On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private "interview" with the President, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the President in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in A...

Revealing Islam’s formative influence on literary Romanticism, this book recounts a lively narrative of religious and aesthetic exchange, mapping the impact of Muslim sources on the West’s most seminal authors. Spanning continents and centuries, the book surveys Islamic receptions that bridge Romantic periods and personalities, unfolding from Europe, to Britain, to America, embracing iconic figures from Goethe, to Byron, to Emerson, as well as authors less widely recognized, such as Joseph...

On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private "interview" with the president, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the president in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in A...

Uncovering Islam's little known yet formative impact on U.S. literary culture, this book traces genealogies of Islamic influence that span America's earliest generations, reaching from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Excavating personal appeals to Islam by pioneering national authors-Ezra Stiles, William Bentley, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson-Einboden discovers Muslim discourse woven into the familiar fabric of unpublished letters and sermons, journals and jou...

Washington Irving and Islam contributes to understanding the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world, valuable not only for studies of Washington Irving, American Literature, or Islam, but also for thinking through the role Islam and the “Orient” have played in American literature and history, a critical field receiving ever-increasing attention. The global context of Irving’s work ties these essays together as does an understanding that his writings challenge...

The First Crusade began in 1095 by Pope Urban II in response to an appeal from Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who requested that western volunteers come to his aid and help to repel the invading Seljuq Turks from Anatolia. An additional goal soon became the principal objectivethe Christian reconquest of the sacred city of Jerusalem and the Holy Land and the freeing of the Eastern Christians from Islamic rule. During the crusade, knights and peasants from many nations of Western Europe ...

A shocking, riveting, intriguing re-discovery of history, culture, philosophy and the emerging of a key individual that became the instrument to catapult the Islamic religion. The impact of ancient Arabian folklore with its stone and astral cults, shamanism, various Judaic traditions, heretical sects within Christianity, and prevalent moon-god veneration, all rolled together in the mind of Muhammad, who carved out a kind of salad religion, taking bits and pieces and countering with his own...

One of the most important developments in the modern history of the Middle East, the so-called Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010, bringing down dictators, sparking a civil war in Libya, and igniting a bloody uprising in Syria. Its long-term repercussions in Egypt and elsewhere remain unclear. Now one of the world's leading Islamic thinkers examines and explains it, in this searching, provocative, and necessary book. Time Magazine named Tariq Ramadan one of the most imp...

In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer’s profound engagement with the "American Dream" in its various forms. Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values...

We have men and we have rocks in plenty, but we have nothing else. - Dost Mohammad Khan to John LawrenceIn the 21st century, as NATOs operation against the Taliban and al-Qaeda has dragged on for over a decade, the old maxim that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires has been revived. Indeed, the rugged, desolate, and mountainous region was a place that many Westerners likely could not have found on a map before the attacks of September 11, and now the nations border with Pakistan is one of...

The Land's Wild Music explores the home terrains and the writing of four great American writers of place—Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. In their work and its relationship with their home places, Tredinnick, an Australian writer, searches for answers to such questions such as whether it’s possible for a writer to make an authentic witness of a place; how one captures the landscape as it truly is; and how one joins the plac...

Among the first critical works on Alice Munro's writing, this study of her short fiction is informed by the disciplines of narratology and literary linguistics. Through examining Munro's narrative art, Isla Duncan demonstrates a rich understanding of the complex, densely layered, often unsettling stories.