middle east

Bernard Lewis was the person who really invented the phrase the clash of civlisations and in a way very different from the notorious Samuel Huntington. Lewis's famous article is here along with most of your other favourite Lewis writings. Christopher Catherwood, author of CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL CREATED IRAQ (Carroll and Graf 2004)

I have a couple problems with this book, but I will still give it a rating of 5 stars.

My first problem is that it doesn't flow particularly well from one chapter to the next. This is because the book is an anthology of various speeches, op-eds, chapters of other books, lectures, and other work over the years, many previously unpublished. I would have appreciated some more commentary from today's point of view on his work done many decades ago. Because it jumps from year to year, subject to subject, it is hard to digest large portions of it at a time. My recommendation would be to provide even just paragraph-long segues from one chapter to the next explaining why he included each chapter and how it all adds up to the grand point he is making.

Second, I let someone borrow it, and she declared it boring and refused to plug away to finish it. I will admit, this book is not exactly for beginners on the Middle East, nor is it for people looking for exciting quasi-history or conspiracy theories. It is not pop-history. It is, rather, a subtle and mostly objective look at the history and contemporary affairs of the Middle East over multiple generations, and in such a collection of work, one can glean bits of why the world is how it is today. But don't expect the book to jump out and slap you in the face, arguing from the point of view of an extreme ideologue. If you can't handle it being dry in some places, this is not the book for you.

As far as the good things go, the book is a great way to brush up on Middle Eastern history. I've read some of Lewis' other books, and they are also very good. Some of the other ones flow much better than this one, but this one is the one I would recommend to those who want a more comprehensive yet succinct look at the Middle East, because it does cover so many topics.

As a reader I have known more than one time in my life that very special pleasure of meeting a book, that lifts one spirit and one's mind, seems to put one in another higher realm entirely, and gives a kind of intellectual joy which certainly must be among life's greatest pleasures. Reading and meeting again the mind of Bernard Lewis in "From Babel to Dragomans" is such a pleasure.
Collected in this work are essays of one of the great intellectual figures of this past half - century. Arguably the world's foremost authority on the Middle East ( and most especially the Ottoman Empire) Lewis in these essays displays not only a vast learning but a civilized and often quietly humorous writing which continually inform and delight. In the title essay he elucidates the concept of the ' dragoman' or ' meturgaman' the translator and in so doing also helps us better understand the way societies which contained within themselves a rich variety of cultures and languages operated . In his remarkable essay " A Taxonomy of Hatred" he gives perhaps the most skilled argument I have ever seen for valuing and considering ' the other'. And this as he analyzes and explains how the instinctual hatred that seems to come to us naturally as primates is refined into something more elegant and deadly in human civilizations. As one who has been involved in the study of the Islamic world for over sixty years he brings a fine sense of the transformations that world has gone through in his lifetime while balancing this against what seem almost inherent cultural patterns these societies cannot free themselves of . His analysis of the distinct identity Iran and Iranian civilization managed to preserve after the Arab onslaught swept aside the ancient cultures of Egypt, Syria and other Mid- East regions too enables us to understand the life- struggle that society is going through today between a narrow Islamic based fundamentalism and a broader richer conception of life and civilization.
The book is divided into three large sections, part one dealing with Past History, part two with what he calls " Current History" and Part Three "About History" In this latter section he makes a defense of the practice and teaching of history. He concludes , "Our education today should be concerned with the development of many cultures, in all their diversity: with the great ideas that inspire them and the texts in which those ideas are enshrined, with the achievements they made possible, and with the common heritage their followers and successors share.
"History is the collective memory , the guiding experience of human society, and we all badly need that guidance"
In this volume Lewis provides that guidance in a continually inspiring and uplifting way.
Who reads this volume will not only read a civilization , but a very great man indeed.