Discourse pertaining to "political Islam" and to its connection with modernization currently involves both Muslims and Westerners. This book reconstructs the development of the catch-term "political Islam" - from the original Qur'anic categorization of a "religion" to the emergence of a tendency to predicate Islam in terms of its so-called societal, and subsequently political, dimension - and shows how, by the end of the 1970s, both discourse and the "hermeneutic field" itself have become politicized, due to the emerging image of an "Islam in Movement". It looks in detail at the various discursive "circles" spanning the current "transcultural" space between "Islam" and the West, offering valuable insights for those interested in cross-cultural relations and in Islam's changing political roles.