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This book offers a framework for understanding the interaction between the academic disciplines 'observing' contemporary political Islam and the individuals and communities being 'observed' practising it. It investigates how different disciplinary approaches in the social sciences explain and understand their 'Islamic' subject matter, revealing how political Islam is a phenomenon that each academic discipline analyses using its own dominant paradigms, whilst attempting to combine specialist knowledge to create a more comprehensive representation of Islamism. Yet, for all the efforts that are made within each discipline, the interdisciplinary drive to united the relevant insights about contemporary political Islam amounts more often than not to educated guesses by scholars and policy analysts trying to reconstruct an elusive straw man for policy and public consumption purposes. Volpi highlights the strengths and weaknesses of key disciplinary approaches toward the Islamist phenomenon. He offers a multidisciplinary account of political Islam based on the insights provided by post-orientalism, international studies, sociology of religion, democratization studies, multiculturalism studies, security studies, and globalisation studies. His book outlines the areas of convergence and the synergies between these approaches, and highlights the gaps and misunderstandings that still exist between parallel narratives on Islamism.