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Since 9-11-2001, there has been an ever-increasing volume of literature both fiction and non-fiction on the problems of integrating different cultures
within a society. For most of the 20th century, the focus was on the difficulties the newly arrived immigrants met in acquiring an American identity and ‘melting in’ to the predominant culture. Now, that focus has broadened to explore the fractured experience of the immigrant in adjusting to the new environment and simultaneously preserving his heritage despite discordant mainstream values. Within psychoanalysis, there has been an evolution in theory mirroring the shift in the immigrant's outlook. In the past, there was the presumption that the experienced analyst had the capacity to empathize with feelings of the analysand who usually shared the same ethnic background. When empathy failed, the analyst's ability to examine his counter-transference was usually corrective. Currently, ethnic and racial differences that frequently separate the analyst and analysand, affect the analyst's capacity for empathy. We now believe that the analysand's capacity for empathy for the analyst is an important feature of successful treatment. These shifts in clinical theory make the question of how cultural and ethnic factors impinge on the psychoanalytic process more relevant.
With the goal of studying the interaction of Moslem and Western culture from multiple perspectives, Salman Akhtar has assembled a group of authors who explore the Moslem experience from different points of view. The chapters cover an amazingly wide range of topics: a history of the development of Islam; influential historical, literary, and political figures (for example, Rumi, Attaturk and Jinnah); past and current interaction of Moslems with other political and religious groups; a Sufi perspective on suffering which is compared with concepts in psychoanalysis; study of the origins of Osama bin Laden's ideology and aggression; recent cultural developments in fi