Malise H Ruthven

Malise Ruthven was born in Dublin of Hiberno-Scottish parentage. A former scriptwriter with the BBC Arabic and World Services, he holds an MA in English Literature and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University. He has taught Islamic studies, cultural history and comparative religion at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland,  Birkbeck College, University of London, the University of California, San Diego, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and at the Colorado College, Colorado Springs. He is the author of Islam in the World (Oxford University Press 1984, 1991,  2006 ) a highly acclaimed overview of Islamic faith and history. His other books include Torture: The Grand Conspiracy (Weidenfeld 1978), Cairo (Time-Life 1980), Traveller Through Time: A Photographic Journey with Freya Stark (Viking 1986) , The Divine Supermarket: Shopping for God in America (Chatto/Morrow 1989/1990, nominated for the 1989  Thomas Cook Travel Award; reissued by I B Tauris in 2012) A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam  (Chatto 1989/Hogarth 1990),  Islam: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 1997, 2000, now published in several languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Italian, Spanish and German), A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (Granta 2002/3: Italian translation Il seme del terrore published by Einaudi);  Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning (OUP 2004, Bulgarian, Dutch and Finnish translations, ) and A Historical Atlas of the Islamic World (with Azim Nanji)  Harvard University Press and OUP 2004, winner of the 2005 U S Middle East Outreach Council Book Award).  Encounters with Islam: on religion, politics and modernity - a collection of reviews and essays from the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books  was published  by I B Tauris in 2012.  .