Islamic studies in the context of "Oriental studies"

Henry Corbin (14 April 1903 – 7 October 1978) was a French philosopher, theologian, and Iranologist, professor of Islamic studies at the École pratique des hautes études. He was influential in extending the modern study of traditional Islamic philosophy from early falsafa to later and "mystical" figures such as Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, and Mulla Sadra Shirazi. With works such as Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964), he challenged the common European view that philosophy in the Islamic world declined after Averroes and Avicenna.

Born into a Catholic family, he converted to Protestantism between 1927 and 1930. He received a Catholic education, obtaining a certificate in Scholastic philosophy from the Catholic Institute of Paris at age 19. Three years later he took his "license de philosophie" under the Thomist thinker Étienne Gilson. He studied modern philosophy, including hermeneutics and phenomenology, becoming the first French translator of Martin Heidegger. On 13 October 1929, Louis Massignon (director of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne) introduced him to Suhrawardi, the 12th-century Persian Muslim thinker. In a late interview, Corbin said: "through my meeting with Suhrawardi, my spiritual destiny ... was sealed. Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia, illuminated the path that I was seeking." He thus dedicated himself to understanding Iranian Islam, which he believed esoterically expressed older perennial insights related to Zoroastrianism and Platonism.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (born April 7, 1933) is an Iranian-American philosopher, theologian, and Islamic scholar. He is University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.

Born in Tehran, Nasr completed his education in the Imperial State of Iran and the United States, earning a B.A. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.A. in geology and geophysics, and a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University. He returned to his homeland in 1958, turning down teaching positions at MIT and Harvard, and was appointed a professor of philosophy and Islamic sciences at Tehran University. He held various academic positions in Iran, including vice-chancellor at Tehran University and president of Aryamehr University, and established the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy at the request of Empress Farah Pahlavi, which soon became one of the most prominent centers of philosophical activity in the Islamic world. During his time in Iran, he studied with several traditional masters of Islamic philosophy and sciences.

Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson (April 11, 1922 – June 10, 1968) was an American historian and scholar of Islamic studies, best known for his pioneering work on Islamic civilization and his broader contributions to world history. He taught at the University of Chicago, where he developed an influential yearlong course on Islamic civilizations and later chaired the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought.

Hodgson's scholarship, particularly through his posthumously published three-volume work The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, introduced new interpretive frameworks to understand Islam's global and cultural complexity. He critiqued Eurocentrism and coined the term "Islamicate" to distinguish cultural phenomena associated with Muslim societies from those that are strictly religious.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (also French: Encyclopédie de l'Islam and German: Enzyklopädie des Islām; EI is a common abbreviation in all three languages) is a reference work that facilitates the academic study of Islam. It is published by Brill and provides information on various aspects of Islam and the Islamic world. It is considered to be the standard reference work in the field of Islamic studies. The first edition was published in 1913–1938, the second in 1954–2005, and the third was begun in 2007.

The Al-Azhar University (/ˈɑːzhɑːr/ AHZ-har; Arabic: جامعة الأزهر, romanized: Jami'at al-Azhar, IPA: [ˈɡæmʕet elˈʔɑzhɑɾ eʃʃæˈɾiːf]) is a public university in Cairo, Egypt. Associated with Al-Azhar Al-Sharif in Islamic Cairo, it is Egypt's oldest degree-granting university and is known as one of the most prestigious universities for Islamic learning. In addition to higher education, Al-Azhar oversees a national network of schools with approximately two million students. As of 1996, over 4,000 teaching institutes in Egypt were affiliated with the university.

Founded in 970 or 972 by the Fatimid Caliphate as a centre of Islamic learning, its students studied the Qur'an and Islamic law, along with logic, grammar, rhetoric, and how to calculate the phases of the moon. Today it is the chief centre of Arabic literature and Islamic learning in the world. In 1961 additional non-religious subjects were added to its curriculum.

The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Arabic: جماعة الإخوان المسلمين Jamāʿat al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn), better known as the Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn), is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt by Islamic scholar, Imam and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Al-Banna's teachings spread far beyond Egypt, influencing various Islamist movements from charitable organizations to political parties.

Initially, as a pan-Islamist, religious, and social movement, it preached Islam in Egypt, taught the illiterate, and set up hospitals and business enterprises. It later advanced into the political arena, aiming to end British colonial rule in Egypt. The movement's self-stated aim is the establishment of a state ruled by sharia law under a caliphate — its most famous slogan is "Islam is the solution". Charity is a major aspect of its work.

The revisionist school of Islamic studies (also critical school of Islamic studies and critical historians of Islam) is a movement in Islamic studies that questions traditional Muslim narratives of Islam's origins.

Until the early 1970s, non-Muslim Islamic scholars, (while not accepting accounts of divine intervention), accepted Islam's origin story "in most of its details", and accepted the reliability of its traditional literary sources – tafsir (commentaries on the Quran), hadith (accounts of what the Islamic prophet Muhammad approved or disapproved of), and sira (biographies of Muhammad).

Julius Wellhausen (17 May 1844 – 7 January 1918) was a German biblical scholar and orientalist. In the course of his career, his research interest moved from Old Testament research through Islamic studies to New Testament scholarship. Wellhausen contributed to the composition history of the Pentateuch/Torah and studied the formative period of Islam. For the former, he is credited as one of the originators of the documentary hypothesis.