Ian Johnsen høres ut som en av disse dyktige menneskene som arbeider iherdig og har noe å fare med:

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist who focuses on civil society and religion. In May, 2010, he published A Mosque in Munich, which tells the Cold War history of a mosque that stands at the center of three separate efforts to use Islam for political purposes. In 2004, he published Wild Grass, a look at grassroots civil society in China, focusing on people in the countryside, city and spirtual realm.

Johnson won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize and several other awards for his reporting on a popular religious uprising in China. He lives in Beijing and Berlin, where he writes and teaches.

n the wake of the news that the 9/11 hijackers had lived in Europe, journalist Ian Johnson wondered how such a radical group could sink roots into Western soil. Most accounts reached back twenty years, to U.S. support of Islamist fighters in Afghanistan. But Johnson dug deeper, to the start of the Cold War, uncovering the untold story of a group of ex-Soviet Muslims who had defected to Germany during World War II. There, they had been fashioned into a well-oiled anti-Soviet propaganda machine. As that war ended and the Cold War began, West German and U.S. intelligence agents vied for control of this influential group. At the center of the covert tug of war was a quiet mosque, which became Munich radical Islam’s first beachhead in the West.

Culled from an array of sources, including newly declassified documents, A Mosque in Munich weaves the stories of several key players: a Nazi scholar turned postwar spymaster; key Muslim leaders across the globe, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood; and naive CIA men eager to fight communism with a new weapon, Islam. A rare ground-level look at Cold War spying and a revelatory account of the West’s first, disastrous encounter with radical Islam, A Mosque in Munich is as captivating as it is crucial to our understanding the mistakes we are still making in our relationship with Islamists today.

«Mosque in Munich’ is an important book about an important subject. But Ian Johnson is more than a brilliant journalist and tireless researcher; he is a writer of the first rank. His story of an extraordinary Muslim community in Germany is instructive, enlightening, and beautifully done.»

Ian Buruma, author of Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents and «Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh».

«It is especially timely in light of recent calls to recalibrate American and Western approaches to Islam and to radical Islam. It should be read in the corridors of power and by citizens who take a serious interest in the continuing issue of how best to address the challenge posed by political Islamism both in Europe and the Middle East.»
Jeffrey Herf, Professor of History, University of Maryland and author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II.