Islam & the West: Conflict of civilizations?

This video raises interesting questions about whether we are genuinely in a conflict of civilizations or in a struggle between faith and doubt or divided between modernity and traditionalism. Or even between Aristotle and Plato?

I add the following speech by Bernard Lewis, a famous scholar of Islam, who first began discussing the argument for a clash of civilizations from an historical perspective. Conceiving the conflict in this manner is illuminating but also highly dangerous because it can easily motivate people to enter the fray as if they were being called by civilization itself.

"The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad--an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war."

Thank you, Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, ladies and gentlemen. As you have

been told, I have studied a number of languages, but I cannot find words in

any of them adequate to express my feeling of gratitude for the honor and

appreciation which I have been shown this evening. All I can say is thank

you.

My topic this evening is Europe and Islam. But let me begin with a word of

personal explanation. You are accustomed for the most part to hearing from

people with direct practical involvement in military and intelligence

matters. I cannot offer you that. My direct involvement with military and

intelligence matters ended quite a long time ago--to be precise, on 31

August 1945, when I left His Majesty's Service and returned to the

university to join with colleagues in trying to cope with a six-year backlog

of battle-scarred undergraduates.

What I would like to try and offer you this evening is something of the

lessons of history. Here I must begin with a second disavowal. It is

sometimes forgotten that the content of history, the business of the

historian, is the past, not the future. I remember being at an international

meeting of historians in Rome during which a group of us were sitting and

discussing the question: should historians attempt to predict the future? We

batted this back and forth. This was in the days when the Soviet Union was

still alive and well. One of our Soviet colleagues finally intervened and

said, "In the Soviet Union, the most difficult task of the historian is to

predict the past."

I do not intend to offer any predictions of the future in Europe or the

Middle East, but one thing can legitimately be expected of the historian,

and that is to identify trends and processes - to look at the trends in the

past, at what is continuing in the present, and therefore to see the

possibilities and choices which will face us in the future.

One other introductory word. A favorite theme of the historian, as I am sure

you know, is periodization--dividing history into periods. Periodization is

mostly a convenience of the historian for purposes of writing or teaching.

Nevertheless, there are times in the long history of the human adventure

when we have a real turning point, a major change--the end of an era, the

beginning of a new era. I am becoming more and more convinced that we are in

such an age at the present time--a change in history comparable with such

events as the fall of Rome, the discovery of America, and the like. I will

try to explain that.

Conventionally, the modern history of the Middle East begins at the end of

the 18th century, when a small French expeditionary force commanded by a

young general called Napoleon Bonaparte was able to conquer Egypt and rule

it with impunity. It was a terrible shock that one of the heartlands of

Islam could be invaded, occupied, and ruled with virtually no effective

resistance.

The second shock came a few years later with the departure of the French,

which was brought about not by the Egyptians nor by their suzerains, the

Turks, but by a small squadron of the Royal Navy commanded by a young

admiral called Horatio Nelson, who drove the French out and back to France.

This is of symbolic importance. That was, as I said, at the end of the 18th

and the beginning of the 19th century. From then onward, the heartlands of

Islam were no longer wholly controlled by the rulers of Islam. They were

under direct or indirect influence or control from outside.

The dominating forces in the Islamic world were now outside forces. What

shaped their lives was Western influence. What gave them choices was Western

rivalries. The political game that they could play--the only one that was

open to them--was to try and profit from the rivalries between the outside

powers, to try to use them against one another. We see that again and again

in the course of the 19th and 20th and even into the beginning of the 21st

century. We see, for example, in the First World War, the Second World War,

and the Cold War, how Middle Eastern governments or leaders tried to play

this game with varying degrees of success.

That game is now over. The era that was inaugurated by Napoleon and Nelson

was terminated by Reagan and Gorbachev. The Middle East is no longer ruled

or dominated by outside powers. These nations are having some difficulty

adjusting to this new situation, to taking responsibility for their own

actions and their consequences, and so on. But they are beginning to do so,

and this change has been expressed with his usual clarity and eloquence by

Osama bin Laden.

