Now brought completely up to date, this classic study by one of the world's premier historians of the Middle East considers the achievement of the Arab peoples and their place in world history, from pre-Islamic times to the present-day. In a concise and readable account, Lewis examines the awakening that accompanied the advent of Islam and the political, religious, and social developments that transformed the Arab kingdom into an Islamic empire. He brings the edition up-to-the-minute with an account of recent events in the Middle East and analyzes the forces, internal and external, that have...

This documentary history of Islam from the advent of the prophet Muhammed to the capture of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmed, the Conqueror, is concerned with a period that extends from the 7th century to 1453; with a region that stretches from Western Arabia to embrace the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia, tropical Africa, and southern and eastern Europe; and with people and states, which, amid many diversities, share a common acceptance of the faith and law of Islam. Bernard Lewis, a widely-known authority on the Middle East, here translates from original sources and documents...

This second volume examines the religion and structure of Islamic society. Bernard Lewis draws on a broad range of Islamic literature, including books on religious sects, politics and economics, philosophy and science, travel, biography and literary works, and even bureaucratic records from such disparate sources as the postal service and the judiciary. Comprehensive and cogently translated, these documents bring into sharp focus aspects of a world long neglected by Western historians.

From before the days of Moses up through the 1960s, slavery was a fact of life in the Middle East. Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims bought and sold at the slave markets for millennia, trading the human plunder of wars and slave raids that reached from the Russian steppes to the African jungles. But if the Middle East was one of the last regions to renounce slavery, how do we account for its--and especially Islam's--image of racial harmony? How did these long years of slavery affect racial relations? In Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis explores these questions...

With this major revision of his classic The Middle East and the West (1964), a leading Middle East historian of our time offers a definitive and now more-timely-than-ever history of Western-Middle Eastern relations from the late seventeenth century to the present day. Fully revised to cover the volatile developments of the last three decades, The Shaping of the Modern Middle East sheds light on the climax and sudden end of the cold war, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Arab-Israeli wars, the formation and activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the...

Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies," Bernard Lewis has been for half a century one of the West's foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, the author of over two dozen books, most notably The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and The Muslim Discovery of Europe. Eminent French historian Robert Mantran has written of Lewis's work: "How could one resist being attracted to the books of an author who opens for you the doors of an unknown or...

Hailed as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies" in The New York Times Book Review, Bernard Lewis stands at the height of his field. "To read Mr. Lewis," wrote Fouad Ajami in The Wall Street Journal, "is to be taken through a treacherous terrain by the coolest and most reassuring of guides. You are in the hands of the Islamic world's foremost living historian." Now this sure-handed guide takes us through treacherous terrain indeed--the events of 1492, a year laden with epic events and riven by political debate.
With elegance and erudition, Lewis explores that climactic year as a clash of...

Written by renowned scholar Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey has established itself as the preferred one-volume history of modern Turkey. It covers the emergence of Turkey over two centuries, from the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire up to the present day. In a new chapter, Lewis discusses the origins of his book in the Cold War era and the events that have taken place since its first publication in 1961. This new edition addresses Turkey's emergence as a decidedly Western-oriented power despite internal opposition from neutralists and Islamic fundamentalists....

What does jihad really mean? What is the Muslim conception of law? What is Islam's stance toward unbelievers? Probing literary and historical sources, Bernard Lewis traces the development of Islamic political language from the time of the Prophet to the present. His analysis of documents written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish illuminates differences between Muslim political thinking and Western political theory, and clarifies the perception, discussion, and practices of politics in the Islamic world.

"Lewis's own style, combining erudition with a simple elegance and subtle humor,...

The Arab-Israeli conflict has unsettled the Middle East for over half a century. This conflict is primarily political, a clash between states and peoples over territory and history. But it is also a conflict that has affected and been affected by prejudice. For a long time this was simply the "normal" prejudice between neighboring people of different religions and ethnic origins. In the present age, however, hostility toward Israel and its people has taken the form of anti-Semitism-a pernicious world view that goes beyond prejudice and ascribes to Jews a quality of cosmic evil. First...