Traveling to archives in Tunisia, Morocco, France, and England, with visits to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Spain, Nabil Matar assembles a rare history of Europe's rise to power as seen through the eyes of those who were later subjugated by it. Many historians of the Middle East believe Arabs and Muslims had no interest in Europeans during this period of Western discovery and empire, but in fact they were intensely preoccupied with the naval and industrial development, politics, and trade of European Christendom. Beginning in 1578 with a major Moroccan victory over a Portuguese invading army, Matar surveys this early modern period, in which Europeans and Muslims shared common cultural, commercial, and military goals. He concludes with a detailed history of the decline of Arab-Islamic power and the rise of Britain and France.

Matar focuses on how Spain, France, Britain, Holland, Italy, and Malta transmitted knowledge of Euro-Christians to the nonprint cultures of North Africans. With a translation of twenty primary texts, he presents the experiences of Muslim captives in Europe, who were the first to provide their compatriots with information regarding Christendom, and he recounts complex cultural encounters in which Muslim delegates met with Christian men and women and visited regions of high social, infrastructural, and artistic development. Matar reveals that the Arabs of the Maghreb and the Mashriq were eager to engage Christendom, despite wars and piracies, and hoped to establish routes of trade and alliances through royal marriages. With the rise of an intolerant and exclusionary Christianity and the explosion of European military technology, however, these links were destroyed and Muslims fell under the hegemonic expansion of Western power.