An exploration of fundamentalism in Islam from the ninth century to the present.

Based on a symposium on the theme Islam and the History of Religions, this important work features thoughtful essays on the study of Islam. On its publication in 1985, this text influenced the transition of Islamic studies from Orientalism and area studies to religious studies, and is now republished in the Oneworld Classics in Religious Studies series.

Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate contemporary incarnations of Islam for a growing audience of those invested in a sharper understanding of the Muslim world.

Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry. Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section, the contributors reexamine...