Hay-Adams Hotel Washington, D.C.The relationship between Islam and the West will be a defining feature of the 21st century, particularly in the Middle East. How should U.S. Policymakers engage with the Muslim world? Will the spread of democracy throughout the Muslim world blunt the militant forces generating terrorism? How will European governments and populations deal with their burgeoning Muslim populations, and how will this affect U.S. Foreign policy priorities and alliances?The Pew Forum hosted a discussion of these and other issues with Professor Bernard Lewis, who for 60 years has helped interpret the world of Islam to the West.

• Islam And The West Smithsonian

In addition to authoring more than two dozen books, including What Went Wrong and The Crisis of Islam, Professor Lewis has advised government officials and policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Middle East on the intricacies of the relationships between Islam and the West.Speaker:Professor Bernard Lewis, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton UniversityModerator:Luis Lugo, Director, Pew Forum on Religion & Public LifeLUIS LUGO: Good afternoon to all of you and thank you for joining us today. I’m Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which is a project of the. The Center is a research organization and does not take positions on policy debates.This luncheon is part of an ongoing Pew Forum series that brings together journalists and policy leaders to discuss timely topics at the intersection of religion and public affairs.We are delighted to have Professor Bernard Lewis with us today.

Professor Lewis is one of the most influential scholars of Islam of our time. For more than 60 years, he has specialized in the history of Islam, particularly in the Middle East, and the relationship between Islam and the West, a relationship that has become arguably the single-most important U.S.

Bernard lewis wikipedia the free. DOWNLOAD COLIBRI READERS CIRCLE. Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006) Bernand Lewis. Download islam west bernard lewis 1993 06 24 799 pages. Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis. Hay- Adams Hotel Washington, D.

Foreign policy concern of the 21st century. It was Professor Lewis who coined the term “clash of civilizations,” three years before Samuel Huntington used that phrase in his famous article in Foreign Affairs, setting the stage for a vigorous debate about the relationship between Islam and the West.As everyone acknowledges, more than four-and-a-half years after 9/11, the United States continues to face serious challenges in its relations with the Muslim world. A survey done last year by our sister project, the, captured this rift in numbers. The survey of countries around the globe found that the U.S. Draws its most negative assessment from Muslim nations. In fact, solid majorities in five of the six Muslim countries surveyed view the U.S. In Jordan, for instance, just 21 percent of the population held favorable views of the U.S., while in Turkey and Pakistan it was 23 percent.

Morocco, by the way, was the lone exception. There, our unfavorable rating stood at “only” 42 percent versus 49 percent favorable.And the feeling seems to be mutual. Surveys we have done with the Pew Research Center find that only 4 out of ten Americans have a favorable view of Islam, and unfavorable views in this country are driven by what many perceive to be a close association between Islam and violence.

It is a sobering fact, as our survey from last summer revealed, that more than half of the American public now believes the terrorist attacks over the last few years are, or soon will be, part of a major civilizational conflict between Islam and the West.Are we witnessing a deep-seated and long-term clash of civilizations, or is this a serious but perhaps more manageable and short-term clash of policies? And what does this all mean for U.S. Foreign policy interests and priorities? I submit that if one is going to have a serious conversation on the topic of Islam and the West, any short list of invitees would surely include the name of Bernard Lewis.

We are delighted to have him with us here today. I should mention that Professor Lewis will be celebrating his 90th birthday next month.BERNARD LEWIS: Celebrating isn’t the right word. LUGO: A major conference marking that occasion is being held next Monday in Philadelphia under the auspices of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. Professor Lewis, thank you for being with us today. It is a pleasure and honor to have you, sir.MR. LEWIS: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It is certainly a privilege and, I hope to discover, also a pleasure to be with you today.

As time is short, I shall waste no further time on ceremonial formalities and get straight to the one or two points that I shall have time to make, and leave the rest for you to develop in the course of our subsequent discussion.Let me begin with the name, which has been given – not by me – to our discussion today: the West and Islam, sometimes also Islam and the West, depending on your perspective. You will surely be struck by a certain asymmetry in this formulation. On the one side, a compass point; on the other, a religion. Now, of course, we use “the West” in a number of different senses, but primarily, they are political, strategic, cultural, even civilizational, but not normally religious. The one religious term I have heard used for the West is the post-Christian world.

I needn’t develop the implications of that term. Islam, on the other hand, is the name of a religion. And it is a part of human society identified by itself, and therefore also by others; not the other way around, in terms of religion.But having said that, I think one needs to be more specific. In talking of the Christian world, in English – and, I suppose, in all the other languages of the Christian world – we use two terms: Christianity and Christendom. Christianity means a religion, in the strict sense of that word, a system of belief and worship and some clerical or ecclesiastical organization to go with it. If we say Christendom, we mean the entire civilization that grew up under the aegis of that religion, but also contains many elements that are not part of that religion, many elements that are even hostile to that religion.