We see with the ending of the era of outside domination, the reemergence of

certain older trends and deeper currents in Middle Eastern history, which

had been submerged or at least obscured during the centuries of Western

domination. Now they are coming back again. One of them I would call the

internal struggles--ethnic, sectarian, regional--between different forces

within the Middle East. These have of course continued, but were of less

importance in the imperialist era. They are coming out again now and gaining

force, as we see for example from the current clash between Sunni and Shia

Islam--something without precedent for centuries.

The other thing more directly relevant to my theme this evening is the signs

of a return among Muslims to what they perceive as the cosmic struggle for

world domination between the two main faiths--Christianity and Islam. There

are many religions in the world, but as far as I know there are only two

that have claimed that their truths are not only universal--all religions

claim that--but also exclusive; that they--the Christians in the one case,

the Muslims in the other--are the fortunate recipients of God's final

message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to

themselves--like the Jews or the Hindus--but to bring to the rest of

humanity, removing whatever obstacles there may be on the way. This

self-perception, shared between Christendom and Islam, led to the long

struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries and which

is now entering a new phase. In the Christian world, now at the beginning of

the 21st century of its era, this triumphalist attitude no longer prevails,

and is confined to a few minority groups. In the world of Islam, now in its

early 15th century, triumphalism is still a significant force, and has found

expression in new militant movements.

It is interesting that both sides for quite a long time refused to recognize

this struggle. For example, both sides named each other by non-religious

terms. The Christian world called the Muslims Moors, Saracens, Tartars, and

Turks. Even a convert was said to have turned Turk. The Muslims for their

part called the Christian world Romans, Franks, Slavs, and the like. It was

only slowly and reluctantly that they began to give each other religious

designations and then these were for the most part demeaning and inaccurate.

In the West, it was customary to call Muslims Mohammadans, which they never

called themselves, based on the totally false assumption that Muslims

worship Muhammad in the way that Christians worship Christ. The Muslim term

for Christians was Nazarene--nasrani--implying the local cult of a place

called Nazareth.

The declaration of war begins at the very beginning of Islam. There are

certain letters purported to have been written by the Prophet Muhammad to

the Christian Byzantine emperor, the emperor of Persia, and various other

rulers, saying, "I have now brought God's final message. Your time has

passed. Your beliefs are superseded. Accept my mission and my faith or

resign or submit--you are finished." The authenticity of these prophetic

letters is doubted, but the message is clear and authentic in the sense that

it does represent the long dominant view of the Islamic world.

A little later we have hard evidence--and I mean hard in the most literal

sense--inscriptions. Many of you, I should think, have been to Jerusalem.

You have probably visited that remarkable building, the Dome of the Rock. It

is very significant. It is built on a place sacred to the Judeo-Christian

tradition. Its architectural style is that of the earliest Christian

churches. It dates from the end of the 7th century and was built by one of

the early caliphs, the oldest Muslim religious building outside Arabia. What

is significant is the message in the inscriptions inside the Dome: "He is

God, He is one, He has no companion, He does not beget, He is not begotten."

(cf. Qur'an, IX, 31-3; CXII, 1-3) This is clearly a direct challenge to

certain central principles of the Christian faith.

Interestingly, they put the same thing on a new gold coinage. Until then,

striking gold coins had been an exclusive Roman privilege. The Islamic

caliph for the first time struck gold coins, breaching the immemorial

privilege of Rome, and putting the same inscription on them. As I said, a

challenge.

The Muslim attack on Christendom and the resulting conflict, which arose

more from their resemblances than from their differences, has gone through

three phases. The first dates from the very beginning of Islam, when the new

faith spilled out of the Arabian Peninsula, where it was born, into the

Middle East and beyond. It was then that they conquered Syria, Palestine,

Egypt, and North Africa--all at that time part of the Christian world--and

went beyond into Europe, conquering a sizable part of southwestern Europe,

including Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, all of which became part of

the Islamic world, and even crossing the Pyrenees into France and occupying

for a while parts of France.

After a long and bitter struggle, the Christians managed to retake part but

not all of the territory they had lost. They succeeded in Europe, and in a

sense Europe was defined by the limits of that success. They failed to

retake North Africa or the Middle East, which were lost to Christendom.

Notably, they failed to recapture the Holy Land, in the series of campaigns

known as the Crusades.

