Temple Gairdner’s The Rebuke of Islam, published in 1920, has long been recognized as one of the classics of Christian response to Islam in the early 20th century. Part of its significance is that Gairdner’s approach sums up the very best of earlier approaches (especially in the 19th century), but breaks significantly new ground and therefore points forward to approaches that have been developing between his time and the present day.

Gairdner began his work as a British missionary of the Church Missionary Society in Cairo in 1899 and died there in 1928. He described this book as ‘the fruit of twenty years spent in the East in one of the great centres of Islam and of some sincere hard thinking …’ (iii). It was the fifth, thoroughly revised, edition of his book published in 1910 under the title The Reproach of Islam, and was originally intended to be used in mission study groups in British churches and not as an academic textbook. It received an enthusiastic response, with 20,000 copies of the first edition being published.