He includes long pieces, such as his capsule history of the interaction-in war and peace, in commerce and culture-between Europe and its Islamic neighbors, and shorter ones, such as his deft study of the Arabic word watan and what its linguistic history reveals about the introduction of the idea of patriotism from the West.
Lewis ranges far and wide in these essays. In Islam and the West, Bernard Lewis brings together in one volume eleven essays that indeed open doors to the innermost domains of Islam. Eminent French historian Robert Mantran has written of Lewiss work: How could one resist being attracted to the books of an author who opens for you the doors of an unknown or misunderstood universe, who leads you within to its innermost domains: religion, ways of thinking, conceptions of power, culture-an author who upsets notions too often fixed, fallacious, or partisan.
Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as the doyen of Middle Eastern studies, Bernard Lewis has been for half a century one of the Wests foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, the author of over two dozen books, most notably The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and The Muslim Discovery of Europe.
