Britain and Islam

Academic study of the relationship between Islam and its communities, political powers and empires, commerce and migration and settlement with Britain has been well served in the 20th and 21st centuries. This addition by Martin Pugh, a former Professor of Modern British History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, has two self-declared objectives. Firstly, Pugh sets out the intention of explaining ‘... how radically British relations with Muslims have fluctuated over the 1,400 years since the foundations of Islam, from fanatical propaganda associated with the Crusades, to the pragmatic collaboration with Muslim states inspired by the Protestant Reformation, the appreciation of the extensive common ground between Islam and Christianity in the eighteenth century, and Britain’s pose as a defender of Islam (in the shape of the Ottoman Empire) by the early nineteenth century’ (p. xii). Secondly, Pugh wishes to write for the “general reader” a “corrective” to ignorance, misconception, and prejudice about Islam (p. xiii).