A Non-Muslim Islamic scholar is a scholar of Islam who is not a Muslim. Among the fields of study of the early Orientalists, most of whom were not Muslims, was Islam. Eventually, the term Orientalist was replaced [1] with the more modern Western scholar or Arabist.
Among the characteristic traits of the works of the earliest scholars was the Christian-apologist approach to Islam, most notably in the naming of the first translation of the Qur'an they produced: While this approach was kept by scholars such as Henri Lammens, and is still adopted by contemporary scholars such as Ibn Warraq, other scholars such as Karen Armstrong have taken a more hagiographical approach. In recent times, there have emerged non-Muslim scholars with a higher familiarity for the Shi'a denomination, most notably Wilferd Madelung
Over 250 western and eastern non-Muslim scholars and writers on Islam, spanning nearly 1,400 years, annotated with their dates and country, titles of their chief writings on Islam, and often other information.
