The history of Islam in German thought from Leibniz to Nietzsche

The book addresses the roots of disturbance in Western thought regarding Islam through a comparative analysis of the ideas of eight German philosophers. The book in your hands — as the author states — is not an effort to defend Islam but an attempt to diagnose and examine that disturbance. It also does not offer any salvific solutions to address the complexities and consequences of the problematic image that Islam has taken on as a culture and as peoples in the writings of those philosophers. Ian Almond takes the reader on an exciting philosophical historical journey, presenting a disjointed mixture of ideas, attitudes, and impressions, some of which are being revealed from the German archives for the first time. The reader will discover how difficult it is to determine a clear, specific perspective of those philosophers toward Islam and Muslim peoples, even within the ideas and attitudes of a single philosopher. The author's method in tracing the image of Islam among a considered group of German thinkers encourages the reader to ask questions instead of seeking answers, to reflect on the contexts that produced those ideas about Islam instead of trying to dismantle them, and to approach the personality of the philosopher and his social and political circumstances — which cast shadows on his perception of the culture of a neighboring people compared to his perception of distant cultures — rather than issuing value judgments that confine him to ignorance or reduce the complexities of the other to simple stereotypes, and perhaps worse, bias, fanaticism, or serving orientalist or colonial agendas. It can be said that the idea that might dominate the mind of someone culturally affiliated with the region targeted by these philosophers through their thinking, observations, and notes is that the cultural presence of the Islamic world in the consciousness of the European cultural elite has, and still does have, a presence filtered through a special lens. This lens does not necessarily derive its legitimacy from success in understanding the complexities of this world but rather from its ability to fulfill a function determined by the user of that lens — a function that, in any case, does not seem to be guided by intellectual concern.