A Heart Turned East

It began in Bosnia, where Islamic nationalism was reborn as Serb shells rained down on Europe's ancient Muslim heartland. It was the start of a three-year odyssey into the hearts and minds of Muslim Europe and America, a journey by which Adam LeBor set out to discover what it means to be a Muslim in the 90s, living in the West, but with a heart turned east. He met Muslim soldiers on the front lines of Bosnia who, abandoned by Europe, rediscovered Islam. He met with exiled Muslim dissidents in London - a city now referred to as the intellectual capital of the Arab world. He spoke to Turkish rappers in Berlin and young Algerian artists in Marseilles, both in the vanguard of a new European-Muslim culture that straddles the gulf between two disparate worlds. And in the United States he met with Muslim lobbyists who are demanding a presence in the corridors of power as a new wave of Black Americans are turning to Islam in their rage against the white establishment. Islam and Christianity are at a crossroads, argues LeBor, but a global media, a global economy, and a new mix of cultures mean that a symbiosis of the best of both worlds will be the result, not the violent clash of creeds that so many on both sides expect.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.