The distinguished scholar Bernard Lewis has written a gem of a book, eminently readable and full of wonderful insights and brilliant aperçus. It combines narrative and analysis in just the right proportions and embraces the whole sweep of the history of the Near and Middle East, starting as far back as late antiquity. The study then moves forward, step by step, through the far-flung empires of the caliphs and sultans to the more recent emergence of the Arab world, after a long period of subjection and passivity, to independence and self-assertion. Professor Lewis concludes his book with some parting thoughts, elegantly and persuasively presented, on the reasons for the Middle East’s present uneasy confrontation with the challenges posed by European (and more recently American) modernity.

Spreading his canvas even more widely than the subtitle of the book would suggest, Lewis sets out to recount in vivid and telling detail the past glories and present discontents of the peoples who have lived and flourished in the heartlands of Islam, their politics and institutions, their societies and economies. Beginning—as is fitting for a work conceived on such a time-scale—with the advent of Christianity, he ends with the sequel to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Along the way, he ranges far and wide over an enormous expanse of territory that stretches all the way from the eastern approaches of the Iranian plateau to the foothills of the Atlas, from the Danube basin and the mountains of the Caucasus in the north to the tip of the Yemen in the south. Lewis shows with authority and affection how the men and women who populate history tried to work out their own destiny over time, until the impact of such Western notions as nationalism and self-determination brought about the collapse of their traditional ways and undermined their age-old sense of self-awareness and collective identity.

One of the advantages of adopting such wide-ranging perspectives, which extend well beyond the chronology of the area as commonly defined by Arabists, is that Lewis can afford to give due weight to the legacy of the past and to many of its more elusive ramifications. Iran, for instance, emerges, again and again, as a model for emulation and a source of attraction. Our attention is also drawn to the recurring influences radiating from such distant lands and cultures as those of Central Asia and China, linked to the area by ties of trade and commerce, notably the silk route. Then there are the repeated invasions, from the Golden Horde and Mongols to the Tatars and Turks. The ruin and devastation produced by the Mongol onslaught in the thirteenth century is compared and contrasted with the more familiar story of the Crusades and with the repercussions of Western imperialism in our own time.

Thus the growth and development of the peoples and countries of the area are described not only on their own terms and for their own sakes (although they remain of central importance throughout), but as part of a much larger process of contact, change, and adaptation that extends over many centuries and several continents. To cite but one or two examples out of many: the residual legacy of Oriental despotism, traced all the way back to pre-Islamic Egypt and Sassanid Persia, for instance; or the continuing resiliency of a Byzantine autocracy running parallel with the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates in their heyday, as well as with the Turkish Sultanate that challenged and ultimately replaced it. These powers are shown to have shaped and reinforced an authoritarian, autocratic streak growing out of an Islamic creed, one rooted in the Arab experience in Mecca and Medina. Despite the appearance it gave of uniformity, Islam managed to achieve unity and diversity in a symbiotic balance that stands out as a unique achievement in the history of civilization—one certainly never equalled by China or India, to say nothing of Western Christendom. Also unique in shaping the self-consciousness of the Islamic polity is that the rhythms and patterns of its history have tended to be discontinuous, fragmented and diffuse, with little to connect the pre-Islamic past and its vestigial pagan remnants to its present dilemmas and perplexities.

In addition to offering other striking and provocative observations on the vicissitudes of the internal history of Arabs, Turks, and Persians over more than a millennium, the book contains an intelligent and lively discussion of the region’s troubled relations with the West. Documenting the successive phases and processes of the loss of power— from the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the humiliation a century later of the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji at the hands of Catherine II of Russia, until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire—the book culminates in the Middle East’s present rejection of the authority and attraction of European culture and all its ways.

The Middle East is of considerable scholarly interest since the whole thrust of the author’s works has of late created quite a stir in certain circles that have only a polemical interest in this part of the world. After holding a chair since 1949 at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, Bernard Lewis became a professor (now emeritus) of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University in 1974. A long-time member of the Institute of Advanced Study, he is renowned for his teaching, his writings, and his example as the most versatile and prolific of today’s Orientalists.

He first attracted the attention of what was then a small but select gild of Arabists while still at London University more than half a century ago, with the publication in 1940 of a seminal doctoral thesis on The Origins of Ismailism: A Study on the Historical Background of the Fatimid Caliphate. Republished in 1968 under the title The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam, this account of Shiite political activism at the time of the Crusades gained a wide and enthusiastic readership outside the academic community.

Then came a steady flow of books and monographs shedding new light and fresh interpretations on a wide variety of aspects of Islamic history. Lewis began to broaden his interests beyond the Middle Ages to more modern and contemporary themes by way of a fascination with Ottoman history, which he was one of the first scholars to study systematically on the basis of the recently opened Turkish archives. This stream of almost yearly publications, showing a range and depth of scholarship unrivaled in the profession, included such notable works as The Arabs in History, now in its sixth edition and still after more than four decades the standard work on the subject; The Emergence of Modern Turkey, a study published under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which remains the best available book on the transition from Ottoman to modern Turkey; and Istanbul and the Civilization of the Ottoman Empire, a dazzling evocation of the reign of Süleiman the Magnificent. The Middle East and the West, which has achieved the rare feat of being translated into both Hebrew and Arabic, by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, on the one hand, and the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, on the other, was subsequently revised and updated under the even more suggestive title, The Shaping of the Modern Middle East. Race and Color in Islam (later expanded, it became Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry) was one of the few works to draw attention to the persistence of slavery in the Arab world. Then there was Islam and History, a collection of essays revised and expanded in 1993 into a volume more than twice its original size, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, the only book to explore such a subject; The Jews of Islam, on the Sephardi communities and their changing fortunes; Semites and Anti-Semites, a devastating exposé of the spread and diffusion of Western ideas throughout the Arab world; History Remembered, Recovered, Invented, containing a wealth of illustrations drawn mostly from the Middle East; and The Political Language of Islam, which demonstrates Lewis’s enduring fascination with the vocabulary of governance and power and the changing meaning of words, loan words, and their etymologies. He is also the editor or co-editor of the three collective works to which the present book can rightly be compared: the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam, which has so far only reached the letter m; the venerable two-volume Cambridge History of Islam, regarded by many as somewhat flawed because of its concentration on political history; and the highly acclaimed Islam and the Arab World, to which he contributed two essays and an epilogue.

With such an impressive record, it should come as no surprise that this, Lewis’s latest endeavor, is a virtuoso performance, which once again demonstrates an intimate and confident familiarity with the sources combined with an enviable gift for compression and lucidity of expression.