That was not the end of the matter. In the meantime the Islamic world,

having failed the first time, was bracing for the second attack, this time

conducted not by Arabs and Moors but by Turks and Tartars. In the

mid-thirteenth century the Mongol conquerors of Russia were converted to

Islam. The Turks, who had already conquered Anatolia, advanced into Europe

and in 1453 they captured the ancient Christian citadel of Constantinople.

They conquered a large part of the Balkans, and for a while ruled half of

Hungary. Twice they reached as far as Vienna, to which they laid siege in

1529 and again in 1683. Barbary corsairs from North Africa--well-known to

historians of the United States--were raiding Western Europe. They went to

Iceland--the uttermost limit--and to several places in Western Europe,

including notably a raid on Baltimore (the original one, in Ireland) in

1631. In a contemporary document, we have a list of 107 captives who were

taken from Baltimore to Algiers, including a man called Cheney.

Again, Europe counterattacked, this time more successfully and more rapidly.

They succeeded in recovering Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, and in

advancing further into the Islamic lands, chasing their former rulers whence

they had come. For this phase of European counterattack, a new term was

invented: imperialism. When the peoples of Asia and Africa invaded Europe,

this was not imperialism. When Europe attacked Asia and Africa, it was.

This European counterattack began a new phase which brought the European

attack into the very heart of the Middle East. In our own time, we have seen

the end of the resulting domination.

Osama bin Laden, in some very interesting proclamations and declarations,

has this to say about the war in Afghanistan which, you will remember, led

to the defeat and retreat of the Red Army and the collapse of the Soviet

Union. We tend to see that as a Western victory, more specifically an

American victory, in the Cold War against the Soviets. For Osama bin Laden,

it was nothing of the kind. It is a Muslim victory in a jihad. If one looks

at what happened in Afghanistan and what followed, this is, I think one must

say, a not implausible interpretation.

As Osama bin Laden saw it, Islam had reached the ultimate humiliation in

this long struggle after World War I, when the last of the great Muslim

empires--the Ottoman Empire--was broken up and most of its territories

divided between the victorious allies; when the caliphate was suppressed and

abolished, and the last caliph driven into exile. This seemed to be the

lowest point in Muslim history. From there they went upwards.

In his perception, the millennial struggle between the true believers and

the unbelievers had gone through successive phases, in which the latter were

led by the various imperial European powers that had succeeded the Romans in

the leadership of the world of the infidels--the Christian Byzantine Empire,

the Holy Roman Empire, the British and French and Russian empires. In this

final phase, he says, the world of the infidels was divided and disputed

between two rival superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In

his perception, the Muslims have met, defeated, and destroyed the more

dangerous and the more deadly of the two infidel superpowers. Dealing with

the soft, pampered and effeminate Americans would be an easy matter.

This belief was confirmed in the 1990s when we saw one attack after another

on American bases and installations with virtually no effective response of

any kind--only angry words and expensive missiles dispatched to remote and

uninhabited places. The lessons of Vietnam and Beirut were confirmed by

Mogadishu. "Hit them, and they'll run." This was the perceived sequence

leading up to 9/11. That attack was clearly intended to be the completion of

the first sequence and the beginning of the new one, taking the war into the

heart of the enemy camp.

In the eyes of a fanatical and resolute minority of Muslims, the third wave

of attack on Europe has clearly begun. We should not delude ourselves as to

what it is and what it means. This time it is taking different forms and two

in particular: terror and migration.

The subject of terror has been frequently discussed and in great detail, and

I do not need to say very much about that now. What I do want to talk about

is the other aspect of more particular relevance to Europe, and that is the

question of migration.

In earlier times, it was inconceivable that a Muslim would voluntarily move

to a non-Muslim country. The jurists discuss this subject at great length in

the textbooks and manuals of shari`a, but in a different form: is it

permissible for a Muslim to live in or even visit a non-Muslim country? And

if so, if he does, what must he do? Generally speaking, this was considered

under certain specific headings.

A captive or a prisoner of war obviously has no choice, but he must preserve

his faith and get home as soon as possible.

The second case is that of an unbeliever in the land of the unbelievers who

sees the light and embraces the true faith--in other words, becomes a

Muslim. He must leave as soon as possible and go to a Muslim country.

