As ideology fades, will religion become the main force that sets one group of mankind against another? It may. Yet it would be wrong to see all the current evidence of religious militancy as part of a single phenomenon. All religions share something in their appeal to the human spirit, and all the fanatics newly excited in the causes of their various faiths plainly have some qualities in common. But only one religion, Islam, is enjoying a widespread increase in popularity and simultaneously undergoing a revival of basic belief. This combination, coupled with certain precepts peculiar to Islam, brings Muslims into conflict with other ideas, economic and political ones, which are also gaining in popularity. Nothing that is happening in India, awful as it is represents quite such a clash between fundamentalism and modernity.
