Received Date: 31/01/2020 • Accepted Date: 26/05/2020
The study of Islam in the West has gone through several transformations, often driven by geopolitical imperatives. As the Islamic faith emerged out of the Arabian Peninsula and expanded westward, the military and cultural encounters with the Byzantine Empire were already leading to the emergence of an image of Islam as a religious challenge to Christianity, as a cultural challenge to Europe, and as a geopolitical challenge to Christendom. The encounters with Christianity and Christendom also had an impact on Muslim thinking, not just about ‘others,’ but also about Islam and the Muslim world. Early Muslims thought of themselves as a faith community.1 As they encountered established empires and engaged with them politically and militarily, later Muslims started to think of their community as a polity and also, as an empire, and competed with other empires based on this new self-perception. As the encounters became more frequent, more intense and sometimes bloody, thinkers in both Christian and Muslim communities started producing discourses that shaped the identities of the self and the other; both began to construct and reconstruct the other through these narratives.2 Since the 18th century, European nations became more dominant globally and their languages (English and French) started dominating global literature and then global media. Consequently, their narratives about Islam and Muslims and the Muslim world became dominant narratives, even shaping how Muslims themselves think and talk about their own history, religion and identity.3
