page_title: Islamic studies
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Islamic studies / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of a Painter
context_page_description: Islamic studies refers to the academic study of Islam. Islamic studies can be seen under at least two perspectives:
  From a secular perspective, Islamic studies is a field of academic research whose subject is Islam as religion and civilization.
  From a traditional Islamic perspective, Islamic studies is an umbrella term for the "religious sciences", pursued by the ulama i.e. the Islamic scholarly class.
context_section_description: The first attempt to understand Islam as a topic of modern scholarship (as opposed to a Christological heresy) was within the context of 19th-century Christian European Oriental studies.
  In the years 1821 to 1850, the Royal Asiatic Society in England, the Société Asiatique in France, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in Germany, and the American Oriental Society in the United States were founded.
  In the second half of the 19th century, philological and historical approaches were predominant. Leading in the field were German researchers like Theodore Nöldeke 's study on the history of the Quran, or Ignaz Goldziher 's work on the prophetic tradition.
  Western orientalists and Muslim scholars alike preferred to interpret the history of Islam in a conservative way. They did not question the traditional account of the early time of Islam, of Muhammad and how the Quran was written.
  In the 1970s, the Revisionist School of Islamic Studies questioned the uncritical adherence to traditional Islamic sources and started to develop a new picture of the earliest times of Islam by applying the historical-critical method.
caption: Portrait of a painter during Reign of Mehmet II (1444-1481)
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