Ian Almond

Georgetown University in Qatar · Department of History

This is a podcast from Radio ReOrient launched by the New Books Network, in which i discuss themes surrounding World Literature and its relationship to a global history of ideas with the renowned scholar and theorist Salman Sayyid, author of "A Fundamental Fear". https://newbooksnetwork.com/literatures-beyond-the-west-ian-almond

A review of Kaiser Haq's latest book of poems, THE NEW FRONTIER.

A review of the latest book of poems by the poet Kaiser Haq

1A04 Professor Ian Almond, Ia265@georgetown.edu lesson hours: Monday Wednesday 4pm-5.15pm. office hours: Monday Wednesday 3pm-4pm ENG 2550 4pm to 5.15pm World Cinema The aim of the course is to examine the development of World Cinema from its origins to the present day. Amongst other aspects, a thoroughly critical and at times even aggressive appro...

ENG 2015 2.30pm to 3.45 Mon, Wed Professor Ian Almond Kabbalah and Literature The aim of the course is to examine the medieval Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah-primarily through its major text, the thirteenth-century Zohar-and subsequently to examine the acknowledged influence of Kabbalah upon a variety of modern writers, Jewish and non-Jewish...

syllabus for course on South Asian Literature

This essay examines the work—fiction and nonfiction—of Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar (one of Turkey's greatest modern writers) in the context of Armenians and the violence inflicted on Armenians by the Ottoman/Turkish state in 1893, 1915, and 1923. It examines the striking absence of Armenians in Tanpınar's work, given his own Armenian friends and experienc...

Laura Doyle, Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 378pp. What would a genuinely global history of the planet look like? Where and how should one begin to catalogue, chronicle, dissect the millennia of human activity on the planet-the clash of its battles, the c...

This is the middle chapter of my book WORLD LITERATURE DECENTERED (Routledge, 2022) on the retelling of myth in Mexican, Bengali and Turkish literary traditions.

an op ed in the Long View about the cultural hegemony of the West

Данная статья преследует две цели: в первом разделе рассматривается социально-политическое место Ислама (устойчивого образа, клише) в произведениях Говарда Филлипса Лавкрафта-демоны-султаны, арабские мудрецы и зарисовки, с которыми мы сталкиваемся в его творчестве, исследуются, учитывая реакционные и расистские взгля Лавкрафта. В статье анализирует...

History of Islam in German Thought Leibniz Herder Kant Hegel Schlegel Goethe Marx Nietzsche

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 active...

this is a YouTube talk on "Ten Percent of the Planet: Towards a Radical World Literature". link is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7xwatoxoyw&t=1s

YouTube talk on hotel novel in Mexican Turkish and Bengali fiction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg127P44iSo&t=3406s Novels dealt with are: "Chowringhee" by Sankar, "Motherland Hotel" by Yusuf Atilgan, and "Hotel DF" by Guillermo Fadanelli.

A talk on YouTube about Armenians in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, looking at the Armenians he knew, how they are (not) represented in his work, and offering a reading of Huzur/A Mind at Peace from the exclusive viewpoint of 1915. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAIIU6eq7sQ&t=593s

This is a video link to a talk given in October 2020 on the ghost story in Mexican, Turkish and Bengali fiction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBsY28p1AxU

What's Wrong with World Literature? Literary Scholar Ian Almond and Hasan Azad, PhD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fklFTAqpc4U&t=22s&fbclid=IwAR169ii_pHwoT9Hsn5VV-tmkJLw5lGfe4TWX4veZzU0L6s0J1nqDq83aW3g

Bengali translation of my book on Nirad Chaudhuri নীরদ সি চৌধুরীর মন: ইসলাম, সাম্রাজ্য ও হারানোর বেদনা নীরদ সি চৌধুরী (১৮৯৭-১৯৯৯) জন্মেছিলেন ময়মনসিংহের কিশোরগঞ্জে। বাংলা ভাষার ইতিহাসে অন্যতম বিতর্কিত লেখক নীরদ সি চৌধুরী সাহিত্য জীবন শুরু করেন আলোচিত বিদ্রূপাত্মক পত্রিকা শনিবারের চিঠি-তে লেখালেখির মধ্য দিয়ে। বাংলা ভাষায় চারটি বই লিখলেও তাঁর প্রধা...

A podcast on Islam, Postmodernism, and New Orientalism: A Conversation with Ian Almond https://eclectic-intellection.simplecast.com/episodes/islam-postmodernism-and-new-orientalism-a-conversation-with-ian-almond

How do writers from regions with a historical experience of colonialism depict Western Orientalists in their work? What exactly does it mean to “reverse the gaze” and include the Orientalist within the frame of representation? The article considers the non-Western representation of Orientalists and Orientalism in literary texts from three different...

