ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a debt of gratitude to Susan Hoffman, who as director of the Osher
Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State, convinced me to teach
a class on Islam and the West in 2006. Those lectures were one of the seeds
out of which grew this book-a growth spurred also by Neils Swinkel,
who taped some of those lectures and Matt Martin, station manager at
KALW radio, who aired the edited tapes as a weekly series.
Next, let me thanks my agent, Carol Mann. When I told her I was
vaguely thinking of writing something called "world history through Is-
lamic eyes," she cut in to say, "That's it! That's your next book! W't-st of
Kabul was the ant's-eye view; this will be the bird's-eye view." And she was
right-this is a bird's-eye view of my enduring preoccupation, the con-
junction and disjunction of East and West.
And thank you, Lisa Kaufman, my insightful editor, whose notes and
line edits have been like having not just a second set of eyes but a second
and more exacting brain to apply to this project.
Also, I received priceless feedback on this book while it was still a work
in progress from my brother Riaz Ansary, who knows more about the doc-
trines and early history of Islam than I ever will, from my brilliant sister,
Rebecca Pettys, and from my friends Joe Quirk and Paul Lobell. Layma
Murtaza generously allowed me to study correspondence and magazines
her family inherited from her grandfather Dr. Abdul Hakim Tabibi, a dis-
ciple of Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan. Farid Ansary has contributed with a
lifetime of stories, anecdotes, poetry quotations, and wit. Wahid Ansary
has done his best to clue me in to the fine points of our religion, and then
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