This round table 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 neomodern 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. In this respect, they raised the question of balance between declared goals and real impact on social development — in other words, can those groups that call for a return to the past actually facilitate movement forward? The participants paid particular attention to terminology. They also actively discussed the issue of language for scientific analysis and the language that different Islamic movements used to present themselves, and whether they were necessarily interconnected or could be fully autonomous.