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ernard Lewis
is justly regarded as the world’s premier living authority on the history
of the Middle East and the Arab world; any further praise of his work,
therefore, is superfluous. But not so fast: In his new book, The Crisis
of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (Modern Library, 184 pp., $19.95),
Lewis meets, with his customary excellence, the particular needs of a
new generation of readers. In the current confrontation between the U.S.
and Islamist terrorists, the average educated citizen is confronted with
competing explanations of the religion the killers claim to represent:
Is Islam a “religion of peace,” or is it an essentially terroristic creed?
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Lewis is the man
to ask, and in this book he provides a remarkably concise and compelling
answer. “Most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists
are not terrorists,” he writes, “but [a crucial ‘but’] most present-day
terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such.” In other
words, the religion itself is not to be blamed for terrorism, but terrorism
undeniably exists within Islam’s boundaries and forces Islam to face an
unpleasant yet ethically necessary choice. Lewis is frank on this point,
both in his defense of Islam and in his denunciation of those who pervert
it:
Islam as
such is not an enemy of the West, and there are growing numbers of Muslims,
both there and here, who desire nothing better than a closer and more
friendly relationship with the West and the development of democratic
institutions in their own countries. . . . At no point do the basic texts
of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point — as far as I am
aware — do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved
bystanders. . . . [The 9/11 terrorism] has no justification in Islamic
doctrine or law and no precedent in Islamic history. . . . These are not
just crimes against humanity and against civilization; they are also acts
— from a Muslim point of view — of blasphemy, when those who
perpetrate such crimes claim to be doing so in the name of God.
But what about all
those Muslims who were photographed dancing in the streets in celebration
of the 9/11 atrocities? Lewis attributes their glee, at least in part,
to the sin of envy — which “sentiment,” he points out, “was also
widespread, in a more muted form, in Europe.” In fact, in one of the book’s
most fascinating passages, Lewis outlines how certain strands of German
philosophy contributed to the rise of Islamist anti-Americanism: “A negative
view of America formed part of a school of thought, including writers
as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, and Martin
Heidegger. In this perception, America was the ultimate example of civilization
without culture; rich and comfortable, materially advanced but soulless
and artificial; . . . technologically complex but without the spirituality
and vitality of the rooted, human, national cultures of the Germans and
other ‘authentic’ peoples.” This philosophy became very popular among
the Arab intelligentsia, and influenced, among other things, the formation
of the Iraqi Ba’ath party. As recently as last year, Saddam Hussein gave
a speech invoking (in Lewis’s summary) “the theme of American artificiality
and lack of a genuine nationality.”
Thanks anyway, Saddam,
but we have all the culture critics we need right here at home. Meanwhile,
the U.S. is engaging in its own act of highly practical culture criticism
abroad: The current war against Islamist terrorism is America’s bid to
strengthen the better angels of Islam’s nature against the dark impulses
that celebrate the murder of innocents.
Lewis provides an
excellent brief summary for the non-specialist of how what was once “the
leading civilization in the world” came to be seen by many as synonymous
with all that is most sinister in the human heart. And he does so with
an intellectual sensitivity that makes his book a source of remarkable
insights, and a joy to read.
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