The introductory chapter (Chapter 1) looks at historiographical problems in both Islamic history and the intellectual history of the Late Ottoman period, with sections including a review of the literature, a discussion of the construction of Islam as a world religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century public and scholarly discourse in the West, an examination of the discourse of Ottoman and Islamic ’decline’ and how Islamic modernism and Salafism relate to that discourse, and a review of the Late Ottoman problematisation of Islam as a social and political category.