Orientalism and Islam is a remarkable study. Based on an extensive reading of sources, the book presents a detailed account of the elaborations on “Oriental despotism” in the writings of Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. (The chapter on Marx was originally published in 1997.) The first three chapters of the book provide a very useful overview of the wider European (mostly British and French and at times also North American) debate on the Orient (mostly the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and, less frequently, Persia) and Islam.

The first chapter deals with “European Views of Islam and Their Correlation with Oriental Despotism.” Norman Daniel's study, Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), on European views of Islam between the 12th and 14th centuries serves as a baseline. Focusing on the debate in Europe especially from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the chapter shows that “Islam continued to be viewed as at least partly responsible for Oriental despotism, the degradation of women, slavery and a passive, obedient population subject to cruelty and violence” (p. 32). Although the survey also mentions a 1674 work by Henry Stubbe, probably the first English writer sympathetic to Islam (pp. 34–35), the overall picture shows a very critical attitude: the writers reviewed “believed that the precepts of Islam gave credibility to despotism, and they were deeply critical of those despotic governments they thought were committed to an Islamic mission to conquer the world” (p. 37).

The second chapter reviews the writings of “Observant Travelers,” including Richard Knolles (1545–1610), “who never left England” (p. 46). “Each traveler told his own individual story, but all described similar features of Oriental politics and societies” (p. 39), and their views were mostly negative. The author explains the uniformity of the views by arguing that these journeys were undertaken at a time when Western societies developed in a markedly different direction from Eastern ones. In Western societies political structures and institutional arrangements emerged “that could restrain the central ruling power. By contrast, Oriental systems lacked such general restraints of this kind as well as the separate corporate bodies that could limit the power of rulers” (p. 40). According to note 7 (pp. 40, 319), the author's understanding of European developments is based on Michael Cook's edited volume Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press, 1970) and Bernard Lewis’ The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)—a rather awkward choice of sources given their age and, despite their wide range of expertise, neither Cook nor Lewis is a scholar of European history.

The third chapter focuses on “Political Thinkers and the Orient.” After a brief discussion of the difficulties inherent in typologies in comparative political science, the author states that the term “despotism” can nonetheless be employed “to refer to a particular kind of nondemocratic rule or society in any comparative study, and more particular the term Oriental despotism can be used to refer to that kind of rule in Eastern countries” (p. 51). He elaborates that, although hardly used until the late 16th century, the term “despotism” was employed in the 17th and 18th centuries to criticize absolute monarchical rule:

From there, the concept of despotism is traced from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Adolphus Slade, a British naval officer, in the 19th century, with special emphasis on the Enlightenment. Though there were some less critical voices in the 18th century (pp. 61–64), a very wide consensus can be identified.

As for the thesis of the book, the author states that: “Reading the accounts of Oriental societies by scholars, political thinkers, diplomats, and travelers, it is reasonable to conclude that the concept of Oriental despotism is not an arbitrary exegesis, the result of prejudiced observation, having little relation to Eastern systems, but rather reflects perceptions of real processes and behavior in those systems” (p. 71). More generally,

This is a rather astonishing argument. Does persistent repetition have any “truth value”? Ministries of propaganda would certainly rejoice. The dichotomy of arbitrary prejudice versus truth underlying the argument is misleading. All texts/historical sources are arbitrary and prejudiced; there are no “objective” ones. They may nonetheless contribute to the understanding of “reality,” past and present, on the condition that they are properly contextualized—each one in its specific context, East or West. The author does not contextualize the texts studied in this way. Instead, they are read against a master narrative presented in the introduction (see the following) that may be open to challenge and that is certainly much too general.

As is obvious from the thesis, the book is meant to refute the criticism raised against European (Western) scholarship by what the author refers to as “the (neo-) Foucaultian argument” (pp. 8–9), that is, Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) and the methodological debate that followed—as, for example, surveyed in Zachary Lockman's Contending Visions of the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The author instead views himself (p. 7) as following Maxime Rodinson's position in La Fascination de l'Islam (Paris: La Decouverte, 1978). The proposed understanding of European views is facilitated by a specific reading of the history of the encounter between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, elaborated in the introduction (pp. 18–30). It is a story of continuous Muslim aggression against Christian Europe, inspiring fear. The fear is said to have subsided only by the end of the 18th century, as the European Christian powers began to dominate and control most of the Muslim world. Already by the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire and its institutions are seen to have been in decline (p. 29). According to note 57 (p. 317), the author's understanding of the developments in the Ottoman Empire is based on Elie Kedourie's Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1974), Paul Coles’ The Ottoman Impact on Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), Bernard Lewis’ The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), and Norman Itzkowitz's “Eighteenth Century Ottoman Realities” (Studia Islamica 16 [1962]: 85–91). That means that forty years of scholarship in a burgeoning field of research have not been taken into account, including several major shifts in the understanding of Ottoman history.

The thesis may be open to challenge, and there is lots of room to improve the contextualization of the texts discussed. But in its current form the book is undoubtedly a treasure trove; it would be most valuable as a reading assignment for historiography classes.