Let me give one simple example. No one could seriously assert that Hitler and the Nazis came out of Christianity. No one could seriously dispute that they came out of Christendom.

Islam And The West Smithsonian

In talking of Islam, we use the same word in both senses, and this gives rise to considerable confusion and misunderstanding. There are many things that are described as part of Islam, which are indeed part of Islam, if we take the word as the equivalent of Christendom, but are very much not part of Islam – are even alien or hostile to Islam – if we take the word Islam as the equivalent of Christianity. I think this is a very important point, which one should bear in mind.The late Marshall Hodgson, of the University of Chicago, in discussing this issue, suggested that we use the word Islamdom to describe the civilization. A good idea, but it didn’t catch on, probably because it’s so difficult to pronounce.In that world, religion embraces far more than it does in the Christian or post-Christian world. We are accustomed to talking of church and state, and a whole series of pairs of words that go with them – lay and ecclesiastical, secular and religious, spiritual and temporal, and so on.

These pairs of words simply do not exist in classical Islamic terminology, because the dichotomy that these words express is unknown. They are used in the modern languages.

In Arabic, they borrow the terminology used by Christian Arabs. They are fortunate in having a substantial Christian population using Arabic, and they therefore have a good part of the modern terminology at their disposal, in their own language. In Turkish, Persian, Urdu and other languages of Islam, they had to invent new words. The word in Turkish and in Persian is laik from the French word la誰que, which describes the prevailing concept of separation of church and state.In the Islamic world, from the beginning, Islam was the primary basis of both identity and loyalty.

We think of a nation subdivided into religions. They think, rather, of a religion subdivided into nations. It is the ultimate definition, the prime definition and the one that determines, as I said, not only identity, but also basic loyalty. And this is quite independent of religious belief. In Islam, there isn’t – or rather, there wasn’t until recently – any such thing as the church, in the Christian sense of that word. The mosque is a place of worship.

It’s a building, a place of worship and study. And in that sense, it is the equivalent of the church. But in the sense of an institution with a hierarchy and its own laws and usages, there was no such thing in Islam until very recently. And one of the achievements of the Islamic Revolution in Iran has been to endow an Islamic country for the first time with the equivalents of a pope, a college of cardinals, a bench of bishops and, above all, an inquisition. All these were previously unknown and nonexistent in the Islamic world.On the question of loyalty, let me give you an example. We all know from the history books of the exchange of Turks and Greeks, which took place after World War I when, after the war ended, there was a further war between Greece and Turkey, at the end of which, the Greek and Turkish governments agreed on an exchange of populations.

And as it appears in the history books, the Greek minority in Turkey was sent to Greece; the Turkish minority in Greece was sent to Turkey. That’s what it says in the history books. But if you look at the treaty in which this agreement was incorporated, it says something different. The parties to be exchanged are defined as Turkish subjects of the Greek Orthodox faith and Greek subjects of the Muslim faith. And if you look more closely at who the people actually were, they were, to a very large extent, Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians from Turkey and Greek-speaking Muslims from Greece. This was not an exchange of two ethnic minorities. It was a deportation of two religious minorities.And this remains very much the perception to the present day.

Religion is the primary identity, and that is quite unrelated to belief and worship. An Egyptian scholar even wrote a book with the odd title – odd, that is, to the Western reader – the odd title of Atheism in Islam. It seems a rather absurd title on the face of it. But it isn’t at all.

He was talking about Islam as a culture, as a civilization, and there, as elsewhere, there were atheists and atheist movements, a perfectly legitimate title of a perfectly valid study. It is very difficult for us in the West to understand and appreciate this and all its implications. Separation of church and state was derided in the past by Muslims when they said this is a Christian remedy for a Christian disease.

It doesn’t apply to us or to our world. Lately, I think some of them are beginning to reconsider that, and to concede that perhaps they may have caught a Christian disease and would therefore be well advised to try a Christian remedy.That’s all by way of introduction; I can elaborate on these points if you wish later. I want to tackle one specific question that has been very much in the news of late and will appeal to you professionally, I hope. That is the question of the Danish cartoons. Now, this is a very curious story. The news story, as it broke, was that a Danish newspaper had published a series of cartoons offensive to the Prophet, and that this had led to spontaneous outbursts of indignation all over the Muslim world. Now, there are several problems in this.

One of them was that the spontaneous outbursts of indignation didn’t occur until slightly more than four months after the publication of the cartoons. It’s a little difficult to follow, I think you’ll agree. The second problem was that when the spontaneous outbreaks of indignation did occur all over the Muslim world, in the remotest parts of northern Nigeria, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and elsewhere they had an ample supply of Danish flags of suitable size and texture for trampling or burning, as required. Obviously, this was something carefully prepared over a period of time.What exactly was it about?

