A remarkable feature of Islam is that it gives dignity even to the humblest illiterate peasants. It gives them a certain human dignity which one doesn’t find in other societies.
BERNARD LEWISCertainly 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.
More Bernard Lewis Quotes
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My position on that has been misrepresented again and again and again in the media.
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Muslims are very keenly aware of the history of their community, of the history of that relationship between their community and the rest of the world. And they have had this all through the centuries and are very much heightened by modern communications.
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I think confronted with the modern world or with the rest of the world, I think people are becoming aware that the Western and Islamic civilizations have more in common than apart.
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Very often we mean the same thing. But what we do mean, what in the Western world we call human rights, in the Islamic world, they don’t talk about rights. Now they do, but in the past they didn’t. It wasn’t part of their terminology. But really it’s the same thing.
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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.
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The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic Law.
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I think the important point which I’ve been trying to get across is that Islam, from the very beginning, is strongly, clearly opposed to autocratic dictatorial government.
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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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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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In opposing we always talk about freedom in the Western world, Muslims always talk about justice.
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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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The word “democracy” is a Western word obviously. It doesn’t exist in Arabic. Democratiya is a loan word.
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Christians and Muslims share the belief that they are the fortunate recipient of the final God message.
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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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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.
BERNARD LEWIS