What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
This book is based on a series of lectures Lewis gave at the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in 1999; a sort of precis of some of the themes of the book are given in Lewis' 2002 Atlantic article entitled "What Went Wrong." Lewis traces the history of Arab awareness of and interactions with the West from the time of the Caliphate to the present day, focusing first on the initial and long-standing preeminence of Islamic Civilization, and then on the Islamic world's selective attempts to assimilate some Western concepts in order to reverse its own decline, and why these efforts have come to nothing, or worse helped to birth a particularly vicious and virulent movement in political Islam. Lewis ends up plumping for actual political freedom in the Middle East, since it is the one thing that has not yet been tried.
(Btw, Lewis' role in advising Dubya in the run-up to the Iraq War is not actually the cause of Said's recent lenghthy ad hominem attack on Lewis as an Orientalist; instead Said has always thought and said this about him. It has been sort of interesting finding so many bibliographical references to Lewis in the works of the Muslim progressives I've been reading lately; I don't know if they're making a point with that or just ignoring the whole thing and relying on Lewis as if his reputation as the preeminent Western historian of the Middle East were unchallenged).