On Leibniz and Islam

A review of "Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking from Mecca to the marketplace", by Irfan Ahmad (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) published in the journal POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY 2019, VOL. 20, NO. 4, 1–3

Albanian translation of my 2004 book SUFISM AND DECONSTRUCTION / SUFIZMI DHE DEKONSTRUKSIONI

This is the original English text of an essay translated into Turkish and published in the magazine Sabah ülkesi no.59 (April 2019) pp46-48.

Arabic translation of HISTORY OF ISLAM IN GERMAN THOUGHT تاريخ الاسلام في الفكر الألماني من لايبنتز الى نيتشه

In attempting to understand the place of rewriting myth in twentieth-century Mexican literature and its precise relationship to modernity, this chapter suggests five categories (aggrandisement, inhabitation, reversal, manipulation, and appropriation) as a tentative means of delineating the range of retellings involved. Figures such as Alfonso Reyes...

There is definitely a long-overdue debate that needs to be had over anti-semitism in the Labour Party-but the current barrage of media attention is not that debate, writes Almond [Reuters] https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/danger-conflating-anti-zionism-anti-semitism-180812094500385.html

Russian translation of Ibn Arabi/Eckhart essay: Божественная необходимость, Божественные иллюзии: предварительные замечания к сравнительному изучению

An op-ed for Aljazeera, published today. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/room-critical-thinking-islam-180406080925909.html

This is the English language preface to a 2018 Bosnian/Serbo Croat translation of a history of the representation of Islam in 18th and 19th century German thought.

German translation of my book HISTORY OF ISLAM IN GERMAN THOUGHT

ALTÜST DERGİ ON 15 NİSAN 2016 Hepimiz IŞİD Miyiz? – " Tüm kadınlar öldüğünde, cihatçılar onların cesetlerini evlerin içinde yaktılar. Kadınların işini bitirdikten sonra çocukları kilitlemiş oldukları …'ya geri döndüler. Küçük çocukları getirdiler –iki, bir buçuk, üç yaşındakileri– birbirine tutunmuş olan çocukları dışarı çıkardılar. Grupları dışarı...

In his new book, the British journalist and commentator puts together a staggeringly one-sided flow of statistics, interviews and examples, reflecting a clear decision to make the book a rhetorical claim that Europe is doomed to self-destruction " Europe is committing suicide " is the dramatic opening line of The Strange Death of Europe, and within...

Was wussten Leibniz, Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Hegel, Marx und Nietzsche über den Islam? Wahrscheinlich mehr, als man gemeinhin annimmt. Und waren sie den „Mohammedanern“ wohlgesonnen? Oder standen sie ihnen ablehnend gegenüber? Hier liegt die Wahrheit wie so oft im Sowohl-als-auch. Ian Almond hat dies- und jenseits des ‚west-östlichen Divan‘...

This is an op-ed that appeared on 18th May in Counterpunch. original link - http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/19/the-secret-joke-of-our-democracy-britains-elephant-in-the-boardroom/ The “expenses scandal” worked in its ultimate function: to distract us all from the most insidious capture of our democracy – namely, the estimated 2,800 directorshi...

Published in The Comparatist 41 (October 2017). Examines a certain kind of ghost story - a male protagonist enters a haunted house or place, invariably haunted by a female spirit, and ends up losing his identity to that ghost. I look at six texts from three regions: Mexico (Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo), Turkey (Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Peyami Safa) and...

An extract from my book THE THOUGHT OF NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI (Cambridge UP, 2015) pp100-135 on sadness and loss in the twentieth century Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri.

This is a chapter taken from my book The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss (Cambridge UP, 2015). It deals with the various personalities the 20th century Indian writer Chaudhuri had in dealing with the question of Islam.

This is basically the conclusion to my book The Thought of Nirad C Chaudhuri: Empire, Islam and Loss (Cambridge UP, 2015).

The essay examines the persistence of Sufi motifs in the work of two of the most significant figures in modern Turkish poetry-Orban Veli and the Communist poet Nazam Hikmet. Both figures were non·believers whose work, nevertheless, reveals the presence of a certain series of spiritual echoes-notions of inwardness, memory, sadness, epiphany, attenti...

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...

This is a chapter taken from my book The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss (Cambridge University Press, 2015). It deals with the notion of the archive - both as physical place (museum, library, gallery), mental space (an intellectual and erudite catalogue of ideas) and the physical tradition of South Asian orientalism.

In this essay, previous attempts to dismantle the idea of Europe as a self-contained space are briefly examined. Five strategies for deconstructing the idea of Europe are considered: re-origination, re-configuration, provincialization/de-universalization, fissuring through internal Othering and strategies of commonality. Each of these strategies, b...

