At the beginning of Islamic radicalism in the 1970s, the activists were looking for a new political language capable of interpreting a world dominated by the West and in rapid transformation. It was a search for identity, strongly marked by «modernity», which reacted against colonialism and the failures of decolonization. On the one hand, after centuries of submission, Islam went underwent a process of politicization —both in Sunni and Shiite worlds— claiming to struggle against the cultural and political dispossession of Muslim peoples; on the other hand, the reconstruction and re-organization of the state in Islamic terms was viewed as an alternative to Western imported models. It was an «Islamic alternative» illustrated by authoritative thinkers like the Islamic theologians of liberation. In the twentyfirst century, terrorist organizations as al-Q?‘ida and ISIS betrayed the spirit of the Islamic alternative resorting to blind violence and trying to divide the Muslim community. Al-Q?‘ida and ISIS are post-modern phenomena and their growth has been recently helped by the failure of the so-called «Arab springs». The Arab springs actually disrupted the political order of many countries like Syria and Libya, while Iraq never recovered from the American invasion of 2003. However, Islamic political thought seems alive still and many efforts are displayed in order to update the classical concept of sh?r?, or consultation, and elaborate the new concept of dawla madaniyya, civil state.