The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis

Preface: Lewis is a professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His works on the Middle East, Islam, and the West's interaction with Islam have spanned the latter part of the 20th century. He coined the phrase "clash of civilizations" that Samuel Huntington made infamous. Lewis is a proponent of Turkey - as the democratic hub in Islam - and largely focuses on the clash of the two monolithic religions - Islam and Christianity.

Review: The Crisis of Islam is a quick read at just under 170 pages. This Middle East primer was written in 2004 as a collection of expanded essays on the basic idea of: "What went wrong in Islam?" What Went Wrong? is actually the title of an essay written for The Atlantic in 2002. Crisis covers a breadth of topics in a cursory fashion to give the reader a better understanding of why the Middle Eastern culture/Islam harbors such hostility and antipathy towards the West.

Lewis makes some good points and "The Failure of Modernity" offers sobering statistics on the economic, educational, and social status of Islamic - or largely Muslim - countries. His brief discussion on jihad is enlightening to those that may be ignorant on the subject. Lewis points out that jihad has been adulterated by radical Islamists/terrorists; he even provides evidence of how suicide attacks and killing noncombatants indiscriminately is not only an innovation in Islamic doctrine, it's an illict doctrine.

While Lewis provides some answers to the "humiliation" felt by Islamic culture, - an element frequently cited by bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other radicial Islamists as justification for offensive and defensive jihad - the reader must remember that Lewis has spent the majority of his academic career speaking of the decline of Islamic culture at the hands of the superior West. Certainly, some of his argument rings true given the difference in GDP and economic development -aside from oil money. However, Lewis places more stock in his belief that Islam's Western envy has more to do with decline than the impact of imperialist rule and poor management after imperialism left the region.

The book has a lot of good nuggets one can take from it and I would recommend it to anyone interested on the subject. It's not a definitive work on the subject of Islam or Islamic relations with the West, but it's a decent jumping off point.