Islamic studies

Islamic studies is the academic study of Islam and Islamic culture. Islamic studies can be seen under at least two perspectives:

Historically, both perspectives had been sharply separated by the separation of the Western and Islamic worlds. They differed in their understanding of academia and were organized either in universities or madrasas. Today, there are attempts to bring together both perspectives, especially by the attempts to establish Islamic theology at Western universities according to the model of the well-established Christian theology.

Scholars of Islamic studies are called by their special field of study, as e.g. historian, sociologist, or political scientist, or in general a scholar of Islamic studies. The professional title Islamicist is dated. Scholars of Islamic studies from a faithful point of view can be historians etc., too, yet they also can be called Muslim scholar, teacher of religion, cleric, or Ulama. The designations Islamic scholar or religious scholar are misleading since they sometimes apply to a secular scholar of Islamic studies, and sometimes to a religious Muslim scholar of Islamic studies.

In a Muslim context, Islamic studies is the umbrella term for the Islamic sciences ('Ulum al-din), both originally researched and as defined by the Islamization of knowledge. It includes all the traditional forms of religious thought, such as kalam (Islamic theology) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), but also incorporates fields generally considered secular in the West, such as Islamic science and Islamic economics.

In a non-Muslim context, Islamic studies generally refers to the historical study of Islam: , Islamic history and historiography, Islamic law, Islamic theology and Islamic philosophy. Academics from diverse disciplines participate and exchange ideas about Islamic societies, past and present, although Western, academic Islamic studies itself is in many respects a self-conscious and self-contained field. Specialists in the discipline apply methods adapted from several ancillary fields, ranging from Biblical studies and classical philology to modern history, legal history and sociology. A recent trend, particularly since 9/11, has been the study of contemporary Islamist groups and movements by academics from the social sciences or in many cases by journalists, although since such works tend to be written by non-Arabists they belong outside the field of Islamic studies proper.

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