Islam and the West
by Bernard Lewis
Paperback, Oxford University Press, 1994
VG condition: Some shelfwear including small bumps to corners and edges, but text clean and binding tight
Publisher's description:
Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "the doyen of Middle Eastern
studies," Bernard Lewis has been for half a century one of the West's
foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, the author of over two
dozen books, most notably The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern
Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and The Muslim Discovery of
Europe. Eminent French historian Robert Mantran has written of Lewis's
work: "How could one resist being attracted to the books of an author
who opens for you the doors of an unknown or misunderstood universe, who
leads you within to its innermost domains: religion, ways of thinking,
conceptions of power, culture--an author who upsets notions too often
fixed, fallacious, or partisan."
In Islam and the West, Bernard Lewis brings together in one volume
eleven essays that indeed open doors to the innermost domains of Islam.
Lewis ranges far and wide in these essays. He includes long pieces, such
as his capsule history of the interaction--in war and peace, in
commerce and culture--between Europe and its Islamic neighbors, and
shorter ones, such as his deft study of the Arabic word watan and what
its linguistic history reveals about the introduction of the idea of
patriotism from the West. Lewis offers a revealing look at Edward
Gibbon's portrait of Muhammad in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(unlike previous writers, Gibbon saw the rise of Islam not as something
separate and isolated, nor as a regrettable aberration from the onward
march of the church, but simply as a part of human history); he offers a
devastating critique of Edward Said's controversial book, Orientalism;
and he gives an account of the impediments to translating from classic
Arabic to other languages (the old dictionaries, for one, are packed
with scribal errors, misreadings, false analogies, and etymological
deductions that pay little attention to the evolution of the language).
And he concludes with an astute commentary on the Islamic world today,
examining revivalism, fundamentalism, the role of the Shi'a, and the
larger question of religious co-existence between Muslims, Christians,
and Jews.
A matchless guide to the background of Middle East conflicts today,
Islam and the West presents the seasoned reflections of an eminent
authority on one of the most intriguing and little understood regions in
the world.