164. Karen Armstrongof our modern culture poses special problems for people in
all the major traditions. Christians, who are more preoccu-
pied by doctrine than by politics, are currently wrestling
with dogmatic questions in their effort to make their faith
speak to the modern sensibility. They are debating their be-
lief in the divinity of Christ, for example, some clinging to
the older formulations of the dogma, others finding more
radical solutions. Sometimes these discussions become an-
guished and even acrimonious, because the issues touch the
nub of religiosity that lies at the heart of the Christian vision.
The struggle for a modern Islamic state is the Muslim equiv-
alent of this dilemma. All religious people in any age have to
make their traditions address the challenge of their particu-
lar modernity, and the quest for an ideal form of Muslim
government should not be viewed as aberrant but as an es-
sentially and typically religious activity.
Fundamentalism
The Western media often give the impression that the embat-
tled and occasionally violent form of religiosity known as
"fundamentalism" is a purely Islamic phenomenon. This is
not the case. Fundamentalism is a global fact and has surfaced
in every major faith in response to the problems of our
modernity. There is fundamentalist Judaism, fundamentalist
Christianity, fundamentalist Hinduism, fundamentalist Bud-
dhism, fundamentalist Sikhism and even fundamentalist
Confucianism. This type of faith surfaced first in the Chris-
tian world in the United States at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century. This was not accidental. Fundamentalism is not
a monolithic movement; each form of fundamentalism, even
within the same tradition, develops independently and has its
own symbols and enthusiasms, but its different manifestations
all bear a family resemblance. It has been noted that a funda-