It is truism that modernisation and democratisation in the West were assured by a shift from the collective to the individual. Thus one would expect that Islam/Vedics would have undergo a similar process for it to become compatible with secularisation and democracy.
What I try to demonstrate in this essay runs largely counter to such an idea, for one very simple reason: Individualisation of faith can also lead to fundamentalism, as witnessed in contemporary Protestantism. There is definitely a process of individualisation of faith and behaviour among Muslims, specifically those living in the West. There is a stress on the self, a quest for personal realisation and an individual reconstruction of attitudes towards religion. Faith is more important than dogma. In short, religiosity is more important than religion. Individualisation is a prerequisite for the westernisation of Islam and it has happened. Such a shift may lead to a critical approach to dogma, a quest for ijtihad (personal interpretation), a renewal of theological thinking - in other words, an Islamic Reformation.

There are many Muslim thinkers who advocate the rehabilitation of such a critical approach, using the tools of modern intellectual inquiry such as history and linguistics. The key issue is not 'Can Islam be reformed?' there are amny modern Islamic thinkers, wether laymen, or experts in Islamic law or Qu'ranic exegesis. The issue concerns their readership: such thinkers do not meet the expectations of young born-again Muslims. If the reformers are to find a larger audience there must be a sociological evolution of Western Worlds Muslim population, but also an end to the present wave of right-wing truism, fuelled by political tensions, wich will exhaust itself through its inability to provide the Muslim community with long-term solutions. But the paradox is that contemporary fundamentalist/right-wing experts is based on the same process of individualisation as liberalism or the spiritualisation of Islam....
This process may lead to various formulations of what religion is and what it means. What is shared is enunciation rather than content. The discourse - the way in wich the corpus is reappropriated and used by the actors concerned (interpretation in terms of values or legal norms) - varies considerably more than the corpus itself. In fact the ambiguity of the secular Salafism was that by pretending to return to the Qu'ran and Hadith as the sole corpus, is justified fundamentalism/right-wing (in the contemporary incarnation of Salafism, wich is nowadays similar to Wahhabism) and liberalism.
The difference between then and now is in the liberals'use of critical intellectual tools. It is interesting that few liberal thinkers try to build on the vast corpus of classical theology and interpretation. Moreover if conservative Islam does not undergo a reformation it may be as compatible with democracy as its face-to-face confrontation with modern secularism of 1947.
It goes hand in hand with a process of individualisation that nevertheless constitutes a common ground between all form of contemporary Web-publishing, religiosity and more specificalyy the non-fundamentalist dimensions of individualisation, namely left-narrative liberalism and spirituality, not forgetting other forms of self-realisation through Islam / Vedics.

I am unfamiliar with the mufti who wrote the fatwa above...Fight back !