Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims & Jews in the Age of Discovery

by Bernard Lewis

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 civilizations--a clash not only of the New World and the Old, but also of Christendom and Islam, of Europe and the rest. In the same year that Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, he reminds us, the Spanish monarchy captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, and also expelled the Jews. Lewis uses these three epochal events to explore the nature of the European-Islamic conflict, placing the voyages of discovery in a striking new context. He traces Christian Europe's path from being a primitive backwater on the edges of the vast, cosmopolitan Caliphate, through the heightening rivalry of the two religions, to the triumph of the West over Islam, examining the factors behind their changing fortunes and cultural qualities.

Balanced and insightful, this far-reaching discussion of the encounters between Islam, the West, and the globe provides a new understanding of the distant events that gave shape to the modern world.

Genres: History, Islam, Religion, Christianity, Middle East, Judaism, Politics

126 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Bernard Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of many critially acclaimed and bestselling books, including two number one New York Times bestsellers: What Went Wrong? and Crisis of Islam. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Internationally recognized as the greatest historian of the Middle East, he received fifteen honorary doctorates and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Reviews

[Oğuz Kayra · Rating 5 out of 5]

96 sayfalık kitaba dünyaları sığdırmış.

[Bob Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lewis explains that Christianity and Islam have much in common and perhaps unfortunately so. They both believe that they have a divinely ordained mission to bring their way of belief to the unbeliever. This can be contrasted with Judaism which accepts that unbelievers can also be righteous, a belief that is not acceptable to Christians or Muslims. The west having undergone is ordeal of religious wars eventually had to accept the principal of religious diversity. Islam had religious toleration but as long as it was Islam doing the tolerating. However for significant periods of western history the followers of Judaism found that Islamic toleration was more congenial to living in Christian communities. An interesting aspect to this was that the Turks accepted and even welcomed Jewish refugees from Spain they restricted what they could do. They allowed the Jews to set up their printing presses in the Ottoman Empire but forbade them from printing in Arabic or Turkic thereby severing themselves from the intellectual development taking place in the Europe. Lewis argues that creation of neo European countries invigorated the West. The discovery of the new world was largely ignored in Muslim lands.

[David Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In any Christian country, even the most tolerant, such an apostasy was punishable by death." This sentence about the time of the Reconquista troubled me after reading it here, and lingered with me.
Here it is in its fuller context:
"The Jews had a special reason for preferring an Islamic country. Many of them had stayed at home in Spain and Portugal and accepted baptism, waiting for a suitable opportunity at a later date to emigrate and revert to Judaism. In any Christian country, even the most tolerant, such an apostasy was punishable by death. In Muslim lands, too, apostasy from Islam was a capital offense, but apostasy from Christianity to Judaism was a matter of indifference." pg. 37-38

Lewis makes the claim about Christian countries at that time without elaboration but, given his erudition, it comes across to me as a weighty generalization. Being a Christian, I will continue to struggle to understand what went wrong in such low points in the history of Christianity to such an extent that the gospel of Christianity was wed to violence.

The reconquest of Andalusia, Spain seems to instantiate Lord Acton's aphorism, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Once the Spanish Christians consolidated power, they became the most intolerant.
First, in 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain. They were given the choice: baptism, exile, or death.

Lewis writes, "In fact, Christian tolerance ended with the completion of the reconquest. The change was all the more dramatic in that the final conquest of Granada was achieved not by assault but by a negotiated capitulation, in which the ruler and nobles of Granada ensured their own safety and also secured from the victorious Catholic monarchs a whole series of undertakings, whose purpose was to guarantee to the Muslim possession of their homes and property, the free exercise of their religion, exemption from any tax other than those prescribed by Islamic law, and the right to be judged by their own judges in accordance with their own laws." p. 46

The arrival of the celebrated archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, in 1498 brought a change to policy and Muslims found themselves increasingly under pressure to convert or depart. They were given the same choice the Jews had been offered ten years earlier: baptism, exile, or death.

When I consider the political language I hear especially on the left today which is so excessive and intolerant as to necessitate by its own logic a merciless subjugation of the opposition, I think of this period in Spain in which the consolidation of power meant the peak of intolerance, and I hope they never have absolute rule.

