ISLAM AND THE WEST pdf download

Islam And the West by Bernard Lewis

ISLAM AND THE WEST

The studies in this volume are concerned with the relations between these two civilizations: the one defined as Islamic, the other at different times as Christian or European or Western. They are grouped according to three main topics: encounters, perceptions, and responses.

 The first section begins with an historical survey of the interaction—in war and peace, in commerce and culture—between Europe and its Islamic neighbors to the east and to the south.

 It continues with a discussion of a specific and new issue: the emergence, mainly through immigration, of large Muslim minorities in Western countries.

Much has been written in recent years on the latter topic, seen principally as a problem for the majority host societies.

In this study I have tried to look at the issue not in a Western but rather in an Islamic context, against the background of Islamic history and law.

The second section is concerned not so much with the encounters between the two civilizations as with the perceptions arising from these encounters.

 I have dealt elsewhere at some length with Muslim views of Europe. The five studies in this section are principally concerned with Western views of Islam.

 They deal with the problems of translation from Arabic into a Western language, with the impact on European thought and letters of the centuries-long threat of the Turks, and with Western scholarship on Islamic culture and history.

 This last theme is discussed in three chapters, looking at the topic from three different perspectives. The first is a case study of Gibbon’s chapter on the Prophet Muhammad in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;

 the second, an examination of the origins, growth, and purposes of Arabic and Islamic studies in the Western world, with some consideration of recent and current controversies about “Orientalism”;