History of Islam in German Thought: From Leibniz to Nietzsche

by Ian Almond

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 Islam in the very history of German thought. Almond further demonstrates the ways in which German philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, and Marx repeatedly ignored information about the Muslim world that did not harmonize with the particular landscapes they were trying to paint – a fact which in turn makes us reflect on what it means when a society possesses 'knowledge' of a foreign culture.

Genres: Islam, Philosophy, History

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Ian Almond is a Professor of World Literature at Georgetown University (Qatar). He received his PhD in English Literature from Edinburgh University in 2000. He is the author of five books, most recently Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press, 2009) and History of Islam in German Thought (Routledge, 2010), and over forty articles in a variety of journals including PMLA, Radical Philosophy, ELH and New Literary History. He specializes in comparative world literature, with a tri-continental emphasis on Mexico, Bengal and Turkey. His books have been translated into eleven languages, including Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Serbo-Croat, Persian and Indonesian. His fifth book, on Nirad C. Chaudhuri, came out with Cambridge University Press last year.