This book provides a study of secularisation and secularism in the Arab World, between middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth. It approaches the its subject in the modern history of the Arab World as a set of historical changes which affected the regulation of social, political, religious and cultural order which permeated the concrete workings of society, rather than as an ideological discussion framed from the outset by the presumed opposition between Islam and secularism. The book traces social, institutional and cultural changes of a secularising character, the emergence and consolidation of a secular political and legal system, the rise of a new type of educational and political arrangements with their complement of a modern intelligentsia, the social and institutional attrition of the Muslim religious institution and the strong reformist current in Islam, the rise of modern cognitive regimes, ideologies and secular culture, and the balances of secular and religious elements in nationalism. The book traces the rise of secularist and anti-religious culture in the variety of its manifestations, and of anti-modernism as well, and the emergence of associated religious and anti-modernist currents in the wake of the 1967 war, the associated strengthening of Islamist politics and its move from the margins to the centre in the last quarter of the twentieth century.