Denis MacEoin

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Denis M. MacEoin (b. Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1949) is a novelist and a former lecturer in Islamic studies and is, at present, chief editor of the Middle East Quarterly. His academic specializations are Shi‘ism, Shaykhism, Bábism, and the Bahá'í Faith, on all of which he has written extensively. His novels are written under the pen names Daniel Easterman and Jonathan Aycliffe.^{[citation needed]} He and his wife live in Newcastle upon Tyne in the United Kingdom.

[edit] Background and education

MacEoin studied English Language and Literature at the University of Dublin (Trinity College) and Persian, Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He carried out research for his PhD degree at King's College, Cambridge. His PhD dissertation dealt with two heterodox movements in 19th-century Iranian Shi‘ism: Shaykhism and Bábism.^{[citation needed]}

From 1979-80, he taught English, Islamic Civilization, and Arabic-English translation at Mohammed V University in Fez, Morocco, before taking up a post as lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University.^{[citation needed]} In 1986, he was made Honorary Fellow in the Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies at Durham University. Currently, he is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newcastle University.^{[citation needed]}

He has been married to homoeopath and health writer Beth MacEoin since 1975. She is the author of around 20 books on natural health, including the Natural Medicines Society book, Natural Medicine: A practical guide to family Health, which was published by Bloomsbury at the end of 1999, and Homeopathy: Medicine for the 21st Century (Kyle Cathie, 2006).^{[citation needed]}

An advocate of alternative medicine since the 1960s, he has in more recent years taken a serious interest in the sociology and politics of medicine, and in the relations between CAM and conventional therapy. He regularly lectures to medical students on these topics. For many years, until its demise in 2003, he was chairman, then president of the Natural Medicines Society, a UK charity for the general public.^{[citation needed]}

In recent years, he has become active in pro-Israel advocacy (hasbara), chiefly in his capacity as a writer.^{[citation needed]} He continues to work on Islamic issues, particularly the development of radical Islam. In December 2007 the BBC news program Newsnight produced evidence that suggested some material on which MacEoin's report on radical Islam in the UK for Policy Exchange, "The Hijacking Of British Islam", was based had been forged.^[1]. Gabriele Marranci, an anthropologist at the University of Western Sydney specialising in the study of Muslim communities has made numerous criticisms of the methodology of the report.^[2] Accusations of partisanship and bias have also been made against MacEoin.^{[citation needed]} He has stated: "I do not hold a brief for Islam. On the contrary, I have very negative feelings about it, but still try to appreciate those elements that elevate it (such as the finer forms of Sufism, the poetry, the architecture, and the belief in material simplicity over greed)... I am pro-Israeli and involve myself in the defence of Israel".^[3]

[edit] Publications

He has published extensively on Islamic topics, contributing to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Islam in the Modern World, the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the Penguin Handbook of Religions, journals, festschrifts, and books, and has himself written a number of academic books.^{[citation needed]}

He was a member of the Bahá'í Faith from 1965-1980, but left the movement over differences with the administration.^{[citation needed]} For several years he published books and articles critical of Bahá'í practices, and their level of scholarship.

Since 1986 he has pursued his principal career as a novelist, having so far written twenty-three novels, several of them best-sellers. He uses the pen-names Daniel Easterman^{[citation needed]} (international thrillers) and Jonathan Aycliffe^{[citation needed]} (classic ghost stories in the tradition of M.R. James). Among the best-known Easterman titles are: The Seventh Sanctuary, The Ninth Buddha, The Judas Testament, Brotherhood of the Tomb, K is for Killing, The Final Judgement, Midnight Comes at Noon, Night of the Seventh Darkness, and Maroc. Some Aycliffe titles include Naomi's Room, Whispers in the Dark, The Matrix, The Lost and A Garden Lost in Time. A collection of his journalism was published under the Easterman name by HarperCollins in 1992 under the title New Jerusalems: Islam, the Rushdie Affair, and Religious Fundamentalism.