Book Reviews

Abstract

Have you ever wondered why Osama Bin Laden has not been arrested and killed so far? Not even by the all powerful American Army! JoAnn Jaffe, one of the co-editors of Contesting Fundamentalisms, argues, the public stage has been monopolised by the symbiotic conflict between two great fundamentalisms. The right-wing Christian United States President George Bush and the leader of the Islamic Al Qu'eda movement, Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden, have been each other's best friends, the later, in fact, through his activities helping President Bush to pursue American imperialism. In order to be both 'exclusive' and 'universal', the fundamentalist identity, often leads to a type of nationalism where religion and nation coincide as it happened in the case of the United States of America.