Introduction: Contemporary Debates in Islam: Modernism versus Fundamentalism: An Anthology of Islamic Thought

This book presents a series of articles, treatises, and exposés on historically significant issues written by prominent theologians, scholars, and academics in the Islamic world from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth. These works constitute only a small sample of the vast array of intellectual products of Muslim scholars in this period. They display those diversities in theme and orientation that demonstrate the dynamic nature of the religion of Islam, far from its image that has been portrayed in certain media as a monolithic and stagnated system of ideas. This dynamism is naturally a function of the changing social conditions in time and space.