The Foreign Affairs review of this book noted that  “by playing up the influence of European thought on Muslim intellectuals, Aydin makes those thinkers captive to a version of history in which Muslims did not create unifying identities on their own terms before the imperial expansions of the nineteenth century… Yet within the Muslim-majority territories of the premodern era, notions such as umma (the Muslim community), caliphate (a political community headed by a caliph), and imamate (a Shiite political community led by an imam) played important roles in calls for political unity”.  The Globe should have had "The Idea of the Muslim World"  reviewed by an expert, instead of settling for Saunders.