This book is concerned with Western images of Muhammad and Islam and examines changing
attitudes to the Prophet and Islam in 19th-century England: It analyzes the shifts in images of
the Prophet from that of the profligate heretical lustful ambitious imposter of the late
medieval and early modern period to the much more sympathetic portrayal of Muhammad in the 19th
century as a noble Arab sincere heroic pious and courageous. It argues that such changing
images were the result of increasing knowledge about the origins of Islam and of various social
intellectual and political changes in the West. It demonstrates that the meaning of Islam for
the West was created in the complex relations between the fact of Islam and the Western myth
about it.
