In five pages Judith Nagata's article on fundamentalism is summarized and then critically evaluated. There are no other sources listed.
Name of Research Paper File: D0_khnag.rtf
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that this label has been used in identity politics as a demarcation that establishes specific boundaries and demonizes those outside those boundaries as "other," the enemy, as "fundamentalist." She also
attempts to formulate an anthropological approach to this topic that provides a synthesis of common elements amid the widely divergent cases where this term is employed worldwide. Biases or
assumptions expressed by the author This writer may be wrong (the student should decide and express his or her own opinion), but it seemed to me that Nagata has
a pro-Islamic bias. For example, on page 482, she refers to the "residual Christian baggage" that "lingers on in many popular images" of fundamentalism, which has a distinctly negative connotation.
At the beginning of the same paragraph, she puts in parenthesis, referring to Christianity, "the mother of all fundamentalisms" (482). As one of the principal arguments in her article
is that the epithet of "fundamentalism" has been used to identity an ethnic or racial group as "other," Nagata is fully aware that such labeling is detrimental toward Christians, as
well as Muslims. Also, Nagata spends a great deal of her article defending Muslims against the charge of "fundamentalism." Having already established that acceptance of the inerrancy of
scripture as one of the characteristics of Christian fundamentalism, at one point, Nagata appears to argue that there are no Islamic fundamentalists since all Muslims accept the "revealed, unchanging
(fundamental status of the Quran...scriptural literalness is no an issue here. Moderns and traditionalist equally accept textual" (484). In other words, Nagata seems to feel that since all Muslims agree
on scriptural inerrancy, by rights, fundamentalism should not be applied to them. While Nagata looks unflinchingly at the "self-righteously moralistic revivalist" strains of Christian Protestantism, she states that the US