This volume investigates the core question of how 19th and 20th-century Muslim intellectuals sought to reconcile modern values and institutions with traditional Islamic ideals. Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology, leads a team of regional specialists to curate, translate, and annotate primary source documents from across the Muslim world. The work argues that Modernist Islam was a coherent, widespread intellectual movement rather than a series of isolated regional phenomena, providing a framework for understanding the evolution of Islamic political and social thought during this transformative century.

Scholars and students of Middle Eastern history frequently cite this volume as a foundational sourcebook for accessing previously untranslated primary texts. Readers note the academic rigor of the annotations and the breadth of the regional coverage, making it a standard reference for understanding the intellectual history of the modern Islamic world.