The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics

Academic interest in Islam and the Muslims is not a recent phenomenon. For over one hundred and fifty years, orientalists, historians, anthropologists and sociologists have tried to understand the internal dynamics of Islamic societies in various parts of the world. Some recent, rather unpleasant incidents further intensified the need and desire to look a fresh in the mind of the Muslims and find out the relation between tradition and change in the Muslim world. The emergence of Islamophobia in the United Kingdom and Europe and the terrorism-phobia in the United States have resulted into a flood of literature on radical Islam, the home grown terrorists, the Muslim fundamentalists, the conservative salafis, the jihadis and so on. There has been a genuine need for an academic, objective and authentic source work on not only recent developments in the Muslim world but on relation between Islam and politics, Islam and women, Islam and social change etc.