The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason. By Christopher de Bellaigue. Bodley Head; 398 pages; £25. To be published in America by Liveright in April; $35.

FEW topics are as bitterly contested today as the nature of Islam. America has just elected a president who speaks pointedly of “Islamic terrorism”; his predecessor balked at connecting Islam with violence and said those who did, including terrorists, were misreading the faith.

In Western intellectual debates, meanwhile, some maintain that Islam stultifies its followers, either because of its core teachings or because in the 11th century Islamic theology turned its back on emphasising human reason. Others retort indignantly that the Islamic world’s problems are the fault of its Western foes, from crusaders to European colonists, who bruised the collective Muslim psyche.

A new book by Christopher de Bellaigue, a British journalist and historian of the Middle East, hews to the latter side, but with an unusual twist. He describes how Islam’s initial encounter with modernity, two centuries ago, had some benign consequences and he sees that as a basis for hope. Sceptics will inevitably call the book’s title, “The Islamic Enlightenment”, naive or oxymoronic.

Still, having focused for a number of years on Iran and modern Turkey (from where he reported for The Economist), Mr de Bellaigue is well-placed to tease out at least one strand of the debate about Islam: the reaction to European influence as it unfolded over the 19th century in the political and cultural centres of the Muslim world following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.

The author succeeds in his main purpose, which is to show that in Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran, prominent figures embraced aspects of Western thought and technology with discernment and gusto while remaining good Muslims. His heroes are writers, doctors, generals and sultans. They include Abdulrahman al-Jabarti, an Egyptian sheikh who articulated the fascinated shock with which his compatriots greeted the arrival of Napoleon, accompanied by scientists and scholars. Jabarti had grown up believing that his own faith’s superiority should assure success in war. However, his honest, lively mind had to acknowledge both the invaders’ more effective firepower and the intellectual heft which the French were bringing to the study of his homeland.

In Istanbul the sultan, Mahmud II (pictured), responded to the rising strength of Western powers by imitating them. He curbed the rapaciousness of his civil servants and clerical reactionaries. By removing religious restraints on the study of the body, he ushered modern hygiene and medicine into a region ravaged by plague.

In Persia, meanwhile, Abbas Mirza, a charismatic prince, drew on French and British help to modernise an army run on medieval lines. Young Persians were sent to train in Britain and proved quick learners. One of them, Mirza Saleh, wrote a remarkable account of his travels and became the country’s first journalist.

Mr de Bellaigue shows that in the Islamic world, just as in the West, efficient forms of transport and communication made it easier for intelligent individuals, including women, to share ideas. This is one example of the rich detail that his research brings to the stories of these Muslim modernisers and the violent reaction they sometimes triggered.

In the book’s final two chapters, there is an abrupt change of pace as the author speeds through Islam’s dealings with European colonial powers during the late 19th and, above all, in the early 20th century. It is a fairly accomplished gallop through difficult terrain and its purpose is to show, in very broad terms, why relations between Muslims and Westerners would eventually turn so sour. Western policies became greedier and more cynical, especially during and after the first world war, and this triggered a sharp reaction in the Muslim world, enraging humble, pious folk as well as clever elites.

The author empathises with the resentment felt by Muslims over being used as geopolitical pawns and over the arbitrary borders that were drawn by Europeans. That prompts him to write with a degree of understanding about all the popular movements that successively shook Islam’s heartland, including Turkish nationalism, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and even the Iranian uprising of 1979.

He acknowledges that these last two movements amounted to a form of “counter-enlightenment”, reinstating theocracy, but he insists that even the mullahs’ Iran has some modernising features: they educated an unprecedented number of girls.

Mr de Bellaigue is equally adamant that the positive legacy of the period closest to his heart (the early and mid-19th century) is still partially intact. For him, the very fact that there was once an era in which the Islamic world drew, selectively and intelligently, on Western ideas and technology while remaining true to itself, still gives hope. For one thing, it means that Muslims now migrating to the West retain, deep in their collective memories, an intimation that Islam can flourish in an enlightened form. His book thus offers a refreshingly optimistic counterpoint to the idea that Muslim and Western world-views are doomed to clash.