ABSTRACT
Fundamentalism as a contentious concept has a much wider scope than the postcolonial, both in time and in place, but again and again, the two can be seen to intersect and overlap. This basic concept of fundamentalism as a reaction both to modernity and to forms of colonialism or situations of postcoloniality thus yields a potent explanatory pattern. Aspects of postcoloniality arguably become discernible in the fact that the American South was still suffering from the effects of the Civil War when Christian fundamentalism spread from the southern states. The topic of fundamentalist potentials in diasporic communities in Britain has been, to give at least a short example, prominently explored in the novels and stories by Hanif Kureishi. Fundamentalism, in V. S. Naipaul's version, is an outcome of Islamic conversion in non-Arabic cultures. First of all, the concentration on Islam, and that mainly as a source of fundamentalist and problematic developments, will need to open up to other religious contexts.
