I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of fundamentalist violence over the past few days for a couple of reasons.

The first catalyst has been the recent bombings in the North Indian state of Rajasthan, the province where my wife is from and the state where I went to school. More than 60 people were killed and 200 wounded when eight bombs went off on May 13 in the capital city of Jaipur, a beautiful town that is a popular tourist destination.

There is real public anger in India over the terrorist attack, especially since it is not an isolated incident.

Far from it.

In fact, more than 400 people have been killed in the past three years in similar attacks in cities all over India. The targets have ranged from the Bombay trains and the main India-Pakistan rail link to a restaurant and, curiously, a couple of mosques and Muslim shrines.

In spite of the perverse targeting of mosques (which has led to speculation of right-wing Hindu extremism being responsible for at least one of those bombings) the culprits in most of these cases are quite certainly Islamic fundamentalists. Operating on a mixed brew of transnational jihadism and local grievances, such as the state-sponsored pogrom that killed thousands of Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat a few years ago, these groups have seen fit to lash out every few months against the Indian public.

Added to this is the usual charge in the Indian media that Pakistan’s dreaded Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has links to the Jaipur blasts, supposedly as a way to undermine the newly elected democratic government in Pakistan.

"A riot like Gujarat creates a few thousand potential jihadis seeking revenge, so there's no use blaming the foreign hand. We in this country have created this problem," says Pradip Bose of the Calcutta-based Center for Study in Social Sciences, in a rare dissent from the Pakistan-centered theories prevalent in India.

Regardless of motivation, these attacks are completely inexcusable. And they mask and smear the tradition of nonviolence within Islam, which I’m writing a book about.

This is where the second catalyst for my ruminations about religion and violence comes in: University of California Professor Mark Juergensmeyer’s new survey of fundamentalisms, “Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, From Christian Militias to Al Qaeda.” I riffled through his book very recently, and it supplies a useful context to jihadism.

Instead of concentrating just on Islam, as a lot of U.S.-based authors are wont to do, Juergensmeyer constructs a comparative framework by looking at the origin, nature and implications of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh fundamentalisms, too. So, for instance, he lists five heads of states who were assassinated by religious radicals in the past half-century or so, and he notes that three have been killed by non-Muslims. (Plus, Mahatma Gandhi, never formally a head of state, was murdered by a Hindu nationalist.) All of the fundamentalist movements he surveys reject the secular state and wish to supplant it with their own vision of an ideal religious state.

By providing perspective and background, Juergensmeyer enriches the scholarship on religious political movements. He does fall short on some counts, though. He doesn’t delve deep enough into the reasons that such groupings are popular throughout the developing world. One major explanation is the failure of the modern state at providing educational and job opportunities and basic services. This makes the alternative seem much more rosy. Plus, Juergensmeyer is too sympathetic to the millenarian critique of the secularism and too optimistic about the ability of a religious state to accommodate minority and women’s rights.

Still, Juergensmeyer offers a better understanding of a phenomenon that has hogged the headlines since 9-11 and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.