This paper discusses Dale Eickelman’s scholarly themes and approaches that have had an immense impact on the anthropology of Islam. Although studies that deal with Islamic political thought and movements in Muslim countries are extensive, Eickelman’s contribution has provided insights from ethnographic, historical and cross-cultural perspectives, facilitating comprehensive views of this critical inquiry. Eickelman’s major contribution has been to highlight the power of knowledge to better understand human societies. Eickelman has addressed the relation between knowledge and power in the sense that knowledge leads to power and power may facilitate knowledge. As his early published scholarship attests, Eickelman considers knowledge and power as central to understanding core drivers that bring about, over time, changes in religious and political authorities, ideologies, and social hierarchies in Muslim societies. Knowledge practices represented in mass education, mass communication, new technology, travel, labor immigration and globalization have great impact on the transformation of religious and political identities and authorities in the Muslim world. However, Eickelman has refuted modernization theories that propose that the process of social and economic modernization impacts religion and politics in such a way that secularism becomes dominant over religion, rendering it to a marginal status in the modern world. He has argued that religion has not lost its role, but rather has succeeded in gaining more religious commitment as education has generated political and religious awareness. This is to say that religion can change or transform without failing to be religion. What is significant here is that Eickelman has described religious activism in the political sphere as a distinctively modern phenomenon. The power of knowledge or education and Islamic reform movements have, within the historical context of the Muslim world, put pressures on the cults of saints, which are in relative decline. Educated people, independent of state authority, have been engaged in both religious and political activities. While it is true that the fragmentation of religious authority has enabled those who have generally been excluded from politics to act and to have their voices heard, the situation in the Middle East still requires greater participation of people in political life.