An Arabic translation which was made of my military history of Muslim Christian alliances in Europe, Two Faiths One Banner (Harvard UP, 2009)

Turkish translation of my military history of Muslim Christian alliances Two Faiths One Banner

Although the role of the U.S. in supporting the anti-democratic, counter-revolutionary movements, governments, and dictatorships that flourished in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1990s is well known, this article examines the support provided to the U.S. by other countries. Principally this support was provided by Israel and the United Kingdom...

Turkish translation of my book SUFISM AND DECONSTRUCTION

This article has three parts. First, it considers a series of overlaps between the postcolonial and Slavoj Žižek's work. Then, it examines Žižek's three main objections to the postcolonial: it reduces issues of political-economic struggle to cultural/psychological analysis; it involves a "prettification" or detraumatization of the Other; and its no...

The article examines four ways of reading the work of a twentieth‐century Anglophone Indian intellectual, by employing postcolonial, Foucauldian, Žižekan/Lacanian, and ultimately deconstructive approaches to produce, in each case, a very different thinker: a willing imperialist tool, a sly subverter of colonial hegemony, a postcolonial subject frau...

About Muslim Christian military alliances in the Crimean War - looking at Ottoman participation, but also the Muslim soldiers who fought for the Tsar and the Russians.

on the 19th century German Romantic thinker Friedrich Schlegel and the Emptying of Islam.

The chapter is taken from my 2010 book HISTORY OF ISLAM IN GERMAN THOUGHT (Routledge).

Goethe and the Turks: Keeping the Turks Out of Islam. This is a chapter from my book HISTORY OF ISLAM IN GERMAN THOUGHT (Routledge, 2010). It concerns the very different way Goethe talked about Ottoman Turkey and Turks, in stark contrast to the idealized, poetic descriptions of Persians and Arabs.

This essay examines the motifs of melancholy, fantasy and economy in Amit Chaudhuri’s short fiction, and ultimately links them together existentially as a postcolonial symptom (and strategy) of an India whose increasing commodification of daily life is increasingly transforming culture into an appendage of capital. In a manner reminiscent of the so...

Kant on the Islamic Orient - his position on Turks, Arabs and Persians.

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...

Looking at various military coalitions between Ottomans and Greeks/Serbs in their fight against either other Byzantine forces or against Tamerlane at the battle of Ankara 1402. taken from pp95-137 of Two Faiths One Banner (Harvard UP 2009)

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 (Žižek and Baudrillard). The medieval motif has two variants: a thirteenth‐cen...

It is an extract from my book TWO FAITHS ONE BANNER (Harvard University Press, 2009). The chapter concerns the Christian soldiers who fought alongside the Ottomans in trying to capture the city of Vienna in 1683. Contrary to the public perception, which portrays this moment as an invasion of Christendom by an infidel Muslim threat, I highlight the...

This is a military history of Muslim Christian alliances from 1050 to 1850. Published with Harvard University Press.(in the UK published with I.B. Tauris).

In an examination of the varied responses to the Muslim Orient by the eighteenth-century German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder, I try to lo-cate the multiple identities he displayed in his treatment of Turks, the Koran, Arab thought, and the doctrines of Islam. What emerges is a series of different voices, employing different registers of lang...

Examines the representations of Muslims and Jews in the work of the British writer Rudyard Kipling. Published in Some Essays on Post-Modernism, Globalization and the Media / [ed] A. F. Mathew, Ahmedabad: MICA Publications , 2008. pp 91-105

Ramu Nagappan's informative book poses what seems, at first, to be a fairly standard question: how do South Asian writers confront, represent, and ultimately work out the question of social suffering? What follows is an illuminating series of approaches to three texts—Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, Salman Rushdie...

This analyses the representation of the Muslim world in the work of the French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva. It was first published in my book The New Orientalists (I B Tauris, 2007) pp131 - 151. In particular it focuses on the way Kristeva's committment to a European tradition invokes orientalists conceptions of Islam.

This is an extract taken from my book, The New Orientalists.

This essay exams the wide range of references to Islam and the Muslim Orient in Leibniz's works, from his earliest references to "Mohammedanism" in the 1660's, through his Egyptian Plan (1671), to extracts from some of his last letters and essays. The article shows the compartmentalization of three separate though porous vocabularies in Leibniz—a t...

The article examines the representation of the ‘Enlightenment missionary’ in a number of postcolonial texts, both Indian and Turkish. Moments where the individual becomes so enamoured of a certain aspect of Western culture - Freud, Proust, Chopin - that he seeks, upon his return, to disseminate this ‘new’ knowledge to as many of his fellow villager...

This article intends to examine how useful or hindering a concept of ‘Indianness’ is in interpreting and teaching postcolonial Indian fiction. Set against the background of debates within contemporary Indian poetics (Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, etc), the article suggests that in order to avoid the dangers of Western readers simply reading I...

