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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.

Bernard Lewis

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

Control Dictatorship Government Moving Thinking
Islam does give human dignity, certainly. The point I wanted to make is that it is great foolishness to try to impose our notions of democracy. They have their own traditions.
BERNARD LEWIS

Country Democrazy Dignity Human Impose Notion Point
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Country Dignity Human Important Philosophy Prevented War
Christians and Muslims share the belief that they are the fortunate recipient of the final God message.
BERNARD LEWIS

Belief Christian God Message Share
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Billion Centuries Diversity Enormous People Religious
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Community Government Political Religious Tradition
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Christian Community Country People Religion Tradition Western World
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Accurate Community Feeling History Knowledge Strong
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Communication Community Dignity History Human Important Mean People Relationship
The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic Law.
BERNARD LEWIS

Dignity Human Important Islamic Law
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Confront Diminishing Excuse Justification Own Problem
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Christian Dignity Human Important Islamic Real
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Country Human Rights Mean Past Right Same Things
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 LEWIS

Dignity Giving Human Humble Remarkable
In the past, foreign intervention was obviously a major problem. Foreign domination, or if not domination, interference. But that has ended. There is no foreign domination; there is minimal foreign interference. The Cold War has ended. The Soviet Union no longer exists.
BERNARD LEWIS

Dignity Domination Human Important Past People War
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.
BERNARD LEWIS

Anything Else Expressed Idea Western World

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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