Bernard Lewis’s new collection of essays, “The End of Modern History in the Middle East”, is an often fascinating, sometimes dull and endlessly frustrating continuation of the author’s 50-plus years of scholarly musing on the region. For those unfamiliar with Lewis, he is best known for coining the phrase “clash of civilizations”, which he introduced in a 1990 article in The Atlantic entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage”. In that piece, Lewis presented his hypothesis that there was a deepening schism between Islam and the West — one founded in an inherent hostility toward Western values on the part of the Muslim world. The events of 9/11 emboldened such thinking and Lewis’s ideology was espoused by the Bush administration in its hammerhead approach to creating ‘democracy’ in the Middle East (Lewis has criticized the implementation of the invasion of Iraq but has stood by its goals). This approach was largely