Lewis remarks at the end of his book, "In setting out to conquer, subjugate, and despoil other peoples, the Europeans were merely following the example set them by their neighbors and predecessors and, indeed, conforming to the common practice of mankind. In particular, their attack on the neighboring lands of Islam in Africa and Asia was a clear case of be-done-by-as-you-did. The interesting questions are not why they tried, but why they succeeded and why, having succeeded, they repented of their success as of a sin. The success was unique in modern times; the repentance, in all of recorded history." pgs. 73-74

Christianity is suppose to shine the light of Christ and not be the darkness of the world. It does encourage me to know that in every age there has always been a Christian witness and a Christian conscience. Some of the European nations remarked of Spain during the era of the Reconquista that it was acting Muslim. De las Casas is an example of one witness against the cruelties perpetrated in the New World. Alcuin shines the light of Christ into the world in opposing Charlemagne's forced conversions of the Saxons.

Here is another example of a Bernard Lewis text which no doubt enrages the woke historicists, the ones who read, because it undercuts their myth-making labors. Just as I must face uncomfortable, sobering truths about Christianity in history and struggle with what happened, for example, in Andalusia, Spain, so they should value truth and honesty over the mythic narrative and subdue the narrative to the truth:

"Although it was known in medieval Europe, slavery was of minor importance there, far less significant in the social and economic life of Europe than in pre-Columbian America or in Muslim and non-Muslim Africa. The meeting of all these different cultures gave rise to a new variant, known as colonial slavery. The fertile lands of America offered both opportunity and challenge. The inventiveness and cupidity of Europe, learning from and drawing on the plantation systems and the slave trade of Africa and the Islamic world, found this answer. Colonial slavery and the seaborne slave trade became a major factor in the crisscrossing interchanges between the four shores of the Atlantic -western Europe, western Africa, North America, and South America.
But it was Europe, too, that first decided to set the slaves free: at home, then in the colonies, and finally in all the world, Western technology made slavery unnecessary; Western ideas made it intolerable. There have been many slaveries, but there has been only one abolition, which eventually shattered even the rooted and ramified slave systems of the Old World.
…Why, then, did the peoples of Europe embark on this vast expansion and, by means of conquest, conversion, and colonization, attempt to create a Eurocentric world? Was it, as some believe, because of some deep-seated, perhaps hereditary vice- some profound moral flaw? The question is unanswerable because it is wrongly posed. In setting out to conquer, subjugate, and despoil other peoples, the Europeans were merely following the example set them by their neighbors and predecessors and, indeed, conforming to the common practice of mankind. In particular, their attack on the neighboring lands of Islam in Africa and Asia was a clear case of be-done-by-as-you-did. The interesting questions are not why they tried, but why they succeeded and why, having succeeded, they repented of their success as of a sin. The success was unique in modern times; the repentance, in all of recorded history." pgs. 72, 73-74

One thing that may be said in particular about the United States is that it is the only country that ever fought a civil war over whether or not to end slavery in the history of mankind. Similarly, regarding the British Empire, although during the first 150 years of its existence it conducted a slave trade, it repudiated slavery 50 years before the United States, led by the Christian crusader against slavery, William Wilberforce, and it spent its second 150 years seeking to destroy the slave trade and the institution of slavery throughout the globe, at great cost to the empire. Mecca was one of the last hold-outs in the Western struggle to outlaw slavery globally.

Bernard Lewis ends with an necessary and plaintive warning:
"Multiculturalism becomes dangerous and demeaning to all cultures when it presents an idealized and sometimes invented version of other cultures and contrasts them with a demonized parody of the West. Certainly, our civilization has many profound flaws, some of them part of our common humanity, others distinctively our own. To many of the charges leveled against us, we have no choice but to plead guilty- as human beings. We of the West have indeed been guilty of arrogance and domination, of aggression and spoliation, of subjugation and enslavement, of murder and rapine, although we might argue in mitigation that it has been a long time since we accepted these things as permissible and even longer since we regarded them as pleasing to God and as ordained by divine law." pg. 76-77

When I read this passage, the pro-Hamas protestors come to mind who do indeed implicitly accept the litany of barbarisms by embracing Hamas, a group similar to or worse than ISIS. Recently they spray painted a statue of Columbus at Union Station in DC with the inscription "Hamas is coming". (There is even some question by both Democrats and Republicans whether VP Harris passed over Shapiro as her choice for running mate because he was a Jew, out of a desire to placate her pro-Hamas base). The irony is their mythologizing paradigm of interpretation ends up causing them to embrace violence and barbarism for the sake of a fanatical Islamic imperialism, ostensibly in protest against Western imperialism, earning them the epithet Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave them in his speech in the US Congress recently: "Useful idiots". (He further noted that the name of the group "Gays for Palestine" was like saying "Chickens for KFC.") He's not wrong.

