Four excellent books about Islam in modern western politics and history.
Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (2009). A history of European translations of the Qur’an and their impact on such luminaries as Voltaire, Rousseau , Goethe, and Napoleon.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (2010). A path-breaking survey of American Muslims, documenting their diversity and importance as citizens, from the colonial era to the present.
[Reviewed on Not Even Past by Reem Elghonimi here]
Andrew F. March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for An Overlapping Consensus (2009). A political scientist’s “study of Muslim citizenship in non-Muslim liberal democracies as a religious problem for believing Muslims,” in which the author does identify an actual Islamic and liberal “consensus” about Muslim citizenship.
Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (1998). A portrait of English intellectual, diplomatic, and military contact with Islam, including the first English translation of the Qur’an in the seventeenth century and the introduction from the Middle East of “the Mahometan berry,” also known as coffee, which resulted in the spread of coffee houses in London long before Starbucks.
Related posts:
Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism by Zachary Lockman (2004)
The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Ariés (1982)
A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (2010)
Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)