The last decade has seen an ever-increasing deployment of anti-Muslim tropes and stereotypes in the media and popular discourses of Western nations. As a result Islam is frequently positioned as a monolithic religion of ill-defined “otherness,” supposedly made up of oppressed women and fanatic male holy warriors who follow a creed of violence and sexual perversion. The recent US election campaign of 2012 saw Barack Obama once more accused of being a “secret Muslim,” a recognizable code standing for an alien antithesis of everything that is “American.” Where do these notions come from and why do they have such resonance and persistence?

These are the important questions that independent scholar and former journalist Jonathan Lyons attempts to answer in his most recent work, Islam through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. Drawing on two decades of experience in reporting from the Middle East and using the “intellectual archaeology” of Michel Foucault, Lyons directly connects the distant past of eleventh-century Europe with the anti-Islamic rhetoric of early twenty-first-century America. From the early days of so-called “Western” contact with Islam, Lyons examines various strands of anti-Muslim rhetoric and propaganda in considerable detail. He argues that a wide-ranging anti-Muslim discourse, led by “Islam experts,” has traditionally informed Western thinking on Islam (17–20).

Lyons spends considerable time laying the groundwork for his thesis, with two extensive chapters setting the scene for subsequent case studies. He contends that there has been a failure to critically examine the core themes of anti-Islam discourse and that these “are often asserted or simply left unstated and unacknowledged, so that they operate silently in the background as they shape our statements about Islam and the Muslims and define the disciplines that organize and classify such knowledge” (4). The author devotes significant energy towards outlining in detail the applicability of Foucauldian intellectual archaeology. It is in his application of this methodology that Lyons is at his most pedantic, constantly re-emphasizing its importance. Given the comprehensive nature of his opening chapters, this is perhaps a little unnecessary. Nevertheless, this in-depth discussion of the methodological core of his work builds a strong foundation for the following substantive chapters.

Those substantive chapters take the form of an opening examination of “The Western Idea of Islam,” followed by three thematic studies investigating different areas in which Western thought comes into conflict with Islamic thought. Here Lyons really gets into the meat of his argument, analysing “Islam and Science,” “Islam and Violence,” and “Islam and Women.” In each of these meticulously constructed case studies, Lyons repeatedly demonstrates that widely accepted conceptions of Islam run counter to what he identifies as the actual historical evidence.

The most useful of these chapters to Americanists working in the post-9/11 landscape is the one that focusses on “Islam and Violence.” Here Lyons outlines a “single, persistent Western discursive formation of violence in Islam that remains largely immune to serious challenge on historical, linguistic, and theological bases” (124), and which “securely underpins the war on terrorism” (154). The criticism of the “clash of civilizations” thesis promulgated by the likes of Bernard Lewis (the contemporary “Islam expert” par excellence) and Samuel Huntington is sustained and well argued. Lyons contends that without the historical discursive formation on Islam the “clash of civilizations” thesis would “never have arisen from relative obscurity to the position of prominence it enjoys” (194). In particular, Lewis is positioned as part of a continuum of Western “Islam experts” that includes Petrus Alphonsi in the eleventh century and Montesquieu in the eighteenth. The analysis of what Western observers mean when they talk of “jihad” is particularly stimulating, connecting as it does Lyons's argument on the “Islam expert,” Western discourses on Islam, and the perceived violence inherent in Islam as a religion (116–23).

Islam through Western Eyes is not without its problems, however. The red line that Lyons argues runs from the eleventh century through to the present day is sometimes a little faded, if not invisible. His hammering home of Foucault's methods becomes slightly wearying and there is little sense that he is willing to dwell upon the issues associated with his choice of methodology. Regardless, this is a fine, thought-provoking book. Lyons has done a great deal to provide a much-needed corrective to the dominant narrative. His work will undoubtedly inspire others to use other methodologies and sources to widen our understanding of the nature and persistence of Western views of Islam and the uses to which those views are put in the era of the war on terrorism, al Qaeda, and the Arab Spring.