ABSTRACT
The question about religion and modernisation is designated "Weberian", because Max Weber developed a most coherent approach to the analysis of modernity, focusing on the religious element in the major civilisations of humanity. This chapter focuses on the role of the common elements in the Muslim civilisation, whether Arab or non-Arab. It discusses why do Muslim countries score low on one of the key aspects of modernity and post-modernity – the implementation of civil and political rights? A large Muslim population lives in India, where religious confrontations between Muslims, Hindus and Christians occur despite the formal confessional neutrality of the Indian State. Palestine and Kashmir are perhaps the most spectacular examples of military confrontation between Muslims and non-Muslims. Most of the world religions contain fundamentalist movements, but what is unusual about Islamic fundamentalism is that it is a relatively late phenomenon and that it received such strong support in the twentieth century.
