As anyone who has attempted to study the subject is likely to confess, what has been conceptualized as religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world, and elsewhere, is a complex phenomenon.  This complexity, while requiring a correspondingly complex framework to understand it, it is not simply due to its periodic historical emergence or cross-national variability.  Rather, Islamic fundamentalism in particular represents a marked historical discontinuity with the Islamic modernism of the last decades of the 19 century and early 20th.  That is, Muslim theologians-cum-intellectual leaders had taken positions on some of the significant issues facing their faith that were cross-nationally similar under a recognizable set of concurrent historical conditions but diametrically opposed to positions taken by a similar group of thinkers decades later.