From: Robert P. Stefko [rpsst16@pop.pitt.edu]
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 4:40 AM
To: blue_planet@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: [BLUE PLANET] - Greetings and questions

>Hi Robert, I'd respectfully dispute your use of the term
"fundamentalism" to describe Islam. Maybe if you could explain your own
definition of the term...<

Fundamentalism is strict adherence to a set of basic principals. Both
Christianity and Islam have such a set of principals, embodied in the Ten
Commandments and the Five Pillars, respectively. However, the modern West
has allowed secular law to supersede these principals, while the Moslem
nations retain them in their original form and context. This latter approach
has caused serious problems in the modern world, where the Western "rule of
law" clashes with the Islamic "rule of raith" in unpleasant ways. Islam, if
it hopes to remain relevant in the next millennium, will have to adapt to an
increasingly secular world, just as Christianity and Judaism were forced to
do in previous centuries. If it cannot, it will eventually draw the ire of
the dominant (and mostly Western) nations, which perceive the Islamic
nations to be a source of instability in an already unpredictable
geopolitical environment.

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