This book reviews writing on Islam prior to the 20th century, in an effort to demonstrate that Orientalism is not the monolithic, colonialist, simplistic view that it is often presented as. The author reviews six writers of the period, as well as including other prominent writers in his discussions. He begins with Montesquieu and works his way through Max Weber, into the very early 20th century. It is a well drawn out work, but suffers a great deal from an excess of repetition, where the same sentence/paragraph/idea will appear several times over a few pages. This could have been handled better with good editing. In addition, while much of his thesis is supported, in the conclusion he begins to assert that most western aggression, such as the Crusades, were simply responses to Islamic aggression. Although this is a possible hypothesis, he presented no evidence to support it, and the writings of the thinkers that he presented throughout the book don't demonstrate that, either. The book is a valuable work, as it does remind us that the East/West relations can't be viewed through the simplistic lens of western imperialism that we are so fond of, and that any consideration of Islam needs to take into account the history of the region, and the existence of a large Islamic empire. He reminds us that the imperialism of the west in these countries that is being blamed for so much of the current problem is only at most a couple centuries old. A good antidote for simplistic thinking, but a reader should be cautious about the author's own failure to support his theses. ( )