The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
A concise history of Islam and Islamic lands, from the days of the Prophet through the Caliphate, colonial, and post-colonial periods, tracing the development and rise of "fundamentalist" Islam. This is an expansion of his George Polk Award-winning essay The Revolt of Islam, published in The New Yorker shortly after 9/11; it also revisits some themes from his 1990 Atlantic essay The Roots of Muslim Rage. Lewis' lucid analysis and elegant writing style probably accounts for some of his popularity with the general reader, and occasionally busts out into dry wit, for example in this coda to his discussion of the Muslim conquest of Palestine, followed by a Crusader re-conquest, followed by a Muslim re-re-conquest:
The victories of Saladin and his capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 have long been and are today a source of inspiration to Arab leaders. Saddam Hussein refers frequently to two previous rulers of Iraq whom he claims as predecessors in his mission--Saladin, who ended the Western menace of his day by defeating and evicting the Crusaders, and Nebuchadnezzar, who dealt expeditiously and conclusively with the Zionist problem. On October 8, 2002, the prime minister of France, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in a speech to the French National Assembly, told how Saladin was able "to defeat the Crusaders in Galilee and liberate Jerusalem." This interesting use of the term liberate by a French prime minister to describe Saladin's capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders may be a reflection of present-day realignments or, alternately, a case of extreme political correctness. In some other countries this formulation might be ascribed to ignorance of history, but surely not in France.