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Dr Ian Almond
Associate Professor,
Georgia State University, Department of English
Ph.D., Edinburgh University
Transnational Literatures

Ian Almond teaches mostly in the area of South Asian and postcolonial literature and theory. He recieved his degrees from the British universities of Warwick and Edinburgh, and has spent most of his academic life outside his home country, teaching at universities in Italy and Germany and spending a research year in India. He lived for six years in Turkey, teaching at universities both in and outside Istanbul.

He is the author of four books: Sufism and Deconstruction (Routledge, 2004), The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam (I.B.Tauris, 2007), a general military history of Muslim-Christian alliances Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press/ I. B. Tauris, 2009) and History of Islam in German Thought From Leibniz to Nietzsche (Routledge, 2009). His books have been translated into Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Persian and Indonesian.

He has also published a number of articles in journals such as PMLA, New Literary History, ELH, the Harvard Theological Review and the left-wing UK journal Radical Philosophy.

Abstracts of Dr. Almond’s publications

This article examines the many references in Nietzsche's work to Islam and Islamic cultures, and situates them in the general context of his thought. Nietzsche's praise of Islam as a 'ja–sagende semitische Religion', his admiration for Hafiz, his appreciation of Muslim Spain, his belief in the essentially life–affirming character of Islam, not only spring from a desire to find a palatable Other to Judaeo–Christian–European modernity, but also comment on how little Nietzsche actually knew about the cultures he so readily appropriated in his assault on European modernity. Nietzsche's negative comments on Islam – his generic dismissal of Islam with other religions as manipulative thought systems, his depiction of Mohammed as a cunning impostor, reveal in Nietzsche not only the same ambiguities towards Islam as we find towards Christ or Judaism, but also a willingness to use the multiple identities of Islam for different purposes at different moments in his work.

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This article attempts to examine and compare the presentation of the Orient in two separate texts by Joyce, the short story "Araby" and Ulysses. Whereas the attitude towards the 'East' in the young Joyce is essentially Romantic and almost transcendental (the Orient as a kind of afterlife where everything will be better), in Ulysses we see a more intelligent awareness of the Orient as a Western construct – a gallery of exotic images which has little to do with reality. Where the semantic emptiness of the Orient in "Araby" produces a sense of woe and melancholy, the author of Ulysses affirms the emptiness and appears unpertubed by the absense of any reality behind the various Buddhas, camels and bellydancers that appear in the novel.

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This brief article deals with the persistence of a single motif — the medieval Christian association of Islam with the Apocalypse — in the vocabulary of an early modern thinker (Schlegel), and its reappearance in the geopolitical mindscapes of two postmodern philosophers (iek and Baudrillard). The medieval motif has two variants: a thirteenth-century Franciscan version (one which sees Muslims as unconvertible signs of the Apocalypse to come) and a seventeenth-century Protestant millenarianism (in which the Muslim becomes an anti-Papist ally whom Protestant Christendom can form a coalition with, convert and ultimately march together with onto Rome). Essentially, the author argues that in his essay on the first Gulf War, Baudrillard reveals himself to be a Franciscan, whilst Zizek's approach in his treatment of both 9/11 and his book on Iraq is that of a Calvinist.

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The paper examines Luther’s attitude towards Islam and, in particular, towards the Turk, whose success against the Catholic Habsburgs Luther appropriated in some interesting ways, effectively seeing the Ottomans as the divine schoolmaster’s rod. The ambiguities inherent in Luther’s treatment of Islam, not just the paradoxical logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, but also the kinds of problems Luther runs into when trying to account for some of those points on which Islam bears some resemblance to protestant Christianity (predestination, mistrust of icons/images, refutation of pope). Ultimately, what emerges is that the figure of the Turk is both a poison and cure, an enemy but also a possible source of (worldly) succor.

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Chapter Four: Muslims, Protestants and Peasants: Ottoman Hungary 1526-1683 When, in our turbulent day, we hear of a “clash of civilizations,” it’s easy to imagine an unbridgeable chasm between the Islamic world and Christendom stretching back through time. But such assumptions crumble before the drama that unfolds in this book. Two Faiths, One Banner shows how 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. This bold book reveals how the idea of a “Christian Europe” long opposed by a “Muslim non-Europe” grossly misrepresents the facts of a rich, complex, and—above all—shared history. The motivations for these interfaith alliances were dictated by shifting diplomacies, pragmatic self-interest, realpolitik, and even genuine mutual affection, not by jihad or religious war. This insight has profound ramifications for our understanding of global politics and current affairs, as well as of religious history and the future shape of Europe.

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Lecture and discussion schedule

All lectures and discussions are free and open to the public

Wednesday, 26 May

			13.30h - Faculty of Islamic Studies, Ćemerlina 54 Book launch: Representations of Islam in Western Thought Round table discussion
			17.00h - Mediacentar, Kolodvorska 3 Round table discussion: Representation of Islam in BH media

Thursday, 27 May

			9.00h - Faculty of Philosophy (Department of Philosophy) Lecture: Nietzsche’s Peace with Islam Discussion with the author
			11.00h- Faculty of Philosophy (Department of Philosophy) Lecture: Two Versions of Islam and the Apocalypse: The Persistence of Eschatology in Schlegel, Baudrillard and Žižek Discussion with the author
			15.00h - International University of Sarajevo, Hrasnička cesta, Ilidža Lecture: Muslims, Protestants and Peasants: Ottoman Hungary 1526-1683 Discussion with the author

Saturday, 29 May

10.00h - Centre for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies (CIPS), Zmaja od Bosne 8 Lecture: Deconstructing Luther's Islam: The Turk as Curse or Cure? Discussion with the author