How can we best understand Islamic fundamentalism? As fundamentalism has become an increasingly significant political force, many different interpretations have been offered, with fundamentalism explained as both a rational reaction against modernity and as a pathological retreat from reality. We argue here that part of the scholarly failure to understand and deal with the growth of religious fundamentalism results from a failure to recognize the importance of cognitive differences in worldviews held by fundamentalists. By providing an empirical analysis of how fundamentalists see the world-what we identify as a fundamentalist perspective-we hope to supply an important missing piece in the literature on fundamentalism. To do so, we utilized a narrative and survey interview technique to contrast the worldviews of fundamentalists with those of comparable Muslims who are not fundamentalists. Our analysis suggests Islamic fundamentalism attracts because it provides a basic identity, an identity which in turn provides the foundation for daily living. The fundamentalist perspective itself is best understood through reference to a worldview which makes no distinction between public and private, in which truth is revealed by revelation, and reason is subservient to religious doctrine. Religious dictates dominate on all basic issues, and only within the confines of the fundamentalist identity are choices decided by a cost/benefit calculus.This article presents a perspectival analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and has two main purposes. First, we wish to demonstrate the importance of cognitive influences on political behavior, arguing in particular that the theory of perspective utilized here can provide rich tools for intellectual analysis and fill critical gaps in our knowledge of important political phenomena. Second, we argue that there is a fundamentalist perspective, one which reflects a worldview so different from that of rational choice decision-making models that such models can provide only the

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Conflicts and wars kill humanity. Nationalist or Religious wars, terrorist attacks, shock and awe war on terror, and revolutions such as the Arab upheavals, all underscored by victors "mission accomplished": the destruction of the body, the soul, and the minds of people involved. This study addresses the prevalence and implications of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among civilians exposed to "continuous" trauma aggravated by displacement. The majority of the literature on PTSD that examines people who witnessed wars focuses mainly on veterans. Little research addresses the innocent populations caught up in an on-going political upheaval. Our case study includes 450 Syrian refugees 21 years or older living in Lebanon. The results found that 61.56% of the Syrian refugees met the criteria of full PTSD, 8.67% participants fit the criteria of partial PTSD, and 29.78% refugees did not report any symptoms of PTSD. PTSD affects the area of the brain responsible for executive function, including memory and emotional ability. Accordingly, we hypothesize that people with PTSD will be more prone to be conflictive, will have low impulse control, associated with anger and a high desire for revenge. Hence, high prevalence of PTSD among civilians feeds into the cycle of extremism and violence.

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