The Muslim Discovery of Europe

by Bernard Lewis

Book Overview

The eleventh-century Muslim world was a great civilization while Europe lay slumbering in the Dark Ages. Slowly, inevitably, Europe and Islam came together, through trade and war, crusade and diplomacy. The ebb and flow between these two worlds for seven hundred years, illuminated here by a brilliant historian, is one of the great sagas of world history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393321657
• ISBN13: 9780393321654
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 358 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Only the curious thrive

Intel co-founder Andy Grove popularized the saying "only the paranoid survive," which has become a mantra for high tech companies competing in the fast-paced global market. The none-too-subtle message of Bernard Lewis' "The Muslim Discovery of Europe" is that "only the curious thrive," which could (and should) serve as a mantra for western societies, the United States above all else, during this period of staggering western power. The subject of this book is as simple as it is sweeping: how did the Muslim world view the West (namely western Europe) from the medieval period to the early modern age? Lewis aims to tell the story of Muslim discovery and interaction with the West from their viewpoint and in their words. The picture he paints of early Islamic society is not flattering and ought to serve as a cautionary tale to modern Americans. Lewis writes that for over a millennium (800-1800) the Islamic world was disdainful and dismissive of the West. The most remarkable aspect of the Muslim view of Europe was the utter absence of any curiosity about its cultures, languages, arts or sciences. While Europeans traveled to the Middle East, learned Arabic, and wrote a host of books on Islam and Arab culture, for centuries Muslims, Lewis argues, could not have cared less about Europeans. One comparative example is illustrative: Cambridge University established a chair in Arabic in 1633 whereas the first ever Arabic-to-Western language dictionary (in this case French) was not published until 1828 in Egypt. The West was viewed as backward, slovenly, and above all "infidel." Lewis argues that this strong undercurrent of cultural arrogance and superiority led the Islamic world to fall further and further behind the West as technological innovations and the western economy grew at a rapid pace beginning in the sixteenth century. So why was Western curiosity about the Islamic world not reciprocated? Lewis contends that the multi-cultural nature of early Europe fostered a need and interest in learning other languages and cultures and dealing with other religions, whereas the relatively monolithic Middle East used one language for religion, government and commerce and never had any firm ethnic or political borders. For Muslims, all Europeans were "Franks" -- that they spoke different languages, dressed uniquely, and eventually practiced different forms of Christianity was unimportant and unexplored. But the main impediment to Muslim curiosity of the West was religious. In Muslim eyes, Lewis says, Christianity was something known and discarded. Anything associated with it was ipso facto inferior and grotesque. Thus, the Muslim world ignored the Renaissance and the political implications of the Reformation, as both were deemed essentially Christian in nature. Lewis repeatedly cites the French Revolution as the first major European event that had major repercussions in the Islamic world namely because it was so overtly non-religious. This book sh

I wish I'd read this in 2002 when it first came out

This is really an excellent, well-written book, with lots of good information. The sub-title of the book, "What Went Wrong" does not refer to the knee-jerk question about why the islamists hate us, it's about how and why the once high culture of Islam has devolved into the violent morass that much of it is today. The book goes all the way back to the seventh century, and is written from the point of view of islamic cultures of the time. The book has changed my frame of reference about what is going on in the outside world's relationship to islamic cultures. Professor Lewis' style of writing is very readable without a lot of editorializing, the way a real scholar's should be. I have read several of his books now, and intend to read them all.

Excellent history of how Islam saw the West

Bernard Lewis is a historian and expert on the Islamic world or more specifically the Middle East. In the Muslim Discovery of Europe he looks at how the Islamic world came to see the West and its influence.Throughout Lewis shows the strange duality of the Islamic regimes and culture. In some ways tolerant of Christianity and Judaism (although more dismissive and contemptuous than is commonly realized), Islamic culture became incapable of making the next leap forward into a more secular, rationale society. Here Lewis traces the perception of writers, scientists, diplomats and traders from the Ottoman empire through their letters, edicts and other writings. It is an amazing eye opener for those unfamiliar with non-western perceptions. Lewis shows a culture that is first progressive, then increasingly unable to come to grips with either the West or its science and technology. What was progressive becomes eventually, under the latter Ottomans, the definition of decay and backwardness.This is great historical writing in some ways as important, though not as revisionist, as Eric Wolfe's "Europe and the Peoples Without a History". Highly illuminating and highly recommended.

