Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.
BERNARD LEWISWe 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.
More Bernard Lewis Quotes
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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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And I think there is a growing awareness of this among Christians and among Jews, and even to some extent to some Muslims. That’s happening for obvious reasons.
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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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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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For him (Ahmadinejad), Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement.
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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.
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If you look at the movement of refugees, in Vladimir Lenin’s phrase, “the people who voted with their feet,” the movement of refugees until comparatively modern times was overwhelmingly from West to East, not from East to West.
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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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One could with equal justification talk about a Judeo-Islamic tradition or a Christian-Islamic tradition. These three religions are interlinked in many signification ways, which marks them off from the rest of the world.
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If the conflict is about the size of Israel, then long and difficult negotiations can eventually resolve the problem. But if the conflict is about the existence of Israel, then serious negotiation is impossible.
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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 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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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.
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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.
BERNARD LEWIS