This chapter examines scholarship in Islamic studies affirming Islam’s status as the symbolic “other” of Western modernity. The 1978 double upheaval of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran transfigured popular and academic representations of Islam in the West. But the transformation that Orientalism precipitated, as scholars like Richard C. Martin have argued, has gone politically and intellectually astray. Contemporary scholars’ romanticization of Islamist rejections of modernity confuses regressive ideas concerning culture, tradition, and family values with radicalism. The chapter traces this new orthodoxy to earlier thinkers like Henri Corbin, which Steven M. Wasserstrom described as “religion after religion.” We examine the work of Omid Safi, Talal Asad, Bruce Lawrence, Hossein Nasr, and Marshall Hodgson. We also discuss a second intellectual current emanating from the Left, whose popularity was made possible by the twentieth-century political eclipse of Marxism, which critiques modernity as a fusion of secularism and liberal democracy, exemplified in Ashis Nandy’s 1983 Intimate Enemy.

The Conclusion raises the question of how the study of the literature and visual cultural of non-Greek-speaking, non-Constantinopolitan communities in the East Roman empire should relate to Byzantine studies. It further asks how the literature and visual culture of these communities should be seen as relating to Byzantine studies after these communities came under Muslim political control. A cultural, “Big Tent,” understanding of Byzantium is advocated for, one which de-privileges the state and which recognizes the importance of Christianity and its literary and visual manifestations for defining Byzantium as an object of study. This exapanded view of Byzantium includes in Byzantine studies the broader eastern Mediterranean world, Greek-speaking and non-, Chalcedonian and non-, Christian and non-.

Terms like “Classical Arabic,” “Classical Armenian,” “Classical Syriac,” and “Classical Persian,” though not entirely unproblematic, arouse minimal controversy and are widely used. These Near Eastern languages have their classical traditions of learning, all arising in the same region, all interacting with one another. Let us therefore envision a “Classical Near East” to foster modern scholarly exchange between specialists in pre-modern Near Eastern history and philology. This essay explores the prospects of a broader arena of ancient and medieval research for specialists in the premodern Near East that transcends the specializing delimitation of modern identities and religions