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Invitation to lecture by Prof. Dr. Ian Almond

May 18, 2010

The Averroes Cultural and Educational Institute Ljubljana in cooperation with the British Council Slovenia hereby invites you to lecture of Prof. Dr. Ian Almond titled Deconstructing Luther's Islam: the Turk as Curse or Cure? The lecture will take place on Monday, 24 May 2010, at 18:00 in the lecture hall of The Averroes Institute at the address Cesta Andreja Bitenca 70, Ljubljana. The lecture will be held in the English language.

Deconstructing Luther's Islam: The Turk as Curse or Cure?

The talk examines Luther's attitude towards Islam and, in particular, towards the Turk, whose success against the Catholic Habsburgs Luther appropriated in some interesting ways, eectively seeing the Ottomans as the divine schoolmaster's rod. The ambiguities inherent in Luther's treatment of Islam, not just the paradoxical logic of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', but also the kinds of problems Luther runs into when trying to account for some of those points on which Islam bears some resemblance to protestant Christianity (predestination, mistrust of icons/images, refutation of pope). Ultimately, what emerges is that the gure of the Turk is both a poison and cure, an enemy but also a possible source of (worldly) succor.

About the author:

Ian Almond teaches mostly in the area of South Asian and postcolonial literature and theory. He received his degrees from the British universities of Warwick and Edinburgh, and has spent most of his academic life outside his home country, teaching at universities in Italy and Germany and spending a research year in India. He lived for six years in Turkey, teaching at universities both in and outside Istanbul.

He is the author of four books: Sufism and Deconstruction (Routledge, 2004), The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam (I.B.Tauris, 2007), a general military history of Muslim-Christian alliances Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press/ I. B. Tauris, 2009) and History of Islam in German Thought From Leibniz to Nietzsche (Routledge, 2009). His books have been translated into Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Persian and Indonesian.