The issue discussed in the article is: Return of the religious factor into politics. Analytically, though curtly, observing, to begin with, different varieties of contemporary fundamentalism, it is to the Islamic one, the one generally recognized the most significant today and generally taken with most interest, that the author devotes the great bulk of her article. I.V.Kudryashova leaves political extremism out of the scope of the study and concentrates exclusively on legal fundamentalism whose ability to withstand modernity and at the same time to integrate into modernity, as the author concludes, allows to reckon it as an element of national development. But it is only within new world outlook, provided the world is taken as an integral system that one can perceive the scale, range and scope of that function of legal fundamentalism.