"This volume looks at these two very different approaches to Islam, illustrating how Islamic modernism and fundamentalism were diverse discourses on a set of historically significant issues that Islamic societies have faced since the nineteenth century. The editors have selected the most prominent Islamic thinkers of modernist and fundamentalist viewpoints from the late decades of the nineteenth century to recent decades of the twentieth century.

The writers discuss their own views with regard to such issues as philosophical and political conceptions of democracy, the state, the history of Islam, women's rights, personal lifestyle, education, and the West. The essays reveal what is sharp and what is subtle in the differences between modernism and fundamentalism, and offer the reader a variety of perspectives from contemporary Islamic thought."--BOOK JACKET.