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Hello, the latter half of the 20th century has seen the surprising and unexpected rise of religious fundamentalism in all the major faiths.

Violin acts have been done in the name of these forms of religion, suicide missions by Muslim extremists, attacks on abortion clinics by Protestant fundamentalists in the USA,

killings at the Hebron Mosque by members of a far-right Jewish religious group.

Not surprisingly, the rise of religious fundamentalism is commonly seen as one of the most threatening forces now, but is it?

Joining me is one of today's leading religious thinkers, Karen Armstrong, a prolific writer on the history of religious ideas.

She's currently finishing a book on fundamentalism in the world's three main religions. It'll be published next year.

I'm also joined by Tarik Ali, known for his Marxism in the 60s. These days, he's better known as a filmmaker and writer of over half a dozen books on world history and politics.

His latest book, a novel called The Book of Saladin, is the second in a quartet on the encounter between Islam and Christianity.

Karen Armstrong, you wrote in a recent article, in the 50s or 60s, religion seemed to be an increasingly marginal activity.

Did the 70s and 80s religion started to dominate the headlines in an inconceivable way? Why do you think that came out?

The religious resurgence of the 1970s and 1980s had long been simmering, long been preparing, but religious people had finally decided that they had the power to fight back against the secularist establishment.

It was a movement that sprang from great terror, great fear. Every single fundamentalist movement that I've studied has been convinced that they were about to be wiped out by the secularist or liberal establishment.

It usually begins as a response to an attack by secularists and liberals.

Now, this seems odd to us because we have certainly experienced in this country secularism as a very liberating thing.

But this has not always been the case in such places as the Middle East, for example, where secularism is often experienced as an assault upon religion.

If you think of the Ataturk, for example, suppressing Sufi orders as closing madrasas, taking away funds, the Shah of Iran, some of the most extreme forms of Sunni fundamentalism in the Islamic world came to birth in the concentration camps in which NASA had interred members of the Muslim brotherhood.

So secularism has been experienced as an assault, but there are also huge fears raised by modernity itself, by our modern culture, by our modern society, which is very difficult and there's a real rift going right the way through our polarized societies.

So it's very difficult for liberals and secularists and fundamentalists to see things from the same point of view.

It's one of the extraordinary things that when you look at the way a fundamentalist will look at the world, they look at it with a kind of horror that we might feel when we contemplate the Auschwitz death camp.

And there's also an element in this that you think the spiritual part of the nature of Homo Sapiens, when you prefer to think of Homo religiosus.

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