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One of the difficulties in analysing what Islam has come to mean and to refer to since the 19th century is the absence of agreement on what Islam actually is. Does Islam name a religion, a geographical site, a communal identity; is it a concept, a technical term, a sign, or a taxonomy? The lack of clarity on whether it could be all these things at the same time is compounded by the fact that Islam has acquired referents and significations it did not formerly possess. European Orientalists and Muslim and Arab thinkers begin to use ‘Islam’ in numerous ways while seemingly convinced that it possesses an immediate intelligibility that requires no specification or definition. ‘Islam’, for these thinkers, is not only the name the Qur'an attributes to the din (often (mis)translated as religion, though there is some disagreement about this) that entails a faith [iman] in God disseminated by the Prophet Muhammad, but can also refer to the history of Muslim states and empires, the different bodies of philosophical, theological, jurisprudential, medical, literary, and scientific works, as well as to culinary, sexual, social, economic, religious, ritualistic, scholarly, agricultural, and urban practices engaged in by Muslims from the 7th to the 19th century and beyond, and much, much more. What kinds of modernist projects, intellectual endeavours and critiques, types of politics, forms of political life, spirituality, and economic and cultural practices do the new meanings and referents of Islam enable and what kinds do they disable?
Some of the new meanings and referents of Islam had a significant impact on political and social thought as well as on national and international politics in the 19th and 20th centuries and may have even more of an impact