If you want to understand what happened in September of 2001, the distinguished Mideast historian Bernard Lewis says you’ve got to look back at least to 1798. That was the year that the French General Napoleon invaded and conquered Egypt. Not only was it humiliating for a once great power to fall so fast, says Professor Lewis, it was much worse because a Muslim state was defeated by a non-Muslim one. For a thousand years before that, the victories had usually belonged to Islam.
At one point, the Muslim world stretched from Spain to India. The Islamic world was the civilized world, with art and science far superior to the European “infidels”. But then something happened. The victories stopped, the empires dwindled, and the blame game began.
Bernard Lewis will be speaking at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education April 8, 2002. For more information, call (617) 495-0740.
Guests:
Bernard Lewis, author, “What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response”