Silky-smooth classic by a master

"The Muslim Discovery of Europe" is a must-read for anyone interested in Middle Eastern history, especially the period between 1500 and 1900. Bernard Lewis writes in a silky-smooth, easy-to-read style, yet the book is erudite and not "Middle Eastern history for dummies".Lewis explores how the "medieval iron curtain" between Christendom and Islam gradually broke down (to the extent that it did) between the Crusades and the middle of the 19th century, underscoring the Muslim world's changing views of Europe. From Islam's early days up through the Ottoman zenith in the 16th century, Islamic civilization was unquestionably more brilliant than its European counterpart. So Muslims didn't find much reason to be interested in the West. While Europe's Roman forbears might be worth a glance, the average Middle Easterner's image of a European before 1800 was the one (perhaps mythic) symbolized by the filthy Austrian soldiers who, in a 17th-century assault on Budapest (then an Ottoman city), turned an immaculate Turkish bath-house into a horse stable and then washed themselves in their animals' urine. With some justification, Muslim scholars reasoned that Europe had no important ideas and no important literature: the most noteworthy European writer of the Middle Ages, after all, was St. Thomas Aquinas, whose books obviously didn't have anything interesting to say to Muslims. Consequently, for centuries, educated Muslims thought it was a waste of time to learn about Europe. As late as the 18th century, Ottoman officialdom was still referring to Europeans -- in government documents -- with nifty little derogatory jingles like "Ingiliz dinsiz" (Englishman without religion), "Fransiz jansiz" (soulless Frenchman), and "Engurus menhus" (inauspicious Hungarian), not to mention the standard and official use of the term "infidel" (kafr). In a way, though, their ignorance is surprising only in hindsight.By 1800, all this had changed. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798) initiated a new wave of European imperialism that over the 19th century, and for the first time since the Crusades, would establish Europeans in positions of direct or indirect power in significant parts of the Middle East. Muslims saw up-close how far Europeans had left them in the lurch: militarily, scientifically, politically, and economically. Rulers recognized that "modernizing" (that is, Europeanizing) their societies was imperative if they were going to prevent foreigners from eventually taking over (some did anyway). The 20th-century implications of these changes were huge: the struggle between tradition and Westernization was (and is) one of the keynotes of modern Middle East history.Lewis ventures far beyond wars and politics and addresses every aspect of the subject: in fact, politics figures into very little of the book directly. Chapter 3, for example, is entirely about language and translation, examining what Muslims thought and knew about European languages and literature on the eve of th

From autarchy to rude awakening.

I have just finished reading Bernard Lewis' "The Muslim Discovery of Europe" (1982 edition), and I find, once again, that Professor Lewis is a master. Just as he did in "Semites and Anti-Semites," the author provides the reader with the necessary information to start the process of acquiring an educated opinion on the subject. In this case, Professor Lewis deals, as the title implies, with the Muslim "discovery" of Europe, and what emerges is the picture of an entire civilization so certain of its own importance and so sure of its righteousness, that it does not do much to know the barbarians from the North and West, robbing itself of the chance to learn something, maybe little but most probably quite a lot, from a different culture, one that, quite unexpectedly, would turn planetary in a matter of centuries. The Muslim world appears as what great civilizations --and most big countries today-- tend to be: obsessed with itself. Professor Lewis proves that, even if the European attitude towards other cultures was similar to that of the Muslims, Europe always allowed a little window of doubt to upset the perfect order of a religion-based society. Doubt and curiosity blessed Europe. After all the bloodshed and the terrible price paid in lives and suffering, Europe could still astound the world with the "Renaissance" of the 12th century, and the true Renaissance that started in Italy in the 14th. Hand in hand with religious murders, expulsion of Jews and Moors, Inquisition, Reformation, and Thirty-Years War, Europe gave "Don Quijote," Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Descartes, Boccaccio, Dante, and thousands of others to the world. While this was happening, Europe's most powerful neighbor was blinded by its own arrogance and its total belief in its superiority.The Muslim world eventually "discovered" Europe, but it was more of a rude awakening than a discovery. This book also states early on what is clear in many history texts, but that tends to be forgotten by overly-sympathetic Western voices: Islam started as an eminently warrior religion, conquering places where Christianity had been established for centuries, like North Africa (Saint Augustine was from Hippo, which is Carthage), and the always improperly named Palestine area. The Muslim conquerors did not go sword in hand to those places to convert idolatrers, and they certainly did not go to Spain because the Visigothic kingdoms were atheist. Eminent historians, like the late Steven Runciman in "History of the Crusades" (3 volumes), and popular programs, like the BBC-A & E "Crusades," can badly serve their readers and viewers by blaming only Europeans for the Crusades, stating that these started in 1096 with the Cristian invasion of Syria, and ended in 1291 with the fall of the last Christian stronghold, Acre. Bur Professor Lewis knows better: the Muslim-Christian confrontation, with ups and downs, years of ferocity and years of coexistence, started when the Muslims broke ou