Very thankful to have been born and raised in Vancouver, I spent six great years of my later childhood with missionary parents and my three brothers in India. At university I studied English Literature and at seminary Hebrew Bible. Since beginning the study of Islam at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1986, I have taught in Canada, USA, Pakistan, Malaysia, and India. I completed my PhD in Quranic Studies under Dr Andrew Rippin in 2004. My most recent academic post was director of the Centre for Islamic Studies at SAIACS in Bangalore, India. Now I live with my wife Gwenyth in the midst of an area of clearwater lakes just west of the Monashee Mountains. Some weeks we seem to see more wild animals than people. I continue to write in the areas of the Quran and its classical commentaries, and the history of Christian-Muslim relations. My Christian commentary on the Quran was released in April 2020 by Zondervan/HarperCollins. Starting with my India childhood years, I have had quite a bit of fun with languages, though I must acknowledge that I have a kind of brain glitch that lets me speak only one extra language at a time. Telugu as a child, French in high school and university, Urdu and Baluchi in Pakistan, German when our family got "stuck" in Nordrhein Westfalen for a year. For some reason the old brain works better with scripts: Telugu, biblical Greek and Hebrew, Urdu, classical Arabic.
