Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism

by Jonathan Lyons

Despite the West's growing involvement in Muslim societies, conflicts, and cultures, its inability to understand or analyze the Islamic world threatens any prospect for East–West rapprochement. Impelled by one thousand years of anti-Muslim ideas and images, the West has failed to engage in any meaningful or productive way with the world of Islam. Formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders and perfected in the newsrooms of Fox News and CNN, this anti-Islamic discourse determines what can and cannot be said about Muslims and their religion, trapping the West in a dangerous, dead-end politics that it cannot afford.

In Islam Through Western Eyes, Jonathan Lyons unpacks Western habits of thinking and writing about Islam, conducting a careful analysis of the West's grand totalizing narrative across one thousand years of history. He observes the discourse's corrosive effects on the social sciences, including sociology, politics, philosophy, theology, international relations, security studies, and human rights scholarship. He follows its influence on research, speeches, political strategy, and government policy, preventing the West from responding effectively to its most significant twenty-first-century the rise of Islamic power, the emergence of religious violence, and the growing tension between established social values and multicultural rights among Muslim immigrant populations.

Through the intellectual "archaeology" of Michel Foucault, Lyons reveals the workings of this discourse and its underlying impact on our social, intellectual, and political lives. He then addresses issues of deep concern to Western readers―Islam and modernity, Islam and violence, and Islam and women―and proposes new ways of thinking about the Western relationship to the Islamic world.

Genres: Islam, History, Nonfiction, Middle East, Religion, Philosophy

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 5, 2012

About the author

Jonathan Lyons spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent and editor for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Monash University and lives in Portland, Oregon. His publications include The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization and (with Geneive Abdo) Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First-Century Iran.

Reviews

[Jonathan Lyons]

This book, more theoretical than my others, explains why it is that the West cannot understand Islam and instead concerns itself with its own 'idea' of the faith, its followers, and the associated civilization that it produced.

After a detailed discussion of the epistemological, social, and political barriers to our understanding, it focuses on three 'hot-button' issues: Islam and modernity; Islam and violence; and Islam and women. In each case, Islam is deprived of its own, independent existence and is subject to Western readings that may have nothing to do with how Muslims live, what they believe, and what they do.

A final section proposes a way around this conundrum by placing Islam and the West in the same cultural space, in competition but hardly as alien to one another as both generally assume.

[Murtaza]

A look at the discourse that has been created regarding Islam, which the offer contends was first given shape during the Crusades and has not changes much since. Employs Foucault's theories about discursive knowledge and our inclination to discount objective facts which we deem "outside the true".

This is a slim volume, the Foucault was all new to me but I appreciated the insight into the manufacture of knowledge. Essentially the West first crafted a discourse about Islam before it knew any Muslims, and subsequent knowledge and interactions have never served to develop a more nuanced picture. Certain groups in society have always benefited from the maintenance of this discourse, and they've been able to pull it off the shelf anew whenever the need arose (ie. post-9/11) The strongest chapter in my opinion was on Islam and Violence, its remarkable how little things have changed in these characterizations going from the Crusades, First Indian Revolution til today.

[Anna C]

I'm fine with intellectual or philosophical texts, but not when the author hides behind intellectual semantics to avoid tackling with the real issues. Take, for example, the chapter on Women in Islam. Is Lyons (an eloquent apologist) going to address female genital mutilation? No, he spends most of his time doing a literary analysis of Montesqieu.

[Diane]

Disappointing

[David]

I was disappointed with this book. I can't remember the last time I gave up and didn't finish any book. I actually had hoped to learn something but after reading the first chapter, I realized it was nothing more than anti-conservative talking points dressed up to look like a scholarly discussion and stretched to make it into a book. Pro-Muslim and anti-Conservative "facts" are thrown out without references or any sources as if they are commonly known and accepted as facts. I have read quite a few books on this topic by a broad sample of ex-Muslims, current Muslims, converts, former radicals, etc. And almost every day there are news stories and anti-Western attacks, verbal and physical, that counter many of the author's arguments. Maybe if I had more staying power and got further into it, I may have found that the tone changed. At least it was a library book so nothing out of my pocket; just the time invested in trying to read it.

[Steve]

I had previously read this author's "House of Wisdom" which focused on the transmission of medieval Islamic science to Europe. That book was written by the author wearing his reporter's hat, and was an easy and interesting read. This book seems to be an outgrowth of his sociology PhD dissertation, is full of academic methodological discussion, and is accordingly a harder read. Lyons draws on the methodology of Michel Foucault to posit--and I feel convincingly demonstrate--a Western "anti-Islam discourse" dating from Urban II's call for the First Crusade. This discourse has been adapted and adopted by the West ever since, subsequently being used by clerical reformers and Reformers, Renaissance humanists, early modern scientists and mathematicians, Enlightenment "philosophes," Victorian Orientalists and colonial administrators, all the way up to Neoconservatives and "Islamic Experts" to portray the Islamic world within the self-contained and self-beneficial context of the discourse, without reference to the actual facts and lives of the Muslims. Indeed, facts that do not accord with the discourse are denied or rejected. Foucault's methodology, as one would expect from a modern French intellectual, is obscure and pretentiously presented to the point of being virtually unintelligible, but the author does a good job of extracting the meaning, and it helps me understand how Fox News and the Tea Party can so straight-facedly lie and lie and lie. On the other hand this is another example of a book that is probably better as a magazine or journal article and has been stretched to fill the covers.