In this critical examination of the famous South Asian thinker Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-1999), a notorious Anglophile and defender of Empire, Ian Almond analyses the factors that played a role in the evolution of his thought. Almond explores how Empire creates 'native informants', enabling local subjects to alienate themselves from and even abhor their own cultures. Through analysis of Chaudhuri's views on Islam, his use of the archive, moments of melancholy and loss in his writing, and his opinions on empire, Almond dissects the constitution of an Indian writer and locates the precise ways in which Chaudhuri was able to produce the kind of discourses he did, exploring how conservative, pro-Western intellectuals are formed in postcolonial environments. A strong comparative element places Chaudhuri's views in the context of conservative intellectuals from Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia, concluding with a consideration of present-day 'native informants' from these regions.

What would world literature look like, if we stopped referring to the “West”? Starting with the provocative premise that the “‘West’ is ten percent of the planet”, World Literature Decentered is the first book to decenter Eurocentric discourses of global literature and global history – not just by deconstructing or historicizing them, but by actively providing an alternative. Looking at a series of themes across three literatures (Mexico, Turkey and Bengal), the book examines hotels, melancholy, orientalism, femicide and the ghost story in a series of literary traditions outside the “West”. The non-West, the book argues, is no fringe group or token minority in need of attention – on the contrary, it constitutes the overwhelming majority of this world.

What would world literature look like, if we stopped referring to the "West"? Starting with the provocative premise that the "'West' is ten percent of the planet", World Literature Decentered is the first book to decenter Eurocentric discourses of global literature and global history - not just by deconstructing or historicizing them, but by actively providing an alternative. Looking at a series of themes across three literatures (Mexico, Turkey and Bengal), the book examines hotels, melancholy, orientalism, femicide and the ghost story in a series of literary traditions outside the "West". The non-West, the book argues, is no fringe group or token minority in need of attention - on the contrary, it constitutes the overwhelming majority of this world.

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.

This book 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 author addresses the significant absence of attention on the relationship between Islam and Derrida and also provides a deconstructive perspective on Ibn 'Arabi. The features explored include the opposition to systematizing representations of God/reality/the text; a re-emphasis on the radical unthinkability of God and the text; a common conception of rational thought as restrictive, commodifying and ultimately illusory - and a subsequent appraisal of confusion as leading to a higher state of knowledge; a positive belief in the infinate interpretability of the text; a suspicion of represention - and an awareness of its semantic futility, along with a common, 'welcoming' affirmation of openness and errancy towards God and the text. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and academics of Religious studies, Arabic and Islamic studies and those interested in the work of Derrida and Ibn 'Arabi.

In this critical examination of the famous South Asian thinker Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-1999), a notorious Anglophile and defender of Empire, Ian Almond analyses the factors that played a role in the evolution of his thought. Almond explores how Empire creates 'native informants', enabling local subjects to alienate themselves from and even abhor their own cultures. Through analysis of Chaudhuri's views on Islam, his use of the archive, moments of melancholy and loss in his writing, and his opinions on empire, Almond dissects the constitution of an Indian writer and locates the precise ways in which Chaudhuri was able to produce the kind of discourses he did, exploring how conservative, pro-Western intellectuals are formed in postcolonial environments. A strong comparative element places Chaudhuri's views in the context of conservative intellectuals from Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia, concluding with a consideration of present-day 'native informants' from these regions.

The west's Orientalism - its construction of an Arab or Islamic 'Other' - has been exposed and examined under the critical theory microscope and thoroughly expelled, it seems, from academic thought. At the same time postmodern 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 more insidious Orientalist strain.Ian Almond sensitively yet rigorously examines the work of Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek, as well as that of postmodern writers Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk. In doing so he exposes the implications of this 'use' of Islam for both the postmodern project and for Islam itself. Taking apart the assumptions, omissions and contradictions inherent in these thinkers' approaches to Islam and to the Arab world, and drawing on the work of prominent Muslim thinkers including Ziauddin Sardar, Aziz Al-Azmeh and Bobby S. Sayyid, "The New Orientalists" highlights the difficulty of ever speaking truly about the 'Other'. In light of the current Western climate of fear and hysteria surrounding the Islamic world, this groundbreaking project could hardly be more timely.

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.

Examinung 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 author addresses the significant absence of attention on the relationship between Islam and Derrida. Presenting a deconstructive perspective on Ibn 'Arabi, the book's features include: * the opposition to systematizing representations of God/reality/the text * a re-emphasis on the radical unthinkability of God and the text * a common conception of rational thought as restrictive, commodifying and ultimately illusory - and a subsequent appraisal of confusion as leading to a higher state of knowledge * a positive belief in the infinate interpretability of the text * a suspicion of represention - and an awareness of its semantic futility, along with a common, 'welcoming' affirmation of openness and errancy towards God and the text. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and academics of Religious studies, Arabic and Islamic studies and those interested in the work of Derrida and Ibn 'Arabi.

When Englishman and Turk fell side by side in the killing fields of the Crimea, it was not the first time that Christian and Muslim blood was shed, and intermingled, in the cause of battling a common foe. It is fashionable today to talk of a 'clash of civilizations', and of an unbridgeable chasm between the Islamic world and Christendom. But in this bold and iconoclastic book Ian Almond 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. As we read of savage battles, deadly sieges and many acts of individual heroism, we learn of Arab troops rallying in their thousands to the banner of a Christian emperor outside the walls of Verona. Of Spanish Muslims standing shoulder to shoulder with their Christian Catalan neighbours in opposition to Castilians. Of Greeks and Turks forming a steadfast bulwark against Serbs and Bulgarians, their mutual enemy. And of tens of thousands of Hungarian Protestants assisting the Ottomans in their implacable and terrifying march on Christian Vienna. As the author shows, any notion that 'Christian Europe' has long been 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 and realpolitik, not by jihad or religious war. This insight has profound ramifications for our understandings of global politics and current affairs, as well as of religious history and the future shape of Europe.