ISLAMIC STUDIES [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS]. The study of Islam is both an ancient and a modern endeavor. It has its roots among Muslims in a long-established and continuing tradition of scholarship and interpretation of their own faith. Among others, particularly medieval Christians, the study was motivated by polemical ends aimed at establishing self-authenticity and preeminence by attributing to Islam, often pejoratively, error or willful misappropriation. This tendency has lingered on, though the medieval constructions and assaults on Islam have assumed different forms and emphases. The academic study of modem Islam, on the other hand, grew primarily out of the Enlightenment tradition of European scholarship and interest in Asian and African cultures and peoples, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had assumed some of the normative contours and institutional patterns that are associated with the general discipline of thought and expertise known...