Crisis of Islam.

AuthorWolfe, Timothy E.
PositionThe Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror - Book review

Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War & Unholy Terror, New York: Random House Books, 2003.

In The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, Bernard Lewis explores a wide array of causal factors for the current conflict involving Islamic fundamentalists against Western democracies. While he does not seem to offer any conclusive practical solution to this quandary, Lewis does an outstanding job of cataloguing a great deal of information into a relatively short book. In so doing, he manages to educate readers without risking the loss of their attention through pleonasms or circumlocution.

In spite of his Jewish heritage, Bernard Lewis does not demonstrate any noticeable favoritism in this or any of his other works. He is a genuine (vis-C-vis revisionist) historian, and his intent in The Crisis of Islam is to focus on placing epochal events into perspective in order to elucidate their relevance to the evolution of the protean religious struggle into its modern milieu. Perhaps the most laudable characteristic of this book is that it addresses the major issues of the topic with just enough detail to arouse curiosity but not so much as to overwhelm the reader with excessive factual fodder; all the while retaining the crucial impartiality necessary to avoid skewing the opinion of his readership.

In The Crisis of Islam, Lewis highlights the social disparity between Western and Islamic societies. He explains that Muslims see themselves as affiliated with a religion separated into nations instead of as members of a nation separated into religions, which is the common affiliation Westerners associate with themselves. Whereas Western societies are generally secular, Islam is woven into the very fabric of a Muslim society, from politics to law to everyday living. This "religion versus nationalism" is reflected in the modern Arab's recognition of religious or tribal boundaries as compared to the Westerner's recognition of nation-state borders.

Lewis goes on to postulate that the widespread feeling of humiliation among the Muslims of the Middle East is a sine qua non for the fomentation of anti-Western hostilities which exists throughout the region. This humiliation is the result of confusion and rage. These are the products of a once-proud (almost to the point of arrogant narcissism) empire that attributed its unprecedented expansion through conquest to a pious dedication to Allah and now wonders why its ostensibly "superior" civilization has...

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