the colonial world." However, some Muslims objected to the way Nussimbaum depicted Islam in his writings, accusing him of Orientalism and of not being a "real" Muslim. In 1930, Mohammed Hoffman, a member of Islamia and himself a convert to Islam, accused Nussimbaum of trying "to pass for a born Muslim" and suggesting that his conversion was merely a ploy. As a result of this and similar accusations, Nussimbaum stopped attending Islamia meetings; however, he never renounced Islam or distanced himself from it. In 1934 the New York Herald Tribune ran a profile of Essad Bey which described him as an irreverent Muslim who "carries no prayer rug; he fails to salute Mecca when he prays... eats pigs and drinks wine; yet when he came to be married in Berlin he refused to abjure his creed." Armin Wegner, a contemporary of Essad Bey who knew him in his last years in Positano, Italy, observed that Bey "kept up the comedy of being Muslim to the end."<ref>Armin Wegner wrote in his diary that Essad Bey "was a Jewish Viennese journalist" and "a typical literary swindler, who was "gifted but irresponsible." When Wegner learned that Essad Bey had been buried as a Muslim "with the Koran under his head, facing the Orient," he noted: "Thus, Essad Bey played the comedy up to the very end." Gerhard Höpp, "Mohammed Essad Bey: Nur Orient Für Europäer?" Asien, Afrika, Lateinamerika, 25:1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), p. 90, Endnote 166, quoting Wegner's diary entries of September 29 to October 1, 1942. Tom Reiss also references Höpp: "The Orientalist (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 336.</ref> A scathing review of Essad Bey's biography Mohammed expressed doubt that the author "had ever read the Quran, either in the original or in translation." It claimed: "Essad Bey's Mohammed is a potpourri of bad history, distorted facts and naive interpretations. It should never have been written... In fact, I am impelled to go still further and state that there is hardly a page in this 'biography' which is free from error." Works Despite Nussimbaum's being an ethnic Jew, his monarchist and anti-Bolshevik politics were such that, before his origins were discovered, the Nazi propaganda ministry included his works on their list of "excellent books for German minds". Among the works credited to him are early biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Czar Nicholas II, Mohammed, the Prophet; and Reza Shah of