Muslims naturally saw Christendom as their arch rival. One point that is really important to bear in mind, particularly in addressing an American audience, and that is that the Islamic world has a very strong sense of history.
BERNARD LEWISIn opposing we always talk about freedom in the Western world, Muslims always talk about justice.
More Bernard Lewis Quotes
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The idea which we so often hear expressed in the Western world, that’s how they are, that’s how they will always be and they can’t do anything else.
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In the West nowadays, it’s very common to talk about the Judeo- Christian tradition. It’s a common term. The term is relatively modern but the reality is an old one.
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During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved.
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Certainly Tunisia was the first in Muslim world. It’s been like that for a long time and women play an important part in Tunisia. There are women in all professions. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, politicians, journalists and so on.
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The general perception, in much of the Middle East, is that the United States is an unreliable friend and a harmless enemy. I think we want to give the exact opposite impression.
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The myth was invented by Jews in nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians.
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The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic Law.
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To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam.
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The Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran.
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The golden age of equal rights in Spain was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam.
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The word Islam thus denotes more than fourteen centuries of history, a billion and a third people, and a religious and cultural tradition of enormous diversity.
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It is difficult to generalize about Islam. To begin with, the word itself is commonly used with two related but distinct meanings, as the equivalents both of Christianity, and Christendom.
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I think that the growing government control of the press is very clear. Turkey is still not a dictatorship, there is still some freedom of the press, but I think it’s moving in the wrong direction.
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In the Christian world, as you remember, Christianity is in the 21st century, Islam is in the 15th century. I don’t mean to say that Islam is backward; I mean to say that there are certain experiences that it hasn’t gone through.
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From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.
BERNARD LEWIS







