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.
Adam LeBor is a British author and journalist. He has written seven critically-acclaimed non-fiction works including the best-selling 'Hitler's Secret Bankers', an investigation into Swiss complicity with the Third Reich, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and 'City of Oranges', the story of six Arab and Jewish families in Jaffa, which was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize.
His most recent non-fiction work, 'The Believers', an investigation into the Madoff fraud, focusing on the psychology and sociology of the $65 billion scam, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. His first novel, 'The Budapest Protocol', a conspiracy thriller inspired by wartime US intelligence documents about the Nazis' secret post-war plans, was published this year to great reviews. Foreign rights to his books have been sold in fourteen countries including America, Japan, France, Spain, Israel, Poland, Hungary and Indonesia.
He writes for The Times of London, the Sunday Times and Monocle magazine and reviews books for The Sunday Times, the Economist, the New York Times and the Jewish Chronicle. He has appeared at the Edinburgh and Bath literary festivals, Jewish Book Week and the Montreal literary festival.
