In the 21st century, Muslim reformist thought is going through a period of rapid development, during which the ideas of the renovators of the 19th - 20th centuries are being transformed and developed. In the late 20th - early 21st centuries, major Arab intellectuals put forward various ideas for rethinking the Muslim reformist paradigm by changing approaches to the study and understanding of the history of the Muslim Ummah and overcoming the non-historicity of discourse. Within the framework of this article, for the first time, an attempt was made to classify the approaches of the largest Arab representatives of the Muslim reformist movement to the study of the history of Muslim civilization from the point of view of changing the paradigms of modern humanitarian knowledge. Muhammad al-Ashmawi, within the frame-work of the positivist concept, advocated a reinterpretation of the era of the “righteous caliphs”. Faraj Fuda, who stuck to a post-positivist position, put forward the idea of an inductive rethinking of Muslim history. Muhammad al-Jabri, being a representative of structuralism, proposed to build a clear referential framework for the periodization of the history of Muslim civilization. Finally, Muhammad Arkun, analyzing the ways of solving the indicated problem, relied on the post-structuralist ideas of “applied Islamology” based on the progressive-regressive historical method. The presented classification clearly demonstrates the diversity of modern Muslim reformist thought and the multistage nature of its development. The proposed division of approaches to the study and understanding of the history of the Muslim Ummah by Arab authors can be further correlated with the typology of the development of reformist ideas in other regions of the Muslim world.