It made a little splash, and then disappeared until the tsunami it implied awaited us, washed all memory of it from our minds.

It reminds me of James Mill’s, Underground Empire.

They saw it coming around the bend. Step one: Americans generally shrugged. Step two: after impact, Americans, those who even care enough to respond then, ask “What the heck just happened?”

Lewis’ books are quite good and readable. One delightful one is his book on The Assassins. The Twelver Shia of Iran and Iraq are weird enough, but the Ismaili Assassins were outright crazy.

Lewis did not believe Islam to be a “religion of peace.”

I have never found any evidence that he told Bush it was, either.

Here’s one of many things Lewis said on the subject:

Until fairly recent times,” writes Bernard Lewis, “[jihad] was usually, though not universally, understood in a military sense. It was a Muslim duty – collective in attack, individual in defense – to fight in the war against the unbelievers. In principle, this war was to continue until all mankind either embraced Islam or submitted to the authority of the Muslim state.”

In 2008 Lewis said this:

There are considerable difficulties in understanding it because of two false images, which are widespread. On the one hand we have the image of Muslims as barbarians, the traditional image of a Saracen riding out of the desert on horseback with a sword in one hand and a Koran in the other offering their victims a choice between the two. On the other hand we have Islam as a religion of love and peace, like the Quakers but without their aggressiveness. Both of these are, of course, nonsense. Both are wildly exaggerated, and the truth is in its usual place somewhere between the two.

What we try to do in this book is to give an unvarnished, unapologetic, undefensive account of Islam as it truly is. It’s not a religious book. We are not theologians. We are concerned with human beings, people who expressed and promoted the religion and who profess it at the current time. What we have tried to do is to give a fair and balanced account of the realities of the Islamic world, the good things, the bad things, and the present danger…

We should have no illusions. [Radical Islamic terrorism] is a very real danger that could be a mortal threat to our whole civilization, to our way of life. It comes in two varieties. On the one hand you have the al-Qaeda type. On the other hand you have the Iranian type sponsored by the Iranian government. Both of these have global aspirations. Both of them have a sort of apocalyptic mind-sets. Both feel that now is the end of time and that the final struggle is about to take place between the forces of good and the forces of evil, the forces of good, of course, means themselves and the forces of evil means us, the rest of the world.

Lewis believe that the terrorists were not the whole story of Islam today, but that they were a big and dangerous part of it.

And, just a reminder, it can be ordered through our gracious hostess’s Amazon portal.

However, it’s my understanding that he is the expert who so thoroughly convinced George W. Bush that “Islam is a Religion of Peace” that even today Bush insists that to be the case.

In the same article in which I read that, the author expressed puzzlement at that POV from Lewis, as evidently Lewis’ prior writings do not support that viewpoint. The author speculated that age was the only plausible explanation for that contradiction.

Personally, I suspect it goes deeper than that, for all his expertise, Lewis evidently shied away from fully confronting Islam’s inherent nature. I suspect his obvious fascination with the subject is responsible, for why devote one’s entire adult life to the study of a monstrous ideology that sprang from the mind of a mass murdering pedophile?

That btw is factually and objectively true, yet were I a British citizen, publicly stating it there would land me in prison.

Ironically, I also suspect that reading aloud any of Lewis’ criticisms of Islam, regardless of how mild, would result in accusations of “Islamophobia”.

“Theresa May Announces the End of Free Speech in UK”

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/05/theresa-may-announces-the-end-of-free-speech-in-uk-we-value-free-speech-we-also-value-tolerance-to-others

Whatever the MB guy meant, I doubt he intended to applaud brutal honesty. That’s not how Islamists roll.

I can see a lot more ways to go in interpreting what an MB would mean by “candid friend or honorable enemy” than your run-down.

If a Stalinist complimented Lewis as a “candid friend or honorable enemy,” it wouldn’t endear Lewis to me either. I would put a question mark next to his name.

Except that by paring the quote as you’ve done, you’ve taken it out of its context. (To be sure, the context isn’t entirely clear from the entire quote…unless one is aware of the background.)

The point being that Lewis’s analyses—and criticisms—of the MB’s behavior, strategy and goals were perceived by that MB particular representative as brutally honest and incisive. And at times critical. But fair.

Brutal honesty is not exactly endemic in that part of the world, where lying, subterfuge, dishonesty, intimidation and violence are by far the norm.

The MB representative was 1) surprised at—and in admiration of—Lewis’s perspicacity, and 2) surprised at—and in admiration of—his honesty in expressing his views.

Hence the MB representative could only conclude that Lewis’s wisdom (in analysis) and fearlessness (in telling the truth) meant one of two things: that he was either “an honorable enemy” or a “candid friend”.

To be sure, Lewis, while always candid, was not then and not ever a “friend” of the MB.

Lewis was probably right, though “How bad is Islam really?” remains a tricky question to assess.

I’m not entirely comforted that a Muslim Brotherhood brother would compliment Lewis as a “candid friend or an honorable enemy.”

A book by Lewis was translated into Hebrew and published by the Israeli defense ministry. The same book was translated into Arabic and published by the Muslim Brotherhood (unauthorized). In his preface to the Arabic version, the translator said, “I don’t know who this author is, but one thing about him is clear: He is either a candid friend or an honorable enemy, and in either case is one who has disdained to falsify the truth.”

Lewis always said that this was one of the great compliments of his career.

That Edward Said disdained Lewis’s scholarship is an indication how good Lewis’s scholarship actually was.