Modernism & fundamentalism

I'm reading Ernest Gellner's postmodernism, Reason and Religion in which he argues that there are "three basic contestants" today in the matter of faith: religious fundamentalism, relativism (of which postmodernism is the most obvious exemplar) and Enlightenment rationalism.

He offers Islamic fundamentalism as an example of the former and shows considerable understanding and respect for it. He abhors postmodernism as, for instance, "What all this means is less than clear - the metaphysical-lit. crit. jargon takes care of that - but the theory, such as it is, feeds back on its own style and underwrites its chaos and obscurity..." (p. 29)

Gellner's preferred option is rationalism, which he admits is also a kind of fundamentalism - he calls it 'mild'; there is a belief that there is a unique truth but a society can never possess it definitively.

I find this very interesting; because although I thought I had repudiated Enlightenment rationalism, this latter position is closest to my own. I believe that there is an absolute truth (one privileged metanarrative which is privileged because of its one-to-one mapping onto the way things actually are) but that we cannot know it in its entirety (1Corinthians 13:9-12).

Gellner and I would disagree fundamentally about the nature of this absolute truth and also about the ways we may gain knowledge about it but our positions are more similar than I had thought. Interesting...