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The religious and intellectual history of early modern and modern Islam is often reduced to a teleological and Arab-centric narrative, where modernity begins with the Egyptian Expedition or the Nahḍa, the Arab Renaissance. This history would see the succession of Sufism, Muslim reformism, Islamism, and Salafism as a “genealogy of Islamism.” Using a regressive history approach, this article will illuminate the plurality of possible pathways and the heterogeneous nature of historical moments through a presentation of the current dynamics of international historiography on Islam between the fifteenth and the twenty-first century. Moving back through time, it attempts to identify breaks and continuities, and the successive readings of medieval authors and concepts (such as salafiyya). The article endeavors to demonstrate the constructed nature of the historiographical vulgate of “Muslim reformism” at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as that of “Arabic thought in the liberal age.” The debates on the “neo-Sufism” and Aufklärung of the eighteenth century have led to a better understanding of Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, thirst for renewal ( tajdīd) flourished in hadith, Islamic law, and Sufism. Recent research on the process of “confessionalization” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows the importance of political factors in these developments of Islam during the age of the three Empires (Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman).