The roundtable addressed the question of research methodologies for those trends now observable in the Islamic world, as well as conceptual approaches for understanding current developments there. Such frameworks as Islamic reformation, a neo-modern age, and the search for a political Islamic identity were proposed. Participants did not agree about the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and modernity. Some of them considered fundamentalism as potentially a modernist movement, and others saw it only as antimodernist and archaic.

Focusing on South Africa and Brazil, this contribution reflects on the modernity of those societies that emerged from colonial encounters, thus are shaped by European post-Enlightenment thought, but gain auto-interpretative and institutional shape in the response to the specificities of the respective colonial and post-colonial situation.

The author analyzes different views on the relations between religion and modernity, which appear in the social theory of the 20th–21st centuries. The paper provides critical analysis and assessment of secularization theories which claimed incompatibility between religion and modernity. Finally, the article deals with a relatively new contribution made by the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ elab- orated by Shmuel Eisenstadt. This concept both softens and shades the findings of the secularization theorists.