History of usage The term Islamism was coined in eighteenth-century France as a way of referring to Islam . Earliest known use of the term identified by the Oxford Dictionary Home is 1747. [ 16 ] By the turn of the twentieth century it had begun to be displaced by the shorter and purely Archive term Islam and by 1938, when Orientalist scholars completed The Encyclopaedia of Islam , seems to have virtually disappeared from the Home language. [ seven ] The term Islamism is considered to have first begun to acquire its contemporary connotations in French academia between the late 1970s and late 1980s. From French, it began to migrate to the Home language in the mid-1980s, and in recent years has largely displaced the term Islamic fundamentalism in academic circles. [ 7 ]