What is happening now in Israel is that you have a coming together of Jews from the Christian world and Jews from the Muslim world with different cultures.
BERNARD LEWISI see encouraging signs of democracy developing in other places in the Middle East. In Tunisia, in Iraq, and now in Egypt. Tunisia is the one Muslim country that does something for girls and education.
More Bernard Lewis Quotes
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As far as I know, this is the only Muslim country where this is true. There is compulsory education for girls from the age of 5.
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We in the Western world make the great mistake of assuming that ours is the only form of good government; that democracy means what it means in the Anglo-American world and a few other places in the West, but not many others.
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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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You see Christians and Muslims have one thing in common which they do not share with their other religions as far as I know. They claim to be the fortunate recipient of God’s final message to mankind.
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One reason which I find particularly fascinating about Israel is this. There is no such thing as a Jewish civilization. There is a Jewish culture, a Jewish religion, but there is no such thing as a Jewish civilization.
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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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Islam explicitly rejects dictatorship and there are no traditions of the Prophet or passages in the Qur’an which clearly give dictators this support.
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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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The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic Law.
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Muslims have their own tradition on limited government. Now in Islam, there is a very strong political tradition. Because the different circumstances, Islam is political from the very beginning.
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In the Muslim world, history is important and their knowledge of history is not always accurate but is very detailed. There is a strong historical sense in the Muslim world, a feeling for the history of Islam from the time of the Prophet until the present day.
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When we talk about the Judeo-Christian or the Judeo-Muslim tradition, it’s important to remember that we are speaking of a Jewish component of civilization, but not in itself a civilization.
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The Jews were a component basically of two civilizations. In the Western world, we talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition and you talk about the Judeo-Islamic tradition because there were large and important Jewish communities living in the lands of Islam.
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The United States is showing minimal and diminishing interest in the Muslim world. They now have to confront their own problems. The old excuses are gone. The old justifications are gone and therefore the anger of people is turning increasingly against their own rulers.
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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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