The third case is that of a visitor. For long, the only purpose that was

considered legitimate was to ransom captives. This was later expanded into

diplomatic and commercial missions. With the advance of the European

counterattack, there was a new issue in this ongoing debate. What is the

position of a Muslim if his country is conquered by infidels? May he stay or

must he leave?

We have some interesting documents from the late 15th century, when the

reconquest of Spain was completed and Moroccan jurists were discussing this

question. They asked if Muslims could stay. The general answer was no, it is

not permissible. The question was asked: May they stay if the Christian

government that takes over is tolerant? This proved to be a purely

hypothetical question, of course. The answer was no; even then they may not

stay, because the temptation to apostasy would be even greater. They must

leave and hope that in God's good time they will be able to reconquer their

homelands and restore the true faith.

This was the line taken by most jurists. There were some, at first a

minority, later a more important group, who said it is permissible for

Muslims to stay provided that certain conditions are met, mainly that they

are allowed to practice their faith. This raises another question which I

will come back to in a moment: what is meant by practicing their faith? Here

I would remind you that we are dealing not only with a different religion

but also with a different concept of what religion is about, referring

especially to what Muslims call the shari`a, the holy law of Islam, covering

a wide range of matters regarded as secular in the Christian world even

during the medieval period, but certainly in what some call the

post-Christian era of the Western world.

There are obviously now many attractions which draw Muslims to Europe

including the opportunities offered, particularly in view of the growing

economic impoverishment of much of the Muslim world, and the attractions of

European welfare as well as employment. They also have freedom of expression

and education which they lack at home. This is a great incentive to the

terrorists who migrate. Terrorists have far greater freedom of preparation

and operation in Europe--and to a degree also in America--than they do in

most Islamic lands.

I would like to draw your attention to some other factors of importance in

the situation at this moment. One is the new radicalism in the Islamic

world, which comes in several kinds: Sunni, especially Wahhabi, and Iranian

Shiite, dating from the Iranian revolution. Both of these are becoming

enormously important factors. We have the strange paradox that the danger of

Islamic radicalism or of radical terrorism is far greater in Europe and

America than it is in the Middle East and North Africa, where they are much

better at controlling their extremists than we are.

The Sunni kind is mainly Wahhabi and has benefited from the prestige and

influence and power of the House of Saud as controllers of the holy places

of Islam and of the annual pilgrimage, and the enormous oil wealth at their

disposal. The Iranian revolution is something different. The term revolution

is much used in the Middle East. It is virtually the only generally accepted

title of legitimacy. But the Iranian revolution is a real revolution in the

sense in which we use that term of the French or Russian revolutions. Like

the French and Russian revolutions in their day, it has had an enormous

impact in the whole area with which the Iranians share a common universe of

discourse--that is to say, the Islamic world.

Let me turn to the question of assimilation, which is much discussed

nowadays. How far is it possible for Muslim migrants who have settled in

Europe, in North America, and elsewhere, to become part of those countries

in which they settle, in the way that so many other waves of immigrants have

done? I think there are several points which need to be made.

One of them is the basic differences in what precisely is meant by

assimilation and acceptance. Here there is an immediate and obvious

difference between the European and the American situations. For an

immigrant to become an American means a change of political allegiance. For

an immigrant to become a Frenchman or a German means a change of ethnic

identity. Changing political allegiance is certainly very much easier and

more practical than changing ethnic identity, either in one's own feelings

or in one's measure of acceptance. England had it both ways. If you were

naturalized, you became British but you did not become English.

I mentioned earlier the important difference in what one means by religion.

For Muslims, it covers a whole range of different things--marriage, divorce,

and inheritance are the most obvious examples. Since antiquity in the

Western world, the Christian world, these have been secular matters. The

distinction of church and state, spiritual and temporal, lay and

ecclesiastical is a Christian distinction which has no place in Islamic

history and therefore is difficult to explain to Muslims, even in the

present day. Until very recently they did not even have a vocabulary to

express it. They have one now.

What are the European responses to this situation? In Europe, as in the

United States, a frequent response is what is variously known as

multiculturalism and political correctness. In the Muslim world there are no

such inhibitions. They are very conscious of their identity. They know who

they are and what they are and what they want, a quality which we seem to

have lost to a very large extent. This is a source of strength in the one,

of weakness in the other.