Philosophy and Literature 28.2 (2004) 309-323 In a letter to his friend Köselitz dated March 13 1881, Nietzsche wrote: "Ask my old comrade Gersdorff whether he'd like to go with me to Tunisia for one or two years. . . . I want to live for a while amongst Muslims, in the places moreover where their faith is at its most devout; this way my eye and ju...

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 inclu...

This article simply examines the representation of the Islamic Orient in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, and suggests two things: 1) that Borges's different representations of Islam in his texts—Arab philosophers, Persian myths, Sufi motifs, quotations from the Koran—are best understood by a different set of Orientalist voices that Borges e...

This study of Rohinton Mistry's recent novel A Fine Balance offers an interpretation of the novel's central themes of resistance and resignation in the light of an earlier Indian classic, Mulk Raj Anand's 1935 work Untouchable, and in particular concentrates on the Yeatsian influence present in the novel, beginning with its title. In contrast to An...

The article undertakes an examination of melancholy and sadness in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, concentrating on the forlorn figures of Tridip and the narrator in an attempt to analyse and evaluate the melancholy atmosphere of the novel. Bearing in mind Freud's own understanding of melancholy as the unconscious mourning for a lost love object,...

In this article I examine the role of infinity in the hermeneutics of two very separate thinkers—a thirteenth-century Sufi and a contemporary French poststructuralist. In both cases, the way a certain idea of infinity (be it the inexhaustible mind of an infinite God or the infinite array of different contexts for a text) leads to an infinitizing of...

This article has two purposes: in the first section, the socio-political place of Islam as topos in the stories of Lovecraft - the various Daemon-sultans, Oriental figures and Arab sages we encounter in his work - is examined, given the already ex-tant research available on Lovecraft’s own reactionary, racist views. The article exam-ines the possib...

ELH 70.4 (2003) 1137-1151 There is a cinematic quality to this opening scene from Salman Rushdie's novel—one can imagine it filmed in ironic, gently understated terms: the figure of a returning emigrant, on his knees against a mountain-flushed landscape, the sound of an indignant thud as his head bows in the namaz, and then the same figure rising,...

This article examines, in the work of a contemporary Turkish novelist, the repeated association of Islam with a variety of different sadnesses-melancholy arising from the demise of the secret, from a certain awareness of the death of metaphysics, the end of our ability to believe in such stories and yet our simultaneous inability to carry on living...

The place of the secret in Derrida's thought has some interesting implications for recent ‘theological’ appropriations of his work—particularly those with a Christian agenda. The aim of this brief article is to express a nagging unease with recent Christian responses to Derrida, an unease borne out of a certain understanding of the ineluctably Niet...

I employ these words, I admit, with a glance towards the operations of childbearing–but also with a glance towards those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so …only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infa...

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 onl...

This brief study will examine Anglo-Indian Rudyard Kipling and Indo-Anglian Raja Rao's, attempts to re-appropriate a foreign culture in terms of their own wills. The novelist Rao's conviction of India's position as the origin of all Western culture, alongside Kipling's own curious tale of a tribe of distant “Englishmen” rediscovered in Northwest Af...

The status of Ibn 'Arabi and Derrida as thinkers is examined: their disagreements with rational/metaphysical thought on the basis of différance and what Ibn 'Arabi calls al-haqq or the Real. Advantage is taken of the fact that both writers speak of emancipatory projects in their work-the freeing of writing from the shackles of logocentric thought a...

This article re-examines a familiar essay of Benjamin’s, ‘The Task of the Translator’, from a Neoplatonic point of view. Beginning with a brief survey of various other Neoplatonic moments in Benjamin’s work (where a greater totality or wholeness is referred to), ‘The Task of the Translator’ is considered as a collection of metaphors on the act of t...

Le but de cet article est de soutenir une seule these, a savoir que dans les sermons en langue vernaculaire de Maitre Eckhart (1260-1328/9) il y a a l'oeuvre une conscience deja hautement developpee du probleme de la presence : l'inconstance du langage, la nature problematique du sens, la futilite de la pensee conceptuelle. Afin de prouver l'antici...

In this article, I consider the positive manner in which both Ibn 'Arabi and Derrida approach the idea of perplexity (in Arabic, hayrah ) - for Ibn 'Arabi, it is a prelude towards an encounter with the Real. If rational constructs are an obstacle toward our understanding of Allah - and if bewilderment means the disabling of our rational faculties -...

Ginzburg's characters-happy or unhappy, loved or unloved-move through worlds of silence. They struggle not to speak, not to say what they feel-theirs is not so much the silence of the poet or the mystic, forever lapsing into speec hlessness before the Inexpressible, but rather the struggle of those who already know their own words and smother them,...

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 in...