Discussed in this essay:

Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong. Modern Library, 2000. 222 pages. $19.95.

What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, by Bernard Lewis. Oxford University Press, 2002. 180 pages. $23.

 he history of trying to come to terms with this somewhat fictionalized (or at least constructed) Islam in Europe and later in the United States has always been marked by crisis and conflict, rather than by calm, mutual exchange. There is the added factor now of commercial publishing, ever on the lookout for a quick bestseller by some adept expert that will tell us all we need to know about Islam, its problems, dangers, and prospects. In my book Orientalism, I argued that the original reason for European attempts to deal with Islam as if it were one giant entity was polemical—that is, Islam was considered a threat to Christian Europe and had to be fixed ideologically, the way Dante fixes Muhammad in one of the lower circles of hell. Later, as the European empires developed over time, knowledge of Islam was associated with control, with power, with the need to understand the "mind" and ultimate nature of a rebellious and somehow resistant culture as a way of dealing administratively with an alien being at the heart of the expanding empires, especially those of Britain and France.

During the Cold War, as the United States vied with the Soviet Union for dominance, Islam quickly became a national-security concern in America, though until the Iranian revolution (and even after it, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) the United States followed a path of encouraging and actually supporting Islamic political groups, which by definition were also anti-Communist and tended to be useful in opposing radical nationalist movements supported by the Soviets. After the Cold War ended and the United States became the "world's only superpower," it soon became evident that in the search for new world-scale, outside enemies, Islam was a prime candidate, thus quickly reviving all the old religiously based clichés about violent, antimodernist, and monolithic Islam. These clichés were useful to Israel and its political and academic supporters in the United States, particularly because of the emergence of Islamic resistance movements to Israel's military occupation of the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. Suddenly a rush of what appeared to be respectably expert material spouted up in the periodical press, most of it purporting to link "Islam" as a whole to such absurdly reductive passions as rage, antimodernism, anti-Americanism, antirationalism, violence, and terror. Quite unsurprisingly, when Samuel Huntington's vastly overrated article on the clash of civilizations appeared in 1993, the core of its belligerent (and dishearteningly ignorant) thesis was the battle between the "West" and "Islam" (which he sagely warned would become even more dangerous when it was allied with Confucianism).

What wasn't immediately noted at the time was how Huntington's title and theme were borrowed from a phrase in an essay, written in 1990 by an energetically self-repeating and self-winding British academic, entitled "The Roots of Muslim Rage." Its author, Bernard Lewis, made his name forty years ago as an expert on modern Turkey, but came to the United States in the mid-seventies and was quickly drafted into service as a Cold Warrior, applying his traditional Orientalist training to larger and larger questions, which had as their immediate aim an ideological portrait of "Islam" and the Arabs that suited dominant pro-imperial and pro-Zionist strands in U.S. foreign policy. It should be noted that Orientalist learning itself was premised on the silence of the native, who was to be represented by an Occidental expert speaking ex cathedra on the native's behalf, presenting that unfortunate creature as an undeveloped, deficient, and uncivilized being who couldn't represent himself. But just as it has now become inappropriate for white scholars to speak on behalf of "Negroes," it has, since the end of classical European colonialism, stopped being fashionable or even acceptable  to pontificate about the Oriental's (i.e., the Muslim's, or the Indian's, or the Japanese's) "mentality."

Except for anachronisms like Lewis. In a stream of repetitious, tartly phrased books and articles that resolutely ignored any of the recent advances of knowledge in anthropology, history, social theory, and cultural studies, he persisted in such "philological" tricks as deriving an aspect of the predilection in contemporary Arab Islam for revolutionary violence from Bedouin descriptions of a camel rising. For the reader, however, there was no surprise, no discovery to be made from anything Lewis wrote, since it all added up in his view to confirmations of the Islamic tendency to violence, anger, antimodernism, as well as Islam's (and especially the Arabs') closed-mindedness, its fondness for slavery, Muslims' inability to be concerned with anything but themselves, and the like. From his perch at Princeton (he is now retired and in his late eighties but still tirelessly pounds out polemical tracts), he seems unaffected by new ideas or insights, even though among most Middle East experts his work has been both bypassed and discredited by the many recent advances in knowledge about particular forms of Islamic experience.

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