A term sometimes used is constructive engagement. Let's talk to them, let's

get together and see what we can do. Constructive engagement has a long

tradition. When Saladin re-conquered Jerusalem and other places in the holy

land, he allowed the Christian merchants from Europe to stay in the

seaports. He apparently felt the need to justify this, and he wrote a letter

to the caliph in Baghdad explaining his action. I would like to quote it to

you. The merchants were useful since "there is not one among them that does

not bring and sell us weapons of war, to their detriment and to our

advantage." This continued during the Crusades. It continued after. It

continued during the Ottoman advance into Europe, when they could always

find European merchants willing to sell them weapons they needed and

European bankers willing to finance their purchases. Constructive engagement

has a long history.

One also finds a rather startling modern version of it. We have seen in our

own day the extraordinary spectacle of a pope apologizing to the Muslims for

the Crusades. I would not wish to defend the behavior of the Crusaders,

which was in many respects atrocious. But let us have a little sense of

proportion. We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an

unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The

first papal call for a crusade occurred in 846 C.E., when an Arab expedition

from Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St. Peter's Rome. A synod in

France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against "the

enemies of Christ," and the Pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those

who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later,

in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades

were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad--an attempt to

recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war. It failed, and it was

not followed up.

Here is another more recent example of multiculturalism. On October 8,

2002--I insist on giving the date because you may want to look it up--the

then French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who I am told is a staunch

Roman Catholic, was making a speech in the French National Assembly and

talking about the situation in Iraq. Speaking of Saddam Hussein, he remarked

that one of Saddam Hussein's heroes was his compatriot Saladin, who came

from the same Iraqi town of Tikrit. In case the members of the Assembly were

not aware of Saladin's identity, M. Raffarin explained to them that it was

he who was able "to defeat the Crusaders and liberate Jerusalem." Yes. When

a French prime minister describes Saladin's capture of Jerusalem from the

largely French Crusaders as an act of liberation, this would seem to

indicate a rather extreme case of realignment of loyalties.

I was told this, and I didn't believe it. So I checked it in the

parliamentary record. When M. Raffarin used the word "liberate," a

member--the name was not given--called out, "Libérer?" He just went straight

on. That was the only interruption, and as far as I was aware there was no

comment afterwards.

The Islamic radicals have even been able to find some allies in Europe. In

describing them I shall have to use the terms left and right, terms which

are becoming increasingly misleading. The seating arrangements in the first

French National Assembly after the revolution are not the laws of nature,

but we have become accustomed to using them. They are difficult when applied

to the West nowadays. They are utter nonsense when applied to different

brands of Islam. But as I say, they are what people use, so let us put it

this way.

They have a left-wing appeal to the anti-U.S. elements in Europe, for whom

they have so-to-speak replaced the Soviets. They have a right-wing appeal to

the anti-Jewish elements in Europe, replacing the Axis. They have been able

to win considerable support under both headings. For some in Europe, their

hatreds apparently outweigh their loyalties.

There is an interesting exception to that in Germany, where the Muslims are

mostly Turkish. There they have often tended to equate themselves with the

Jews, to see themselves as having succeeded the Jews as the victims of

German racism and persecution. I remember a meeting in Berlin convened to

discuss the new Muslim minorities in Europe. In the evening I was asked by a

Muslim group of Turks to join them and hear what they had to say about it,

which was very interesting. The phrase which sticks most vividly in my mind

from one of them was, "In a thousand years they (the Germans) were unable to

accept 400,000 Jews. What hope is there that they will accept two million

Turks?" They used this very skillfully in playing on German feelings of

guilt in order to inhibit any effective German measures to protect German

identity, which I would say like others in Europe is becoming endangered.

My time is running out so I think I'll leave other points that I wanted to

make. [Shouts to go on.] You don't mind a bit more?

I want to say something about the question of tolerance. You will recall

that at the end of the first phase of the Christian reconquest, after Spain

and Portugal and Sicily, Muslims--who by that time were very numerous in the

reconquered lands--were given a choice: baptism, exile, or death. In the

former Ottoman lands in southeastern Europe, the leaders of what you might

call the reconquest were somewhat more tolerant but not a great deal more.

