Michael Bonner
Michael Bonner is a communications and public policy adviser to the government of Ontario, Canada, and a historian of Iran with a master’s degree in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies, both from the University of Oxford.
Latest from Michael Bonner
Islam and the Case Against Cultural Amnesia
Hamline’s firing of an instructor for showing Islamic medieval images of the Prophet Muhammad is akin to a Calvinist taking offence at an image of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, and the university administration siding with the Calvinist and calling the incident "anti-Christian."
The Cognitive Dissonance of the Islamic Republic
Despite vulnerability to invasion and conquest, Persian self-image has remained stable across millennia. The conquests of Alexander the Great, the Arabs and the Mongols wiped out the indigenous political and cultural order nearly everywhere — except in Iran. But the Islamic Republic is a jarring aberration in the country’s history.