The Colonized and Decolonized views of Islam ,An Analytical Study

muhammadanism and Islamicism

Abstract

This research work is mainly concerned with Western views of Islam at an academic level. The West have had a close academic relationship with Islamic Studies and have presented a corpus of great scholarly work about Islam since their inception. The first known person in this regard was John of Damascus ¹ (d. 749 AD), who started writing about Islam in polemical style because he presented Islam as a misleading religion and the Prophet Muhammad as a false and heretical one.² It demonstrates that writing about Islam has existed from the very beginning. This process persisted and went through numerous stages with diverse approaches, including the periods of colonization and decolonization. During colonization, western scholars claimed that Islam was discovered by a common man, Muhammad, and that he did not receive any revelation from God, whereas during decolonization, they claimed that Islam was Islam and accepted Muhammad as God's messenger. So two different approaches are adopted during colonization and decolonization: Muhammadanism and Islamicism. So this research work will compare colonized and decolonized views of Islam (Muhammadanism and Islamicism) at the Western academic level and concentrate on the main characteristics of these two methods, analyzing how they differ from one another. So it will compare and explain these two approaches in order to better comprehend the evolution of Islamic studies in the West.