Religion is fast replacing other ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism and anti-colonialism as determining social and political relations in our postmodern world. One result of the post September 11 world has been the demonization of Islam and the ‘politics of fear’ around the discourse of Islamic fundamentalism. This is despite the fact that fundamentalism, that potent ‘f word’, is originally Protestant, not Muslim, put forward in California in 1910 in a pamphlet titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth, which was circulated in 3 million copies, aiming to stop the erosion of what they saw as the ‘fundamental’ beliefs of Protestantism. Continue reading “Minarets and goldfish”