Religious Fundamentalism in the Contemporary World: Critical Social and Political Issues

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Santosh C. Saha
Lexington Books, 2004 - 340 pages
Today new and ever more pernicious forms of terrorist violence threaten the world. Because these new forms of violence are so often linked to religious radicalism, modern terrorism has challenged the secular ethics of contemporary civil society. There is a pressing need to understand modern religious movements that have added militancy and belligerence as fundamental elements of religious practice. Contributors to this volume painstakingly tackle the question of how to define the contours of current religious fundamentalism as they examine the private and public postures of fundamentalist rhetoric, the importance of its regional variants, and the damage it can do to regional and national education systems. Their analysis tracks trends in religious movements that aspire to radicalize, reform, and violently topple governments and nations, while highlighting the difference between fundamentalist interpretations and other longstanding juridical, political, and intellectual traditions.
 

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Contents

Introduction
1
Religious Fundamentalism and Its Other Snapshot View from the Global Information Order
7
Some Priority Variables in the Study of Comparative Religious Politics
27
Fundamentalist Ideology Institutions and the State A Formal Analysis
45
Religion between Universal and Particular Eastern Europe after 1989
69
Phases of Political Islam
91
Hindu Revivalist Cultural Policies and Programs in India A Critique
125
Perceiving Islam The Causes and Consequences of Islamophobia in the Western Media
169
Democracy vs Fundamentalism Religious Politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India
205
Ethnicity and Religion in Israeli Politics Emergence of the Shas Party
233
Contesting Historiographies in South Asia The Islamization of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks
263
Bibliography
307
Index
323
About the Contributors
335
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Page 336 - Associate Professor, Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong where he teaches science, technology, religion, and society in Asia.

About the author (2004)

Santosh C. Saha is Professor of History at Mount Union College in Ohio.

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