Armstrong writes with a Western, predominantly non-Muslim audience in mind, and she therefore seeks to address what she perceives to be widely-held misconceptions about Islam among that target audience. Often, she explicitly cites the stereotypes that she seeks to address, such as in Part 5, when she asserts, “It is not true that Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to create a modern secular society, as Westerners sometimes imagine” (179). In other ways, the stereotypes that she responds to are woven into the subtext of the entire book, informing which points she chooses to focus on and what she chooses to say about them. Passages centered on the progressive treatment of women in early Islamic societies, Islamic cultural attitudes towards violence, and Islamic contributions to the arts and sciences all implicitly respond to misconceptions of Islam as a regressive or inherently violent religion—misconceptions that have proliferated in the US and Europe throughout the early 21st century.

Armstrong frequently uses direct comparisons between Islam and Christianity to make the content of the book accessible to an audience more familiar with the Christian tradition. For example, she writes in the preface, “A Muslim would meditate upon the current events of his time and upon past history as a Christian would contemplate an icon, using the creative imagination to discover the hidden divine kernel” (10). Armstrong uses this comparative methodology across her works, but it is not an entirely neutral form of comparison. As evidenced by the quote above, in comparisons between Christianity and Islam, she always presents the Christian perspective as more accessible and familiar, revealing her intended audience and her own biases. For readers who have no prior knowledge of Islam but some familiarity with the Christian tradition, this mode of explanation may prove very helpful for achieving understanding of the book’s content. For readers who are unfamiliar with Christianity, however, such comparisons may be doubly confusing; in the example above, the reference to icon veneration may raise a completely different set of questions for those who have never encountered that practice before.

Islam: A Short History was written and published shortly before the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. But the book’s preoccupation with addressing anti-Muslim stereotypes that depict the religion as violent and extremist anticipated the particularly forceful wave of Islamophobic hate-speech and hate-crimes that would be aimed at Muslims living in Europe and North America following those attacks. After September 11, 2001, many political and media figures in the US conflated Islam as a whole with the actions of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups, framing the so-called “War on Terror” as an epochal battle between the modern, democratic West and a Muslim world depicted as uniformly repressive, theocratic, and backward. Meanwhile, the consequences of US-led interventionism in the Middle East drove thousands of Muslims to migrate to Europe seeking safety, only to meet racist backlash from nativists who saw their presence as a threat to national identity. In 2016, fifteen years after the September 11 attacks, anti-Muslim hate crimes in the US remained five times more common than before (Samari, Goleen. “Islamophobia and Public Health in the United States.” American Journal of Public Health, 2016). First published in 2000, Armstrong’s history suggests that the September 11 attacks simply hardened the anti-Muslim sentiment that already existed in the US and Europe. In the book’s Epilogue, which was added in response to September 11, Armstrong condemns the attacks while also noting her belief that “To view [Islam] as inherently the enemy of democracy and decent values, and to revert to the bigoted views of the medieval Crusaders would be a catastrophe” (210). This message of religious tolerance, in the midst of highly polarizing events, is the core of Armstrong’s intent in writing Islam: A Short History.