Lewis reminds us, "Imperialism, sexism, and racism are words of Western coinage, not because the West invented these evils, which are alas universal, but because the West recognized and named and condemned them as evils and struggled mightily- and not entirely in vain - to weaken their hold and to help their victims. If, to borrow a phrase, Western culture does indeed 'go,' imperialism, sexism, and racism will not go with it. More likely casualties will be the freedom to denounce them and the effort to end them." pg. 79

***

Bernard Lewis's corrective is necessary and salient in this time when Woke imagination's lurid distortions threaten to gain more traction. The prescient Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce further illuminates in his essay "Violence and Modern Gnosticism" in The Crisis of Modernity the nature of the turn to violence we can see at present by anti-American, anti-West, pro-Hamas activist "revolutionaries".
The activists are going back to paradigms of history with a very bloody track record, paradigms which ennoble violence.
The ennoblement of violence is tied to the idea of total revolution.
"The idea of total revolution implies the elimination of ethics. Thought in terms of violence follows this elimination." p. 20
Burning the flag or refusing to stand for the national anthem often are expressions of this stance of total revolution. So is spray painting "Hamas is coming" on the statue of Columbus at Union Station in DC.
"The revolution's goal is to obliterate the adversary; nothing of the old 'eon' must remain in the new." p. 21
That includes traditionally acknowledged ethics and morality. Man's moral nature becomes associated with the old eon and thus there is a drive to desecrate and offend morality and belief in a transcendent order of morality.
An example of this drive to desecrate is the opening ceremony at this year's Olympics.
"From the viewpoint of revolutionary violence what matters is that even the memory of the old man must vanish; there must be change without conversion; the past must be erased, and thus even repentance. In short, the annihilation of memory…" p. 21
There is no principle of racial reconciliation, no admitted presence of grace or mercy acknowledged in the Woke movements. There is instead an opposition set up by the revolutionaries' substitution of violence for ethics. The ethical principle is respect for the order of being. "The terms 'respect' and 'violation' define the opposition of ethics and violence." pg. 21
Joshua Mitchell observes, "Identity politics is concerned with the invisible economy of transgression and innocence, but seeks to understand that invisible economy in terms of the relationship between visible groups…. Identity politics always maintains the purity of those it considers innocents and the stain of those it considers transgressors, regardless of any visible evidence to the contrary." pg. xvi, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.
An example of this is a spokesman for White Women for Kamala Harris explaining that white women must never correct a BIPOC person (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), adding a sophistic laugh to her absurd assertion. The tenet in effect de-defines white women and BIPOC from the human species and sets up in its place a weird hierarchy in rejection of human universalism.

For the many Westerners who now live, breathe, and move within the perspective of immanentism, for whom there is nothing sublime or transcendent that they can fully acknowledge, the eclipse of ethics is completely insurmountable. When Western revolutionaries or Hamas black out ethics with violence, the guilty bystanders have no resort like Antigone to higher laws that judge the secular power. They are left without a defense. "From the immanentist perspective, humanitarianism and violence are two inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon." pg. 22. Humanitarianism becomes the tenet that to understand is to justify, thus abolishing the idea of responsibility. Down this road "we reach the mortification of ethics expressed by Nietzsche's definition: it is the science whose task is to justify successful crimes." pg. 25

Although history has many grim and sobering episodes, and although the present is fraught with lies and distortions that engender violence, we are not left without hope:

"I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
Who made heaven and earth."
Psalm 121:1-2

[Sinan Öner]

