There has lately taken place a far-reaching resurgence or reconstruction of the religious dimension in the contemporary world. It is manifested among others in the rise of new religious, especially fundamentalist and communal-national movements, and in the crystallisation of new diasporas with a prominent religious identity. This reconstruction transcends the vision of the classical cultural and political program of modernity and of the ‘classical’ model of the modern nationstate. This resurgence of the religious dimension is very important for the evaluation of the many interpretations of the contemporary world, especially those that proclaim, from often opposing vantage points, the possibility that the classical modern project, as it has developed for the last two centuries, is exhausted. In one version the possibility of such exhaustion takes the form of the ‘end of history’ as proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama; the ideological premises of modernity with all the tensions and contradictions inherent in them are understood as almost irrelevant, enabling paradoxically the rise of multiple postmodern visions, and the new religious movements are on the whole seen as temporary ‘aberrations’. In another view of the exhaustion of the modern program or withdrawal from it, that of, to use Samuel Huntington’s terminology, the ‘clash of civilisations’, these new religious movements play indeed a very central role. Huntington understands the Western civilisational vision—the seeming epitome of modernity—as often confronted in hostile terms with other, especially the Muslim and to some extent the so-called Confucian. Within this civilisational conflict, traditional, fundamentalist, anti-modern, and anti-Western movements are predominant and
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (Fri,) studied this question.