The subject of Islam and Muslims has been of continuing interest to the West for a long time. Some historians observe that such an interest dates back to the founding of the religion. Indeed, Maxime Rodinson, the wise student and scholar of Islam, opened his essay “Europe and the Mystique of Islam” by stating, “Western Christendom perceived the Muslim world as a menace long before it began to be seen as a real problem.”

The interest, or curiosity, about Islam and Muslims since 9/11 has been unprecedented. There is peril, however, in this burst of interest, of coming to view the subject primarily through the lens of 9/11 and, consequently, acquiring a distorted understanding of a world religion and its adherents.

This reading list is drawn as an invitation to begin a journey of discovery of Islam and Muslims in the company of those who made the subject their life’s devotion. The selected titles provide a rounded or a near-comprehensive treatment of the subject in its various aspects as the faith and practice of more than one fifth of humanity. If it prompts the curious to step forth in this journey, this exercise will have been amply rewarding.

In Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong provides a useful and concise guide to the origin, establishment, and expansion of Islam as a faith and cultural-political entity over 1,400 years. She cogently explains key aspects of this history, such as the background of the great schism that divided Muslims into two major sects, Sunni and Shi’a, the foundational practices of the faith such as fasting, charity, and pilgrimage, and the transformation of a desert people into rulers of a new world order, widely diverse ethnically and geographically. In her final chapter, she summarizes the experience of a people who have emerged into the modern world with a rich legacy, but have fallen behind the West in terms of science and democracy.

Armstrong is a former nun, which makes her approach to the study of faith traditions balanced and sensitive. A respected author, she has previously published a biography of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam.

No other founder of a great world religion has been so venerated or maligned as the prophet of Islam. For Muslims, Muhammad is the example par excellence of human conduct, of engagement with the world, and of triumph over adversity. He is the medium through which heavenly messages are communicated to humankind, and it is imperative that non-Muslims learn about Muhammad without the invectives of polemical biographies.

Martin Lings, author of Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, is an expert on Arabic language and history, and served as Keeper of the Oriental Manuscripts at the British Museum. His intimate knowledge of the Arab-Muslim world prepared him to write Muhammad’s life in prose that evokes the simplicity and grandeur of an individual who, like Moses or Jesus, shaped the course of human history. There is no other work of a similar kind in the English language. It remains required reading for anyone who wants to become acquainted with the prophet of Islam.

As the title suggests, Lings’ biography of Muhammad is based on the earliest Arab-Muslim sources from the 8th and 9th centuries, the first two centuries of Islam after the prophet’s demise in 632 AD. Here we have the prophet’s portrait drawn from records based on memories of men and women who witnessed him in person, or learned about him directly from those who were witnesses. Lings brings alive the drama of Muhammad’s life through these perspectives.

The Quran is the sacred text of Islam. There are a few readily available English translations of the Quran (the finest is by A.J. Arberry), and any meaningful translation requires a commentary on the text. Fazlur Rahman’s Major Themes of the Quran is the most insightful, modern, and accessible commentary of an uncommon book that is open to multiple interpretations.

Rahman, a highly regarded scholar, explores thematically the sacred book in which God speaks to mankind. Rahman discusses what God discloses of Himself to humans, and what is so special about the creation of Adam and of human destiny. The Quran reveals God, the Creator and the Sustainer of the universe, as intimately involved in and concerned about human affairs. Rahman examines the Quran’s teachings about making a just and ethical society, about good and evil, about nature and our relationship with it, about prophets and their role in history, and about time and its finality.

One of the richest gifts of Muslims to world civilization is their contribution to mysticism. The passionate love of the seeker engaged in the mystical journey of encountering God is known in Islam as Sufism. Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam is by far the best and most comprehensive survey of Sufism, of those Muslim men and women from the earliest days of Islam consumed with the desire to experience God. Many paid with their lives for seeking this experience, while others expressed this desire in some of the finest poetry and exalted prose in the major languages of Muslims.

Schimmel was a prodigy in learning languages, and an outstanding scholar of Islam and comparative religions. The common understanding of Islam and Muslims in the West is based on a narrow political perspective. From this, the West has derived the dominant image of a people engaged in certain rituals, an orthodoxy preoccupied with social behaviour, and a history dominated by conflicts. In Mystical Dimensions readers will discover, in prose worthy of the subject, the highly developed tradition within Islam of contemplation, and the inward quest of the heart for the infinitely beautiful, which keeps faith alive among common people.

Muslim history is also a record of politics shaped by religion, of the effort to construct an Islamic society based on Quranic precepts. The popular understanding of Islam, that it makes no separation of religion and politics, is explored by L. Carl Brown, professor emeritus at Princeton University, in Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics.

Brown’s study, despite the complexity of the subject, is lucid and lively. He surveys the many trends of political thinking in Muslim history, the various responses for organizing and legitimating power, and the challenge in modern times to adapt Western political theories into Islamic practice, or reconstruct Islamic thinking to the needs of the contemporary age. As an appendix, Brown provides a useful bibliographic essay for further inquiry, and while this study is published by an academic press it is not meant to be read only by specialists.