Customer Reviews
An Essential Point of Departure
Lewis does a nice job laying down a framework with which to understand current world tensions. There is great historical information in the book, and a reader gets a feel for why it is that today's Muslim societies -- especially the Arab societies -- cannot stand their current predicament. These people are used to being on top, and they're searching for what went wrong. Lewis blames history, and bad decision-making. The Ottomans, one of this arguments goes, considered the West to be so inferior, they didn't even have permanent embassies in infidel cities. Because of such thinking, the subtleties of the diplomacy, statecraft, etc., are trades they're still learning. Lewis also points out that Western seafaring, and the new trade routes to Asia it opened, really hurt the Middle East, since its principalities could no longer generate revenue from traders along the Silk Road. This represents another interesting and fresh point.
Start here...
If you are interested in trying to find a legitimate and intelligent point of view about the complex history of the most important conflict facing the world - and particularly the West -today, you have got to start with Bernard Lewis.
First of all, Mr. Lewis is probably the foremost Mid-East scholar writing in English today. His knowledge extends to having read all his bibliographic source material in their original Arabic. He is not relying on imperfect translations. His analyses are not polemical in nature but judicious and calmly reasoned. Rather than overt and biased accusations, he gives a very succinct and lucid view of the origins and effects of the contacts made between Islam and the West from the 8th Century to the 20th Century.
There are parts of this book which perhaps rely a bit too much on the reader's familiarity with history in general (hence the four stars). But all in all, I learned a great deal about the sources of frustration in the Arab world, the beginnings of the deep envy leading to outright hatred of the West and its centuries of superiority over the Middle-East which has increased since the decline of that once-great civilization and its near extinction with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.
In this book there is no excusing the Arab/Islamist societies for their atrocities, just a very even-tempered - and necessarily brief - sketch of the fundamental differences and their historic origins which moved these two societies - Arab/Persian/Turk and Western European - into the adversarial positions they have today.
If you read Bernard Lewis first, then you can feel more confident when you read something which is more overtly polemical, like Michael Ledeen's The Terror Masters (which I will be reviewing in the next few days). Don't fear this book. You will be rewarded with the knowledge that you have been forearmed with enough information to make up your own minds and take a position in any discussion about this very difficult and emotional subject.
Indeed there is nothing wrong with this great book!
Indeed there is nothing wrong with this great book! It is highly to be recommended as essential reading on what is going on in the Middle East today. Christopher Catherwood, author of CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL CREATED IRAQ (Carroll and Graf 2004)
