In his broad survey of British-Muslim relations, Martin Pugh seeks to educate the general public and correct prejudice through historical analysis, which is both laudable and welcome. So is the book's broad scope. However, while Pugh does a fine job laying out a promising periodization for major fluctuations in British-Muslim relations over the long term, the book falters in its attempt to orient general audiences to the genuine historical complexities of the conflicts involved.

Pugh's analysis begins with an account of the origins of Islam and concludes with reflections on the celebration of Ramadan in twenty-first-century Britain. In between these bookends, he notes at least eight major historical trends in “Britain's” approach to “Islam”: the emergence of fanatical hostility toward Islam during the Crusades; the cultivation of pragmatic diplomatic relations with Muslim majority countries in the wake of the Protestant Reformation; the growth of tolerance toward Islam amid increasing imperial business contacts in the eighteenth century; the return of hostility toward Islam in the Victorian age of progress and industrial expansion; the development and maintenance of a grand strategy aimed at preserving the existence of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century; the cultivation of a habit of intervention in the domestic affairs of Muslim majority countries before World War II; the growth of Muslim immigration to Britain as Britain's identity fragmented following World War II; and, finally, the social convergence of Muslim and non-Muslim communities in twenty-first-century Britain.

Curiously, Pugh does not begin with the actual origins of British-Muslim relations, nor does he attempt to contextualize the historically contingent cultural-political ideas of Britain and the Muslim world. Instead, he starts with a brief sketch of the religious development of Islam that skims over controversies and fumbles basic facts. Pugh describes relations between Christianity and Islam before the Crusades in simplistic terms. He characterizes the relationship as “generally good” “despite some Christian martyrs under early Islam” but shows no acquaintance with the considerable scholarship on Syriac Christian responses to Islamic expansion that might nuance his view (4). Christians outnumbered Muslims in the region at the time and left copious documentation of their experiences under Muslim rule—sources now widely available in English translation. Furthermore, Pugh minimizes the theological differences between the two faiths, suggesting without qualification that Muslim critique of the Trinity was acceptable to “many Christians” (7). This fails to do justice to the nature of Christian theological concerns about Islam at the time. Pugh also mishandles basic facts. In his summary of the history of slavery among Muslim-majority societies, Pugh suggests Saudi Arabia and Yemen were the final states to abolish slavery in 1962 when the last such states to abolish slavery were actually Oman in 1970 and Mauritania in 1980 (11).

In Pugh's narrative, England first enters the story with a brief mention of Saxon awareness of Islam before the focus shifts to the crusading phenomenon in Europe and its contribution to “the late-medieval disparagement of Islam” (38). Here, Pugh shows no acquaintance with the extensive scholarship on crusading motivations and organization in the last several decades, which has challenged the notion that the Crusades were defined chiefly by their hostility to Islam. He ends the chapter with Sir Steven Runciman's famous quote characterizing the Crusades as “one long act of intolerance in the name of God” while never having grappled with the precise nature of the theologies, politics, and cultural developments motivating that intolerance and violence in the first place.

Pugh focuses thereafter largely on the monarchs, statesmen, diplomats, and businessmen that made English and later British foreign policy. He pays little attention to missionaries and humanitarians concerned about Islam and its treatment of Christian minorities outside India. Pugh notes that Christian minorities “made a great deal of internal trouble for the Ottomans” and “were regarded as incorrigible rebels”—a perspective he does not challenge, qualify, or explain (127). He touches on Gladstone's concern for these Christian minorities in the nineteenth century but says nothing about the sustained public interest in this problem that continued up through World War I. The Armenian genocide is conspicuous in its absence, even though it is arguably the first major global humanitarian crisis and catapulted British discussion of humanitarian intervention to a global stage, as Michelle Tusan has shown (The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill [Bloomsbury, 2017]). As a result, when Pugh concludes that Britain developed a “counter-productive” “habit of intervention” in Muslim majority countries, the reader is once again left with a contextually thin account as to why the British thought such intervention necessary at the time (107, 119).

Pugh depends on a very thin base of secondary sources for his analysis of the prominent diplomatic, military, and political figures who shaped British policy. For example, he relies exclusively on the quirky account of Michael Asher for his assessment of T. E. Lawrence, and his evaluation of Churchill's view of Islam would have been vastly improved through engagement with the relevant writings of Michael Makovsky and Warren Dockter. As Margaret Meserve has noted, Western views of Islam “may all be equally tendentious, defamatory, and untrue. But they are so in different ways” (Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought [Harvard University Press, 2008], 11). It is the task of historians to explore and explain such differences.

Pugh's treatment of Muslim responses to Western political and military incursions suffers from the same shortcomings. Pugh suggests that Qasim Amin's argument for “female emancipation” challenged Lord Cromer's prejudiced views about Islam and women even as Leila Ahmed's more contextual account of colonial intellectual culture provides ample evidence that Amin and Cromer offered the same rationales for their views (150). Pugh may disagree with Ahmed, but he shows no awareness that his interpretation of Amin is a contested one. Moreover, Pugh asserts unequivocally and with little supporting evidence that Muhammad Ali-Jinnah was “primarily a nationalist, and only nominally a Muslim” with seemingly little appreciation that Jinnah's ambiguous statements about Islam remain one of the most contested aspects of his complicated political legacy (203).

Ultimately, Pugh's work is informed by good intentions, but it does not succeed in providing a reliable introductory historical guide to its important subject for the general public.