Fundamentalism and Modernity: The view from the Black Forest

This paper looks at the specifically modern features of fundamentalism in the Christian and especially in the Islamic world. It argues that, by being articulated in a modern public sphere and in reaction to the modern state, and more specifically the nation state, fundamentalism is in a double sense "public", and as such a modern phenomenon, rather than marking either a return to a strict and literal reading of revealed sources or an attempt to carve out a role for religion in politics, law, or science. I then take a critical look at how two influential liberal and secular authors, Habermas and Rorty, discuss fundamentalism, and - in the wake of Heidegger's influential but in some respects flawed analysis of modernity as involving an Entgötterung - call for a more radically historicized conceptual apparatus to deal with these questions. I ilustrate my case with a discussion of the rise of a modern public sphere in the Islamic world.