Dhimmī or muʿāhid (معاهد) is a historical term for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state with legal protection. The word literally means "protected person", referring to the state's obligation under sharia to protect the individual's life, property, as well as freedom of religion, in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of the jizya tax, in contrast to the zakat, or obligatory alms, paid by the Muslim subjects. Dhimmi were exempt from military service and other duties assigned specifically to Muslims if they paid the poll tax (jizya) but were otherwise equal under the laws of property, contract, and obligation.
Islamic fundamentalism has been defined as a revivalist and reform movement of Muslims who aim to return to the founding scriptures of Islam. The term has been used interchangeably with similar terms such as Islamism, Islamic revivalism, Qutbism, Islamic activism, and has been criticized as pejorative.
Bernard Lewis, was a British-American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis's expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West.
Daniel Pipes is an American former professor, anti-Muslim activist, and commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islamism.
Fouad A. Ajami was a Lebanese-born American professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues. He was a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Martin Seth Kramer is an American-Israeli academic with a focus on the Middle East at Tel Aviv University and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His focus is on the history and politics of the Middle East, contemporary Islam, and modern Israel.
Efraim Karsh is an Israeli and British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013, he has served as professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University. He is also a principal research fellow and former director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. He is a vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the traditional Israeli narrative of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Middle Eastern studies is a name given to a number of academic programs associated with the study of the history, culture, politics, economies, and geography of the Middle East, an area that is generally interpreted to cover a range of nations including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. It is considered a form of area studies, taking an overtly interdisciplinary approach to the study of a region. In this sense Middle Eastern studies is a far broader and less traditional field than classical Islamic studies.
The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam is a book, first published in 1967, written by Middle-East historian Bernard Lewis, and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. An updated edition was published by Oxford University Press in 1987, and another in 2002 by Basic Books.
Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward Said, in which he establishes the term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the Western world's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of the Eastern world—that is, the Orient. Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who inhabit regions throughout Asia and North Africa. Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern world, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.
Khaled Abou el Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he has taught courses on International Human Rights, Islamic jurisprudence, National Security Law, Law and Terrorism, Islam and Human Rights, Political Asylum, and Political Crimes and Legal Systems. He is also the founder of the Usuli Institute, a non-profit public charity dedicated to research and education to promote humanistic interpretations of Islam, as well as the Chair of the Islamic Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has lectured on and taught Islamic law in the United States and Europe in academic and non-academic environments since around 1990.
Oriental studies is the academic field that studies Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology. In recent years, the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies. Traditional Oriental studies in Europe is today generally focused on the discipline of Islamic studies; the study of China, especially traditional China, is often called Sinology. The study of East Asia in general, especially in the United States, is often called East Asian studies.
Michael Allan Cook FBA is a British historian and scholar of Islamic history. Cook is the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam.
Norman Arthur Stillman, also Noam, is an American academic, historian, and Orientalist, serving as the emeritus Schusterman-Josey Professor and emeritus Chair of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. He specializes in the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture and history, and in Oriental and Sephardi Jewry, with special interest in the Jewish communities in North Africa. His major publications are The Jews of Arab Lands: a History And Source Book and Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity. In the last few years, Stillman has been the executive editor of the "Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World", a project that includes over 2000 entries in 5 volumes.
Islam and modernity is a topic of discussion in contemporary sociology of religion. The history of Islam chronicles different interpretations and approaches. Modernity is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon rather than a unified and coherent one. It has historically had different schools of thought moving in many directions.
Fawaz A. Gerges is a Lebanese-American academic and author with expertise on the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, international relations, social movements, and relations between the Islamic and Western worlds.
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz is a German-American Middle East historian. He is a specialist in comparative studies of modern international relations between the United States, the Middle East, and Europe. Schwanitz is known for his research on relations between Arabs, Jews, and Germans, and on the history of German relations with the Middle East.
Secularism—that is, the separation of religion from civic affairs and the state—has been a controversial concept in Islamic political thought, owing in part to historical factors and in part to the ambiguity of the concept itself. In the Muslim world, the notion has acquired strong negative connotations due to its association with removal of Islamic influences from the legal and political spheres under foreign colonial domination, as well as attempts to restrict public religious expression by some secularist nation states. Thus, secularism has often been perceived as a foreign ideology imposed by invaders and perpetuated by post-colonial ruling elites, and is frequently understood to be equivalent to irreligion or anti-religion.
Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist. As a professor of literature at Columbia University, he was among the founders of post-colonial studies. As a cultural critic, Said is best known for his book Orientalism (1978), a foundational text which critiques the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. His model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle Eastern studies.
In the context of political aspects of the religion of Islam, political quietism has been used to refer to the religiously-motivated withdrawal from political affairs or skepticism that mere mortals can establish a true Islamic government. It is the opposite of political Islam, which holds that the Islamic religion and politics are inseparable, and Muslims should be fighting to establish true Islamic government.
