Islam in the Eyes of the West

This is an excellent and timely book in which the authors have expended great efforts both to diagnose and counterbalance the near-pathological tide of Islamophobia currently sweeping the West. However, it is a testimony to the power of this tide that even such a group of enlightened and sensitive authors could not resist the clichés associated with vilifying Islam, as the subtitle announcing that we live in “an age of terror” reveals. How could a couple of terrorist outrages determine that we now live in an “age of terror”, rather than in an age of imperialist wars (“global militarism”, to use the editors’ term) or banking collapse or xenophobic paranoia?

For precisely this reason, being timely also means that the book has tried to undertake a very difficult task. Like similar collections, the book originated in a conference held in Canada in 2008 to ‘examine the relationship between the Muslim world and the West which has been fraught with negative tension since the Crusades’. As the book shows, the expression “negative tensions” is a major understatement. The book is concerned mainly with the representations of Islam and Muslims in the western media and political and cultural discourse. As academics, the authors are concerned mainly with the western academic discourse on Islam, but also with the “images” dominating the mainstream media, reflecting ‘a reservoir of cultural suspicions and clichés’ that divide and feed the conflict.