. For millennia, humanity experienced this unsettling process ...

The industrial mode threatened nearly all values and institutions by which people had lived in the agrarian order ... A transformation so systemic was bound to threaten old ways of life ... In brief ... puts into question, and increasingly renders dysfunctional, traditional values and ways of life. Yet, cultures tend to change more slowly than economic and political realities. All societies caught in this process undergo a period of painful passage. How peacefully and democratically a society makes this journey depends on its historical circumstances, the engagement of its intelligentsia, the outlook of its leaders and governments and the ideological choices they make.

... When faced with a crisis so systemic, people have tended to respond in four ways. We might call these the restorationist, reformist, existential and revolutionary responses. The restorationist wants to return somehow to an old way of life, re-impose the laws or customs that were, recapture lost virtues, rehabilitate old certainties and restore what he believes to have been the golden past - Hindutva and Ram Raj, Eretz Israel, Nizam-e-Mustafa. Restorationism invariably entails rejection of the Other - for example, Muslim, Arab, Hindu, Christian, Ahmadi -and what are construed to be the Other's way which can range from a woman's dress and a man's beard to song, dance and such symbols of modern life as the television and radio. The restorationist ideology and programme can range from relatively moderate to totally extremist..

The reformists are of modernist disposition - men and women who care deeply about preserving the best and most meaningful in their religious tradition while adapting them to the requirements of modern life. The obverse is also true - they seek to integrate modern forms and values into inherited cultures and beliefs ... The first great Indian Muslim reformist was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, and the last to be so regarded was Mohammed Iqbal, whose Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is a quintessential example of reformism in modern Islam ...Like the restorationist, the reformist trend emerged as a response to the perceived decline of Muslim power and encounter with the colonising .Western powers. From the second half of the 19h century, it gained hegemony in the Muslim world, but stagnated in the post-colonial period ...Mustapha Kemal's was the first revolutionary response in the Muslim world. He abolished the Caliphate, established an uncompromisingly secular republic, suppressed many religious institutions, proscribed the veil, prohibited polygamy and enacted secular laws regulating property rights and women's rights on the basis of equality. No other Muslim country has so far equalled Ataturk's radical break from tradition and from the association of Islam with state power ... Under partial reformist influence, the nationalist regimes in a number of states - Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Indonesia and Malaysia among  others - instituted secular constitutions without effecting a radical break from the tradition of associating religion and power. Many of these secular authoritarian regimes are now being challenged by Islamist movements.

With the exception of Pakistan, the secular alternative has been in post-colonial South Asia ... In recent years, the rise of Hindu nationalists to power in several provinces, and recently in the federation, has greatly undermined the secular character of the Indian republic. In Pakistan, on the other hand, the issue of the relationship between religion and the state has remained a source of confusion, instability and misuse of Islam in politics.

The dominant feature of the post-colonial period has been the existential style of deploying religion whenever it suits the political convenience of those in power, and of ignoring the challenge of defining the relationship of religion and politics when governments and the ruling elites feel secure and contented. This posture came under assault with the rise of Islamic militancy in the 1980s and the 1990s, a period that witnessed accelerated globalisation of the world economy. The Islamists were further propelled by the Iranian revolution (February 1979), and, more important, by the Afghan Jihad which, thanks to the generosity of the United States, became a transnational project. Ironically, the pro-US governments of Egypt and Algeria later became the prime targets of the Afghanistan-trained Mujahideen.

The resurgence of right-wing religious movements in the 1980s and the 1990s was a worldwide phenomenon. They have played a most violent role in Israel ... In India, the Hindu movement launched a campaign against the Babari Masjid as part of its effort at mobilising mass support. It ended with the destruction of the 17th century mosque, widespread communal violence, and the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party to national power. After the Russians withdrew, the victorious and faction-ridden Mujahideen of Afghanistan tore the country apart. In Sudan, an Islamic government imposed a reign of terror and mismanagement which has yielded a horrific famine.

Christian orthodoxy linked with Serb nationalism and Milosevic's diabolic opportunism has aided a reign of terror and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now it battles on it Kosovo. (Source: The Frontline, 12 March, 1999)