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This is a controversial and dramatic portrait of a defining choice in US foreign policy that sacrificed years of carefully built good relations with the Arab world, from a leading Lebanese American scholar recently honored by the Carnegie Corporation for his work enriching the discourse on Islam. America has seen the Arab world variously as a place to be saved, educated, traded with and them as a regional political challenge to be managed - sometimes all simultaneously. To the Arabs, America appeared first as huddles of missionaries, as educated institutions, then as oil-needy industrialists and in a final dizzying betrayal as the prime mover behind the legitimization of the state of Israel. From afar, each has looked exotic and enticing to the other; up close the experience has been fright with tension and resentment. In this provocative new book, Lebanese American scholar Ussama Makdisi explores the relationship that might have been between the Americans and the Arabs - based on many shared educational and cultural values-and how close that relationship was to being realised. Makdisi tells of the years when America was an ideal that Arabs could aspire to. And he chronicles in close detail the key moment when the relationship went awry, offering sobering policy recommendations on how America can redeem itself in Arab eyes.