Faces of Muhammad

This book is a well-timed and long-awaited survey of the European portrayal of the Prophet of Islam, throughout many centuries of Christian-Muslim contacts. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, has always been at the centre of European discourse on Islam and Muslims. His image was created as a consequence of the historical encounter between Islam and Europe. The contacts between these two great civilisations, Islam and Europe, however, had been mostly complex and sometimes even tense throughout the epochs of their struggles, which included the Crusades, colonialism, Orientalism, the Cold War and energy geopolitics, recent radical tendencies in the Muslim world, and the consequences of 9/11 on security. It seems that, in the context of globalisation and mass migration movements, the world is witnessing a new juncture in the encounter of Islam and the West with the escalation of Islamophobia and ultranationalistic parties. ‘Otherness’ has become today an essential criterion in communal acceptance and human relations. The controversy over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 and the French satirical magazine CharlieHebdo in 2015 revealed the potentially unstable nature of the Western views of the Prophet of Islam. Negative perceptions of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam could easily be detected today in the media, academia and the public sphere. The book written by John Tolan, however, proficiently highlights that such negativity is just a partial European or Western image of the Prophet of Islam which was the result of various drastic changes due to economic and ideological interests.