"The fundamentalist spirit of Islam, gathering force in the third quarter of the twentieth century, became a powerful, popular and, to many, frightening phenomenon in the 1980s. It affected all the great religions, often in response to fundamentalist outbreaks in their traditional rivals. Thus the revival of Islamic extremism, which began in the 1950s and by the early 1990s had spread to most of the Muslim world, provoked violent reactions. In India, for instance, the Hindu-based Janata Dal Party had, by the end of the 1980s, been goaded into forms of religious extremism by Islamic pressure, and early in 1991 there was widespread violence in northern India as Hindus fought to reclaim the shrines of their gods where mosques had been built. Islamic fundamentalism also helped along the revival of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, started in New York under the Rabbi Meir Kahane, then transferring itself to Israel to promote both the expanding 'historical' frontiers of the Kingdom of David, and the transformation of Israel into a Jewish theocracy. This led to running legal battles and street fights with the Israeli authorities, and more serious violence between fundamentalist Jewish settlers and Arabs in the West Bank."
Islamic extremism

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English