Introduction

The book in your hands is nothing more, nor less, than a history of the reception of the Muslim world in the works of eight key German thinkers. It begins with Leibniz’s plan to invade Egypt (1671) and ends, a couple of hundred years later, with Nietzsche’s praise of Islam in The Antichrist (1888). Although one of the points of a preface is to explain why the author took the path he did, and not to speculate on paths not chosen, I should confess at the outset that this is not quite the book I had started out to write.