ABSTRACT
The rise of religious fundamentalism posits a major challenge to the achievement of a global open society. This chapter explains that in Islam there was no one, besides Averroes, on a par with Baruch Spinoza, outlines a modernist interpretation of the Holy Scripture of Jews and Christians. Spinoza rejected anthropomorphic conceptions of God as both logically and theologically unsound, proposed modern historical-critical methods for biblical interpretation and defended political toleration of alternative religious practices. The chapter discusses that Medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiya was the first to use the term to describe backsliding in Muslim society. For an alternative to jahalia in present day Muslim debate, one should turn to the philosophy of Ibn Rushd or Averroes. The most general approach to Islamic fundamentalism is that of Salafism. Indians, who believe that the Hindu civilization was suffering a long decline, claim as fundamentalists that the solution to that problem is the recovery of a glorious Hindu past.