Well, fortunately we have a little background on this, which makes it easier to understand. About 18 years ago, you may recall, the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a sentence of death against the novelist Salman Rushdie, who was living in London at that time. The crime for which he sentenced him to death was insulting the Prophet. For a Muslim to insult the Prophet is tantamount to apostasy, and that, as we were recently reminded in Afghanistan, is widely seen as a capital offense.But this is a different matter.

And after a time, I got interested in what was happening, and therefore made a study of the literature relating to this offense, which probably I would not otherwise have bothered with. A number of interesting things emerged. By the way, when we talk of Muslim law, I would remind you that we are talking about law. Sharia is a system of law and adjudication, not of lynching and terror.

It is a law that lays down rules, rules for evidence, for indictment, for defense and the rest of it, quite a different matter from what has been happening recently.The first point made was that it is forbidden to portray the Prophet, that making images of the Prophet of any kind is against the Muslim religion. That is true, though not always strictly observed by Muslims. But the point is that they want to avoid any kind of deification of the Prophet.

Muslims are shocked when they go into churches and they see pictures and statues being worshipped. This they see as idolatrous. And if you go into the interior of a mosque, it is very austere: no pictures, no statues, only inscriptions. The ban on the portrayal of a prophet is intended to prevent the development of idolatrous worship of the Prophet. I don’t think there was any danger of that from the Danish cartoons.What was much more at issue was another ban, and that is on insulting the Prophet, which is, of course, an offense. This raises a number of interesting questions that I think are of direct relevance to the whole issue at the present time.

Insulting the Prophet is an offense in Muslim law. This raises two issues: one of substantive law, the other of jurisdiction.

Muslim jurists discuss this at some length, and there is a considerable body of case law concerning it in Muslim states.The first point of disagreement: What is the range of jurisdiction of Muslim law? And here you have two opinions. According to the Shi’a and a minority among the Sunnis, Muslim law applies to Muslims wherever they may be in the world. A Muslim who commits an offense against Muslim law, wherever he may be in the world, is subject to Muslim law and must therefore be punished in accordance with Muslim law.The majority Sunni view is that Muslim law only applies in countries under Muslim government. What happens outside is no concern of the Muslim authorities. One distinguished jurist makes his point with an extreme example: A Muslim traveling in the lands of the unbelievers commits robbery and murder. He returns to the lands of Islam with his loot.

No action can be taken against him or against his loot because the offense was committed outside the jurisdiction of Islam, and it is therefore up to the juridical and legal authorities of the infidels to take action, if they can and will.Here you have two different opinions relating to an offense committed by a Muslim. That is not the case for the Danish cartoons. This is an offense committed by a non-Muslim. And here the plot thickens.

This is discussed by all of the juridical authorities only in the case of a non-Muslim subject of a Muslim state. If a non-Muslim subject of a Muslim state says or does something offensive to the Prophet, he is to be tried – accused, tried, and if necessary, punished. The jurists on the whole tend to take a rather mild view of this offense. They say, well, he is not a Muslim; he doesn’t accept Mohammed as the Prophet; we know that. So saying that Mohammed is no prophet does not constitute this offense. It has to be more specifically insulting than that.

And, as I say, there is an elaborate juridical literature and case law on this subject.What is never discussed at all – it is never considered – is an offense committed by a non-Muslim in a non-Muslim country. That, according to the unanimous opinion of all of the doctors of the holy law is no concern of Islamic law, which brings us back to the case of Denmark. Does this mean that Denmark, along with the rest of Europe is now considered part of the Islamic lands, and that the Danes, like the rest, are therefore dhimmis, non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state? I think this is an interesting question, which can lead to several possible lines of inquiry.MR. LUGO: Excellent.

Thank you so much.Before taking your questions, I did want to introduce to all of you my two partners in crime in this Pew Forum luncheon series, E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution and The Washington Post, and Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. We take turns moderating these events.MR. LEWIS: There is one thing I wanted to add.MR. LUGO: Please do.MR. LEWIS: Insulting the Prophet is something that has been going on in Europe for a very long time.

In Dante’s Inferno, if you’re interested in the 28th Canto, where Dante is being taken on his conducted tour of hell and guided by Virgil, he comes across the Prophet Mohammed in the course of his eternal damnation. He is punished – I quote Dante’s words, as a “seminator di scandalo e di scisma,” a sower of scandal and of schism. Now, this is very insulting. In the great Cathedral of Bologna there is a wonderful set of pictures painted, if I remember rightly, in the 15th century depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno, including some very graphic pictures of Mohammed being tortured in hell by the devil – very graphic.Nobody did anything about this.

