ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to explore the relationship between politics and religion in the Middle East. Religious-inspired violence, it seems, has become an inseparable part of any discourse surrounding the politics and dynamics of the contemporary Middle East. Even the Sultanate of Oman, previously regarded as a paragon of enlightened governance in the Middle East has not been immune, it would seem, from the pressures of Islamic fundamentalism. The term Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalist has become an epithet for intolerance, unyielding in its pursuit of total demands for the strict implementation of Islamic law as the ordering principle of state and society. The development of religious ‘fundamentalism’ is not a new or recent phenomenon. The term was first applied to describe the emergence of an evangelical, crusading movement among Americans, mainly Protestant Baptists, in the 1920s, who rallied against the perceived corrupting influence of what was termed ‘modernism’ by returning to a literal interpretation of sacred biblical texts.
