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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (65750)	8/31/2004 12:24:08 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 794024

Review from the New Yorker... (I'm impressed that you could read heavy duty essays, while driving in a downpour that caused such floods....And I think you are right....a stormy year...and more to come...in more ways than one) LOST IN TRANSLATION by IAN BURUMA The two minds of Bernard Lewis. Issue of 2004-06-14 and 21 Posted 2004-06-07 newyorker.com “Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people,” Lewis writes. In a famous Atlantic Monthly article from 1990, reprinted in the current collection, Lewis speaks of “Muslim rage.” The argument encapsulated by the term goes roughly as follows. The clash between Christendom and Islam has been going on since the Muslims conquered Syria, North Africa, and Spain. Muslims, at the height of their glory, in tenth-century Cairo, thirteenth-century Tehran, or sixteenth-century Istanbul, thought of themselves as far superior to the Christians and Jews among them, who were tolerated as second-class citizens. Since then, however, as Lewis puts it, “the Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat.” Turks reached Vienna in 1683 but got no farther. When the rampant West expanded its empires, European ideas penetrated, dominated, and dislocated the Muslim world. It was deeply humiliating for Muslims to be humbled by inferior Christians and Jews (“Crusaders” and “Zionists,” in modern parlance). Traditional ways, which had produced so much glory in the past, were eroded and often destroyed by ill-considered experiments with Marxism, fascism, and national socialism. Out of political and cultural failure came this Muslim rage, directed against the West, the historical source of humiliation, and out of this rage came the violent attempts to establish a new caliphate through religious revolution. (It was Lewis, not Samuel Huntington, who introduced the phrase “clash of civilizations.”) “In a sense,” Lewis said on C-span after the September 11th attacks, “they’ve been hating us for centuries, and it’s very natural that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be winning.”