The Age of Fundamentalism.

The holy warrior speaks simply and directly, cleaving the world neatly in two. "This is a religious struggle, a clash of cultures," he intones. Luckily, God is on the right side, having "put a hedge of protection around us." Osama bin Laden, lashing out on Al-Jazeera? No, a lunchtime speech to the Economic Club in Detroit by Pat Robertson, the Christian evangelical. Those who might have thought otherwise can be forgiven, for the echo is spookily similar. The Americans and the British, the Qaeda leader said before the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, "have divided the world into two regions--one of faith and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us."

These are good days for Holy Warriors, for this is the age of fundamentalism. Relativism remains a key casualty of September 11. In these queasy times, clinging to certainty and absolutism seems far safer than the messy course of debate and dissent. So in the Islamic world, so in America, where members of the Christian right have come out with a rash of attacks on Islam, calling it "evil" and branding Muhammad a "terrorist" and "demon-possessed pedophile." With his "Axis of Evil," George W. Bush parses the world--"for us or against us," tidy lines in the sand dividing "barbarians" from the "civilized."

Look more closely, though, and the "us" and "them" distinction collapses. Right-wing Christian leaders like Franklin Graham may denounce Islam as a "wicked religion," and Muslim fundamentalists may defame Jews, but in fact their visions are far closer than either camp would admit. Their beliefs on the roles of women and religion in public life closely mirror one another. Both share a love affair with the media and a suspicion of pluralism and secular liberalism. When the Muslim College, a London-based center of Islamic learning, held a seminar for Muslim, Christian and Jewish conservatives, the participants had a shock of self-recognition, says Zaki Badawi, an Egyptian religious scholar who heads the college. Suddenly, they realized they shared attitudes and world views. Whatever their stripe, fundamentalists are absolutists at heart, says Badawi. "They don't like to hear other ideas at all. They want to hear their own voice, and are suspicious of anyone else's."

The exchange of vitriol between Christian and Muslim camps has thus produced a weird mirroring effect. It wasn't always so. Back in 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the writer Salman Rushdie to death for denigrating the Prophet Muhammad in his novel "The Satanic Verses." Then, the so-called Rushdie Affair pitted secularism ...