In recent decades, the Muslim religion has aroused great interest and curiosity. This is due mainly to political reasons, occasionally related with violent conflicts, including wars and terrorism. Despite this interest, information is often received in a disorganized, incomplete manner, and great conceptual and terminological confusion is sometimes produced in the media. This book attempts to explain the essential difference between Islam (the religion) and Islamism (Islamic fundamentalism), mentioning their most relevant features, especially in terms of those matters which are subject to dispute at present, or which cause the greatest problems in interpretation.

Cristina de la Puente has a PhD in Semitic Philology (Arab studies) and is a researcher at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East of the CSIC. She works on the Western Islamic world from the ninth to fourteenth centuries, through two main lines of research: on the one hand, the transmission of religious knowledge through Arab texts (biographic dictionaries and sources on prophetic traditions) and, on the other, social history through works of Islamic law from that era. From 2012 to 2017, she was the CSIC coordinator of the Area of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Assistant Vice-President of Internationalization, Assistant Vice-President of Scientific Areas and, last of all, Vice-President of Scientific and Technical Research.