This concise overview of the perception of Islam in eight of the most important German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allows a new and fascinating investigation of how these thinkers, within their own bodies of work, often espoused contradicting ideas about Islam and their nearest Muslim neighbors. Exploring a variety of 'neat compartmentalizations' at work in the representations of Islam, as well as distinct vocabularies employed by these key intellectuals (theological, political, philological, poetic), Ian Almond parses these vocabularies to examine the importance of...

Examines a series of common features in the works of Derrida and the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi, considered to be one of the most influential figures in Islamic thought.

The west's Orientalism -- its construction of the Arab ""Other"" -- has been exposed, examined and expurgated under the critical theory microscope in recent years yet the issue has acquired renewed urgency in light of the current climate of fear and hysteria about the Islamic world. At the same time post-modern thinkers from Nietzsche onwards have employed the motifs and symbols of the Islamic Orient within an ongoing critique of western modernity, an appropriation which -- this hugely controversial book argues -- runs every risk of becoming a new and subtle form of Orientalism. Examining the...

Demonstrates that in Europe, the heart of the west, Muslims and Christians were often comrades-in-arms, repeatedly forming alliances to wage war against their own faiths and peoples.