Some Muslim minorities remained in some Balkan countries, with troubles

still going on at the present day. If I say names like Kosovo or Bosnia, you

will know what I am talking about.

Nevertheless, I mention this point because of the very sharp contrast with

the treatment of Christians and other non-Muslims in the Islamic lands at

that time. When Muslims came to Europe they had a certain expectation of

tolerance, feeling that they were entitled to at least the degree of

tolerance which they had accorded to non-Muslims in the great Muslim empires

of the past. Both their expectations and their experience were very

different.

Coming to European countries, they got both more and less than they had

expected: More in the sense that they got in theory and often in practice

equal political rights, equal access to the professions, all the benefits of

the welfare state, freedom of expression, and so on and so forth.

But they also got significantly less than they had given in traditional

Islamic states. In the Ottoman Empire and other states before that--I

mention the Ottoman Empire as the most recent--the non-Muslim communities

had separate organizations and ran their own affairs. They collected their

own taxes and enforced their own laws. There were several Christian

communities, each living under its own leadership, recognized by the state.

These communities were running their own schools, their own education

systems, administering their own laws in such matters as marriage, divorce,

inheritance, and the like. The Jews did the same.

So you had a situation in which three men living in the same street could

die and their estates would be distributed under three different legal

systems if one happened to be Jewish, one Christian, and one Muslim. A Jew

could be punished by a rabbinical court and jailed for violating the Sabbath

or eating on Yom Kippur. A Christian could be arrested and imprisoned for

taking a second wife. Bigamy is a Christian offense; it was not an Islamic

or an Ottoman offense.

They do not have that degree of independence in their own social and legal

life in the modern state. It is quite unrealistic for them to expect it,

given the nature of the modern state, but that is not how they see it. They

feel that they are entitled to receive what they gave. As one Muslim friend

of mine in Europe put it, "We allowed you to practice monogamy, why should

you not allow us to practice polygamy?"

Such questions--polygamy, in particular--raise important issues of a more

practical nature. Isn't an immigrant who is permitted to come to France or

Germany entitled to bring his family with him? But what exactly does his

family consist of? They are increasingly demanding and getting permission to

bring plural wives. The same is also applying more and more to welfare

payments and so on. On the other hand, the enforcement of shari`a is a

little more difficult. This has become an extremely sensitive issue.

Another extremely sensitive issue, closely related to this, is the position

of women, which is of course very different between Christendom and Islam.

This has indeed been one of the major differences between the two societies.

Where do we stand now? Is it third time lucky? It is not impossible. They

have certain clear advantages. They have fervor and conviction, which in

most Western countries are either weak or lacking. They are self-assured of

the rightness of their cause, whereas we spend most of our time in

self-denigration and self-abasement. They have loyalty and discipline, and

perhaps most important of all, they have demography, the combination of

natural increase and migration producing major population changes, which

could lead within the foreseeable future to significant majorities in at

least some European cities or even countries.

But we also have some advantages, the most important of which are knowledge

and freedom. The appeal of genuine modern knowledge in a society which, in

the more distant past, had a long record of scientific and scholarly

achievement is obvious. They are keenly and painfully aware of their

relative backwardness and welcome the opportunity to rectify it.

Less obvious but also powerful is the appeal of freedom. In the past, in the

Islamic world the word freedom was not used in a political sense. Freedom

was a legal concept. You were free if you were not a slave. The institution

of slavery existed. Free meant not slave. Unlike the West, they did not use

freedom and slavery as a metaphor for good and bad government, as we have

done for a long time in the Western world. The terms they used to denote

good and bad government are justice and injustice. A good government is a

just government, one in which the Holy Law, including its limitations on

sovereign authority, is strictly enforced. The Islamic tradition, in theory

and, until the onset of modernization, to a large degree in practice,

emphatically rejects despotic and arbitrary government. Living under justice

is the nearest approach to what we would call freedom.

But the idea of freedom in its Western interpretation is making headway. It

is becoming more and more understood, more and more appreciated and more and

more desired. It is perhaps in the long run our best hope, perhaps even our

only hope, of surviving this developing struggle. Thank you.

Bernard Lewis is the recipient of AEI's Irving Kristol Award for 2007.