A couple of years ago, the leaders of the Italian-Muslim community sent a polite request to the cathedral saying these are insulting to Muslims; would they mind covering those pictures. The cathedral administration said they would consider it. Nothing happened.

The pictures are still in view.MR. LUGO: Thank you.BARBARA SLAVIN, USA TODAY: Professor Lewis, it is a pleasure to see you again. I want to drag you into the present, but not about the controversy over the cartoons. We have witnessed the most extraordinary conflicts now between the West, in the personage of the United States, and the Muslim world, with the attack on Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.

I wanted to get your views on how this has affected the mentality of people in that part of the world, and specifically on Iraq. The last time I talked to you, you were very supportive of this. I wonder if you still are, whether it has turned out the way you have anticipated. Thank you very much.MR. LEWIS: May I take the latter part of your question first? No, it has not turned out the way I had anticipated. I had underestimated our capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Well, let’s not go into that.How do they perceive it? I think this is the important thing. And on this, fortunately, we are very well documented. Thanks to modern media and modern methods of communication, we are able to follow their thinking, their debate among themselves fairly closely. And I think one can get a fairly good understanding of how this conflict is seen by Osama bin Laden, by al Qaeda generally, and by many other parallel movements including the Iranian leadership personified by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.It goes something like this: You spoke before of the conflict of civilizations, a term that has been much used and even more misused. When I first used it, I was using it in one strictly limited sense, not as a general principle.

Nature. Vehicles. Land. Events. Golden logres 1 2 2 serial ports.

Some have even written as though civilizations had foreign policies and could form alliances, and so on. I would never go that far.

I was referring to one specific conflict between two specific civilizations. Christendom – I’ll call it that for the present purpose – and Islam. And it is a conflict that arises not from their differences but from their resemblances.These two religions, and as far as I am aware, no others in the world, believe that their truths are not only universal but also exclusive. They believe that they are the fortunate recipients of God’s final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves like the Jews or the Hindus, but to bring to the rest of mankind, removing whatever barriers there may be in the way.

This, between two religiously defined civilians, which Christendom was at that time, with the same heritage, the same self-perception, the same aspiration, and living in the same neighborhood inevitably led to conflict, to the real clash of rival civilizations aspiring to the same role, leading to the same hegemony, each seeing it as a divinely ordained mission.We can date it precisely with the advent of Islam, which spread very rapidly by conquest. If you have ever been to Jerusalem, you must have been to the Dome of the Rock. That in itself is a mark of the conflict. It is built on a place sacred to both Jews and Christians. It is built in the style of the early Christian churches, the Church of the Nativity, the Holy Sepulchre and others. And the inscriptions on the wall are very explicit: He is God.

He has no companion. He does not beget. He is not begotten – in other words, a clear challenge to Christianity. (Laughter.) The caliph who built that place in the late seventh century was sending a message.

He put the same message on the gold currency. In other words, he is saying to the Christian emperor, your religion is superseded; your time has past; move over; we are taking over the world.That was the beginning of a conflict that has been going on ever since. Now, we in the Western world, and particularly in the United States, don’t seem to attach much importance to history.

And even what happened three years ago has become ancient history. I find, for example, people seriously arguing that 9/11 was the result of our invasion of Iraq. This kind of reversal cause and effect is quite common.In the Muslim world, on the contrary, they have a very lively sense of history, a very keen awareness of history and a surprisingly detailed knowledge of history. If you look at, for example, the war propaganda of Iran and Iraq during the eight-year war between those two countries, ’80 to ’88 – this is propaganda addressed to the general public, the largely illiterate general public – it is full of historical allusions, and I mean allusions; not telling them historical anecdotes, but a rapid, passing allusion to a name or an event in the sure knowledge that it would be picked up and understood.Osama bin Laden, in one of his pronouncements, said, “For more than 80 years we have been suffering humiliation” (we meaning the Muslim world). That sent all of the experts scurrying to find out what on earth he was talking about, the old ones to reference libraries; the young ones to their computers.

(Laughter.) And they came up with a wide variety of different answers.To anyone who studies Islam or what goes on in the Islamic world, the meaning was perfectly clear. He was referring the suppression of the caliphate by the Turkish Republic in 1924. The caliphate was established on the death of the Prophet as the headship of the Muslim world. And as Muslims see it, the world of Islam was headed by a succession of caliphs of different dynasties, ruling in different places, Medina, Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo. The last one was in Istanbul, and it ended catastrophically after World War I, when the last of the caliphs was deposed, and the last of the great Muslim empires was partitioned, its territories divided between the victorious Western allies.

Contents.Quote from the author Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently. Those who enjoy freedom have a moral obligation to use that freedom for those who do not possess it. We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was. All this is very dangerous indeed, to ourselves and to others, however we may define otherness - dangerous to our common humanity.