Karine Walther's Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921 explores the intersections between the histories of peoples and countries with which Americans interacted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the role of faith in shaping US foreign policy. The author uncovers the role played by Christians and Jews living in Islamic lands in exercising influence on American understandings of Islam. The book examines the rhetoric accompanying four historical moments, which shaped the US sentiment towards the Islamic world. In Part I, Walther examines the US and the Greeks and Bulgarians under the Ottoman Empire and the influential philhellene movement in the US. In Part II, she studies the hostility between Muslims and Jewish Moroccans who “benefit from their status as protégés of European and American consuls,” and Jewish American activism in Morocco (123, added emphasis). In Part III, the author traces US imperial rule in the Philippines and the Filipino “Moros.” In Part IV, the author engages with the question of how Armenian persecutions led up to World War I, the League of Nations, and the mandate system.

Throughout the book Walther shows how Americans from different backgrounds defined themselves and their American-ness through their view of Islam and Muslims. She argues that the “other” is defined and excluded. US foreign policy and its missionary work act as America's “imperial civilizing mission” that worked together in defining Islam and Muslims and constructing the historical narratives that shape American attitudes toward the Muslim world (9).

The book provides a detailed social and cultural history of the religious motivations that often constituted part and parcel of US political decisions. It captures in vivid detail not only the community's collective memory but also the lives of official and non-official actors – US missionaries, clergymen, diplomats, soldiers, businessmen, and Presidents. In so doing, the author brings to life individual personalities and the role their varying religious inclinations played in shaping US foreign policy during that time.

The book traces early domestic orientalist patterns that presented Islam as inherently violent, and demonstrates the role of politics rather than religion in shaping Muslims’ motivations and the development of race consciousness. The author also makes insightful comparisons of the role of domestic understandings of Muslims and Islamic societies with European orientalist discourse. The book stresses that such a perception of “self” versus “other” indicates a change not only in the location of “faith” on the political map of power but also in American self-identification regarding global politics and power, and the perceptions of the world and of the US nation.

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921 makes use of a wide range of materials, by official and nonofficial actors, and offers a multidisciplinary analysis of such materials, showing the possibilities of extracting rich historical information from texts created for very different purposes. The book is recommended for anyone interested in the history of American Islamophobia and its impact on US foreign policy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.