I have spent much of my professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West, first on both sides of the Cold War divide and, more recently, on the cusp between the Islamic and Western worlds. Over time, I have come to see the relationships between these seemingly polar fields as a problem not of geography or politics (or even geo-politics) but of thought, ideas, and knowledge – that is, as essential problems of epistemology.

All of the offerings featured in the “Writings” section reflect that realization, albeit in different ways and to varying degrees. My latest work, still in progress, is my doctoral dissertation, “War without End? One Thousand Years of Anti-Islam Discourse”. This is social history of ideas that attempts to understand and explain the fact that Western ideas and thinking on Islam have remained almost unchanged since they were first crafted from wartime propaganda at the time of the First Crusade, one thousand years ago. Another academic work, “Out of the Mouth’s of Babes: What the Danish ‘Cartoons Crisis’ Can Tell Us about the Multicultural Future,” takes a similar approach.

My forthcoming trade book, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, presents a narrative account of the West’s extensive borrowing from the medieval Arab and Muslim world. Like its predecessor, Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran, the House of Wisdom attempts to reorient how we think about “Islam” and “the West.”