This article argues that western academia has largely eschewed dialogical understanding in favour of Marxist-inspired accounts and poststructuralist theorizing of the Muslim world. The over-abundance of the critique of ideology, other forms of `ideological demystification' and anti-essentialist theorizing have resulted in the failure of the human sciences to adequately understand the emergence of contemporary Islamic and Islamist fervour and its relationship to modernity. In contrast to much, but not all, of the literature on Islam and modernity, the article develops a reconstructed dialogical theory, which draws upon both Gadamerian hermeneutics and interreligious dialogue, as a means to take more seriously the truth-claims of the Islamic Other. By drawing upon notions of `suspicion' and `silence' from interreligious dialogue, a reconstructed dialogical model can overcome the absence of critique, a charge often levelled against hermeneutic dialogue, without resorting to the Enlightenment mode of critique. Although a reconstructed dialogical framework is not without its own problems, for instance how to overcome the gap between a foundationalist Islamic worldview and an increasingly post-foundationalist secular one, it provides a better prospect for understanding the Other.
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