Red meat, strong drink
By Suzanne Fields
Monday, March 19, 2007

Excerpt: "Bernard Lewis, age 90, has studied Islam and the Middle East for more than half a century. The Capital grapevine has it that he strongly influenced President Bush to take the coalition of the willing into Iraq. His books have been important to historians, but he wasn't known to most of the rest of us until after 9/11, when the West woke up to its ignorance of the Middle East and Islam, beyond the fanciful tales of the caliphs, harems and camel drivers of the Arabian nights.

Crucial reading soon included his book, "What Went Wrong," in which Mr. Lewis dissects the sociology and psychology of the Muslim world after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when Muslim humiliation became total. But instead of examining their own responsibilities for their failures, the Middle Eastern governments looked for others to blame for their demoted status. "Who did this to us?" they asked. Blame was variously assigned to the Mongols, the Turks, then the French and the British, and now Israel and America. The Muslims refused to see the source of their weakness, beginning with the brutal mistreatment of women.

"The status of women, though probably the most profound single difference between the two civilizations, attracted far less attention than such matters as guns, factories and parliaments," says Mr. Lewis. Half of the Muslims are forbidden to contribute their creativity to the Islamic civilization.

To understand the Middle East's great antipathy to America, however, he looks to other changes in the modern world. During the Cold War, Arabs and other Muslims learned to manipulate and profit from Western rivalries. When the era of outside domination ended, older, deeper trends in their history, which had been submerged, returned with a vengeance. These include ethnic, religious and regional differences, the particularly destructive internal rivalries."
the rest