THE BEAUTY WE FEAR: THE GREAT MOSQUES OF THE WORLD

THE BEAUTY WE FEAR: THE GREAT MOSQUES OF THE WORLD is a concise, book-length essay written to counter the stereotype that many Americans and Europeans carry in their minds of the mosque as breeding ground for terror. To confront the negative myths about Islam and the mosque flooding the West, the author peruses three centuries of writing by Western Orientalist authors whose direct experience with the great mosques led them to regard Islam, or at least its mosques, with awe. In such writing we are told that the true "terror" is to be found not in the dangers that Islamic extremists pose to Western civilization, but in the beauty that emanates from Islam's architectural splendors as a reflection of the harmony and contemplation filling the Muslim spirit with peace. But Denson doesn't end with the lofty ruminations of the Western convert to Islamic beauty. He sees to it that we are brought down to earth by the equilibrium of secular Muslims writers whose daily experience of mosques, conjoined with the Western writers inured to their romance and spectacle, testifies that whether the great mosques elicit our fear, awe, or indifference, in the end these magnificent structures are no less the receptacles of our own projected emotions and knowledge than any other public edifice.