The discipline of Islamic studies has been effortlessly coasting in essentialist mode, happily subscribing to the nostalgia of authenticity and the touchstone of inner experience. This, despite several persuasive critiques mounted internally within religious studies to interrogate the genealogies and categorical assumptions to which the field has traditionally ascribed, and to which it continues to do so. Although this interrogation made little if no impact on the study of Islam, another event, one uncanny and not academic in the slightest, would create a sea-change in the ways that Islamicists perceived themselves and were perceived by others, not only inside the academy but also outside of it. The events of September 11, 2001, witnessed the transformation of many Islamicists from being specialists in often-arcane areas of medieval Islamic jurisprudence or philosophy to sudden experts in Islamic mentalities (a genealogy that should not come as a surprise given the subject matter of Chapter 2). As the media came calling, many Islamicists were hauled (often all too happily) in front of cameras to inform an ignorant public about the eternal truths of Islam and to establish the fact that those who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11 were not real Muslims.