I’ve always shuddered when considering Bernard Lewis. That condition will likely continue.

It is interesting that Lewis repeats the question “who did this to us “ throughout this slim polemic. The question asserted by Lewis regards the slipping of prestige from the Ottoman Empire to the embarrassed Middle East of the late 20C. Such was the question bandied about across the United States after the righteous struck Manhattan.

These alleged clashes of civilization might be constructs or crutches. Said taught me that. They do fuel a great deal of opinion as well as policy across the globe.

I enjoyed this book and learned a lot by reading it. A small criticism that I have is that I wasn't really left understanding "what went wrong," as the title promises to teach us. I understood the progress of events and mentalities but I didn't feel there was an explanation of the phenomena that led to the described results. I think this is one of the points – history is not mathematics and there are no clear reasons why things happen the way they do.

This short volume presents a capsule history of Islam's reaction to the West and modernity over the course of Islam's history, and tries to answer the question of why Islam has fared so poorly in the bargain. It's an interesting and informative read, but it leaves a definitive answer as a task for the reader.

I wish the author included more dates. It was hard to determine what happened when.

Bernard Lewis was Edward Said’s intellectual rival and I can see why. Lewis is an Orientalist extraordinaire. He’s a fantastic writer, though, and presented lots of interesting analyses as food for thought.

But chat, here’s the real question: is it Islamophobic to say things like “the world of Islam has become poor, weak, and ignorant”? How about if you add some specificity, with something like: “By all the standards that matter in the modern world — economic development and job creation, literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights — what was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low.”

Is it appropriate to make those kinds of conclusions? And if not, should our answer change if we know that Lewis spent an entire book backing it up and tracing the reasons how it became that way? If anyone gets to be objective about these type of things, it should at least be the guy that knows the stats and history pretty intimately, right? IDK. In my take, *even with* knowing that Lewis and Said were rivals, my off the cuff response for most valuable answer would just be that there’s actually likely a surprisingly sizable overlap of stuff here that both Lewis and Said would agree upon, and maybe that I’m just not asking a question that’s specific enough. I ask not because I especially care about being PC — for better or worse, I don’t — but just for purposes of trying to nail down the extent to which we can ever assess whether a society is “good.”

Rating: 3.5, rounded down because it seems overly simplistic. And maybe Islamophobic?

I was required to read this for my Engl 150 class. As far as the writing is concerned, I felt like Lewis repeated himself too much. I also thought the book was too dryly written. It felt like I was reading an encyclopedia entry rather than someone’s take on the subject. Very boring.

Seeing Islam from this point-of-view provided a lot of insight. However, I’m an outsider so Islamic beliefs and actions may seem strange or oppressive to me no matter how they’re explained. For a Muslim, they may seem normal, biased, or anti-Islam depending on how and by whom they’re explained. I also don’t know a lot about Islam so what Lewis says could just be one way of looking at things.

Even though I felt like I gained a lot of insight, the content still felt very biased. I keep wondering how people of the Islamic faith–more particularly, one from each faction and level of devoutness–would feel about this book. Would it seem biased like I think it would? Or, would it seem accurate? I’d be interested in reading the same content but from a Muslim’s point-of-view to help me make a less biased decision about it.

When I posted my review on Shelfari, my friend Rummanah, wrote the following comment: “I personally have not read books by Bernard Lewis, but looking at the summaries and inside flap, he is very anti-Islam and Middle East. I’m a Muslim and my father is very well versed and well read on the field. I don’t have any desire to read it. Just my two cents.”

Not a very good book because it takes foregone conclusions as given and presents generalised opinions of these.

I hope Lewis is not "the West's greatest. . .interpreter of the Near East" since he apparently believes that what went wrong with the Arabs is essentially what you might call poor protoplasm. Not unbiased historical interpretation.