Canter Bridge

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A first reader of this renowned Princeton Arabist might puzzle for a moment over whether he is a sympathist or an adversary of Arabs, Islam, and the Muslims. He is both.

Lewis represents that kind of ‘Orientalist’ that is disparaged by interpreters like the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said. He is well versed in the Islamic texts, a visceral friend of the Arab and Muslim peoples, and a convinced proponent of the idea that in our time something terrible has hijacked the politics of the Arab and Persian world and the religion of the Muslim people.

That something is the radical response to the chasm that has opened up between all measurable indices of ‘the West’ and those of the Arab states, not to mention the Far East and the realm of Islam, a reaction that has unfortunately come to be called ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’. Lewis is unmoved by arguments that attempt to diminish the sheer horror and indeed the un-Islamic character of bin Laden and those who associate with movements like the one he leads.

Lewis’ Crisis of Islam provides a brief and coherent treatment of how things came to the awful circumstances that dominate the lives of Muslims and others in this first decade of the twenty-first century. He hints at how much worse they might become. For a Western reader who wants to understand why Muslims view the world-and us!-as they do, this book is a great place to start.