12- Nasr ironically notes...

12- Nasr ironically notes, “in many of the major centers of Middle Eastern studies, everything is taught seriously except Islam itself.

One sees often in such centers numerous courses on history, anthropology, languages, sociology, political science, and similar subjects pertaining to the Islamic world, but little in-depth study of Islam as the religion… There is no greater source of distortion than applying the secularist perspective of the past few centuries in the West to a religion and civilization where it does not apply.” (Nasr, 2009, pgs.19, 23).

13- Such political initiatives are highly motivated by modern attempts to spread Western culture in the Muslim world through various methods like increasing secularization of Muslim societies and advocating Western gender roles (Kincheloe and Steinberg,, 2004, pgs.44-47, 161-163).

One author went so far as to twist the words (relying on an average reader’s ignorance of Arabic syntax and morphology) of 18th century Islamic revivalist Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab to re-present some of his statements regarding the rights of women as supportive of current Western conceptions of female gender roles. Many references link to page numbers that don’t even exist in the original work (see Delong-bas’s Wahhabi Islam: From Revival to Reform, 2004)!

14- A common myth, which depends on absolute ignorance of the existence of Arabic resources to refer back to, but nonetheless is mind-numbingly recycled (either explicitly or implicitly by ignoring roughly 1400 years of Islamic scholarship that entails otherwise) is that these aforementioned sects were the most important in Islamic history and then somehow magically with the advent of Muslims like Abdul Wahhab in the 18th century and Sayyid Qutb in the 20th, Islam evolved “political/economic” aspects.

In reality, Islam has always been practiced as a social way of life in the Muslim world up until colonization when most aspects were effectively secularized (see History of Islam by Akbar Shah Najeebabadi). The false notion that such revivers or reformers were bringing something new is simply because they tried to reincorporate such aspects during/after colonization, blasphemy to Western academia which believes that the world was created in the European Enlightenment.

15- By no means do I intend here that Islam is now, or was ever in the past, something with absolutely no variables.