What is Islam?

One in four people in the world is a Muslim. Yet, here in the Western hemisphere, we mostly know next to nothing about Islam and its followers.
Whatever is spread around as knowledge of this culture and religion is the work of a media that is highly politicized and biased, often perpetuating negative and even racist images of Muslims and their ways of life. This picture becomes even more complicated and complex in academia, in the West in particular but in Islamic countries as well. The story of “What is Islam?” begins in the 19th century, when the bulk of the Muslim world fell under European control, be it direct colonialism or (remote-control) coloniality. Almost everywhere, so-called reform was undertaken, with the view of modernizing institutions and subjectivities along Western lines. With secularization and unprecedented forms of politics and political organization, Islamic cultures all over the world began to undergo epistemic transformations, leading to a wholesale revaluation of the Islamic traditions themselves, and their meaning in late modernity. Various groups would attempt to redefine Islam in fundamentalist terms – in unconscious emulation of American Fundamentalist movements – while others took it in different directions, not excluding Marxism, socialism, and nationalism. But the hegemonic and almost “natural” force driving the Islamic world over the last half century has been liberalism, a powerful way of seeing and evaluating the world that deeply affected even the Islamist movements. Islam for modern Muslims has become many disparate things, often if not always incompatible with each other.