Heretic and Hero

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.