The intellectual history of contemporary Islam has been considered through contrasting approaches for the last few decades. While some Muslim thinkers have been challenging the human sciences of the “West”, epistemological irenicism has prevailed within the field itself. Reconsidering the relations between history and social sciences, the author argues that history is the most adequate discipline to make the developments in Islamic thought intelligible. Instead of a dichotomy between textual history and social history, the paper propounds different forms of historicizing Islamic knowledge. It stresses the synchronic plurality of doctrines and elucidates the specific temporality of each discipline. Against the linear historiography developed through the lens of “modernism”, it makes the case for a polyphonic history of Islamic thought.