This book has many origins. Its remote origins lie in my interest in the place of sectarianism in the dynamics of great civilizations – an interest that arose from my reexamination of the Protestant ethic and my attempts to put it in a broader comparative perspective.

This interest became interwoven with my study of the Axial Civilizations, first in a series of conferences, organized by a core group headed by Prof. W. Schluchter reexamining Weber's analysis of the major civilizations, and later in the conferences on the Axial Age organized by me. An interim step was the analysis of Revolutions which I presented in my book on revolutions and transformation.

All these have been connected with a continual reexamination of the theories of modernization and of the major characteristics of modernity, of modern civilization.

The more immediate origins of this book as related to fundamentalism have been the conferences organized in the framework of the Project on Fundamentalism sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and organized by Martin Monty and Scott Appleby in some of which I participated, and in one of the volumes of which I published a chapter which constituted the kernel of several papers ultimately leading to the present book.

During the preparation of this book, I have engaged in conversations about the problems of fundamentalism with many colleagues – Nehemia Levtzion and Hava Lazarus Jaffe in Jerusalem; Nikki Keddie in Los Angeles who also was kind enough to send me a draft of her very interesting paper on the subject; Bjorn Wittrock and Ulf Hannez of SCASSS (the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Uppsala; with Jeffrey C.