History of Islam in German Thought from Leibniz to Nietzsche

With this book Ian Almond offers ‘nothing more, nor less, than a history of the reception of the Muslim world in the works of eight key German thinkers’ (p. 1). The book consists of eight substantive chapters on Leibniz, Kant, Herder, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, plus a brief introduction and conclusion. As such, the book is somewhat less of a history of Islam in German thought over some two hundred years than a series of loosely connected essays on the attitudes and writings of these key thinkers with respect to Islam and, mostly, the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. While the book falls short in its grand aims, individual chapters may be read with profit by those interested in the particular thinkers discussed, although with so much specialized research on figures such as Hegel, Kant, Goethe and Nietzsche it is difficult to assess the pertinence of each essay. Several of the essays, notably the ones on Herder and Hegel, contain worthy insights and commentary on their subjects, but on the whole the volume does not cohere into a substantive overview of its purported topic.