The New York Times Book Review has devoted an entire issue to Islam. The Times has done a better job in selecting reviewers than it often does, for example, it features a trenchant piece by Ayaan Hirsi Ali – who knows of what she writes. The Times also provides at least some balance to the tendentious scholarship found in many Middle East Studies Departments, choosing to review, for instance, Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the Enlightenment.

Some of the recent works on Islam that the Times leaves out, but should have reviewed, are Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, Robert Spencer’s Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, and Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.