Ian Almond is a British academic who teaches English Literature at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He has lived in many other parts of the world: Germany, Italy, India, and Turkey, where he taught for six years at Bogazici University in Istanbul. Almond considers himself to be a Christian Socialist. Besides the two books featured in his Rorotoko interviews, Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press/I.B.Tauris, 2009) and History of Islam in German Thought (Routledge, 2009), Ian Almond is also the author of Sufism and Deconstruction (Routledge, 2004), and The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam (I.B.Tauris, 2007). His books have been translated into Arabic, Korean, Persian, Bosnian and Indonesian.
In many ways, Two Faiths, One Banner reveals how the history of Islam and the history of Europe are profoundly intertwined. In an age obsessed with Muslim-Christian so-called civilizational conflict, this book shows five periods in the history of Europe where Muslim and Christian soldiers actually fought on the same side, in the same armies, for the same cause.The timeline of the book is huge – it goes from eleventh century Spain to nineteenth century Russia. There’s a map at the beginning of the book which shows the battlefields I refer to – where Muslims fought alongside Christians. Those battlefields are all over Europe, in Spain, in Italy, in Hungary, even in Germany. This, , is the aim: to demonstrate how the idea of a Christian Europe is simply a case of historical amnesia. Around the Mediterranean, Muslims, Jews and Christians have been sharing languages, food and music for over twelve hundred years.
Almond, Ian Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched with Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds Harvard University Press240 pages, 6 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches ISBN 978 0674033979
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