As we have seen, there is a tendency to overemphasise the role of Islam in problems pertaining to Muslim migrants and societies, while disregarding heteronormative impact of westernisation and the transversal influence of Christian or leftist patterns of religiosity or political radicalisation.
We cannot understand'Islamic fundamentalism'outside a transversal study of how established religions see themselves in the globalisation era. This transversality involves not a comparative study of the Qu'ran, the Bible and the Torah, but a quest to define what a religion is. Common features of religiosity among born-again or'true'believers include the crisis of a social authority of religion, the delinking of religious and cultural patterns, the constitution of religious communities on the basis of an individual self-definition of'me as a believer', the explicit criticism of'non-religious elements', and the will to the true tenets of the religion.
More important, however, the experience of living as a minority in a secular or even pagan world is a common topic of a discussion among such believers, wether Hindu, Christian, Jewish or Muslim.
There are thus many commonalities between Christianity and Islam in responding to secularisation. Of course the reality of secularisation is debatable. Critics of the concept refute the notion that religion is waning and consider secularisation more and ideology than a sociological reality. It is true that secularisation is manifested differently in Western Europe and the United States. In both cases the role of religion in public life has nothing to do with the legal status of the church. In the United States, where there is constitutional separation between church and state, the expression of religiosity in political life is amandatory...

The contemporary religious revival in Islam is targeting society more than the state and calling to the individual's spiritual needs. This leads to multiform expression of religious practice and discourse, wich are linked with social movements as well as group or individual strategies. The Islamist myth was that of the unification of the religious and the political; post-Islamism means that both spheres are autonomous, despite the wiches of the actors concerned.
Post-Islamism does not go hand in hand with a decline of religion; rather it expresses the crisis of the relationship religion and politics and between religion and the state, as well as a trend towards a fragmentation of religious identity and authority, a blossoming of new and different forms of religiosity that might be antagonistic towards each other, and paradoxically a blurring of the lines between Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Muslim religiosity (not dogmas, of course). This is coupled with a reinforcement of'imagined identities', from religious communities to invented neo-ethnic, or even racial, denomination....

In the West secularisation is seen as a prerequisite for democratisation, but in the Middle East it is mostly associated with dictatorship. The contradiction of secularists in many Muslim countries is that they favour state control of religion and often ignore or even suppress traditional and popular expression of it. The neo-fundamentalist answer is dawah (or da'wat).