Amerikalı Tarih Profesörü Bernard Lewis'in "Çatışan Kültürler" kitabını Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları yayınlamıştı! "Çatışan Kültürler", Profesör Bernard Lewis'in Ortadoğu'da gelişmiş üç dinsel kültürün "keşifler"le ("kolonicilik") değişen ilişkilerini anlatıyor. Yahudilik, Hristiyanlık, İslam, aynı coğrafyada oluşmuş, aynı coğrafyada gelişmiş dinlerdir. Yahudiliğin, Hristiyanlığın, Müslümanlığın dünyadaki yayılımları ise farklılıklar içerir. Profesör Bernard Lewis'in "Çatışan Kültürler"ini Profesör Samuel Huntington'un 19. Yüzyıl'dan itibaren "uygarlıklar" arasında dünyada gelişen "uyuşmazlık"ları anlattığı kitapları ile birlikte okumak belki daha yararlı olur!

[Türkî Beğ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ağustos 2020'de Profil Kitap'tan çıkan baskısını okuma fırsatı buldum. Kısa ancak yararlı bir eser.

[Julia Simpson-Urrutia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but super short for such a complex topic.

[Cem Yüksel · Rating 3 out of 5]

1492 yılını sadece Amerika’nın keşfi ile bağdaştırmamak için , kültürler arası çatışmalara ışık tutan , içeriği iyi Nir kitap. Aynı yılda Endülüs’ten geri dönen Arap İslam’ı , keşiflere olan etkisi , Yahudi ve müslümanlara uygulanan sürgün , dinler arasında birbirine bakış açısı, insanların hareketinin değiştirdiği diğer kültürler , Avrupa’nın açılımı , devreye giren Osmanlı ve batının İslam ile komşuluğu , Yahudiler ile ilişkisi , coğrafi yaklaşmanın getirdiği yeni isimlendirmeler ve onların ilişkilere yansıması. Batı’nın hoşgörüsüzlüğü yanında ötekini merakı ve diğerlerinin ötekini öteki olarak merak etmemeleri ve saymamaları. Kültür etkileşimlerini merak edenler için keyifli bir kitap.

[Amy Ariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many stars, so few reviews.

I'm not exactly sure what to think.
I found much of this book persuasive and provocative, but I'm also very aware that I know too little to accept the author's conclusions at face value. Claimed but not proven, I would very much appreciate more weigh in from experts.

However, as one piece in a puzzle, I'm glad I read it.

[Juliana · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am not fond of Bernard Lewis.

[Pinar G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Osmanli'nin top tufek kullanmasi ve Misir'in Hz.Muhammed'in sunnetidir diye kullanmamasi. Sonra da yenilmesi ve sonra da selim'e mektup yazmasi.... Cahil insanlarimizin daha cok tarih okumasi lazim

[Barbara Ab · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spiegazione storica dei conflitti culturali basandosi su studi del 1492 quando Granada fu riconquistata dagli spagnoli e dal trattamento ricevuto poi dagli ebrei da quest’ultimi. Interessante.

[Aras 9¾ · Rating 4 out of 5]

on numara beş yıldız bir kitap,kötü yorumlara itimat etmeyiniz,alıp okuyunuz:)

[Stephen Coates · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is comprised on three chapters: Conquest on the reconquest of Spain by the Christian Spanish who defeated the Moslem Moors, and the Russian reconquest of lands north of what is now Tatarstan from the Moslem Tatars; Expulsion on the expulsion of Jews and Moslems from Spain, Portugal and other lands within Christendom; and Discovery on the discovery of the Americas by Europeans, each chapter discussing the relations between the nations adhering to these three religions from the times of the above-cited events to the present day.

The book itself is composed of text given as a lecture or lectures, and could have been a very extended opening lecture to a graduate course covering the history of conflict at these times and in these places, and the, at times, tolerance between the cultures dominated by these religions and how these past events effect the present. And what a course that would have been! In contrast to some other transcripts of talks and debates that have been published as books, this one reads as if it was written first. It’s brief and very readable, although the reader would find Tom Holland’s “In the Shadow of the Sword” a useful companion read.

[Kadir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernard Lewis, üç kültürün etkileşimi üzerinde durmuş: Müslümanlar, Hristiyanlar ve Yahudiler. Üç kültürün etkileşimini ise üç kısımda konu edinmiş.
1. Fetih
2. Ülkeden çıkarılma
3. Keşif

1. Bölümde yazar, 1492 öncesi İslam dünyasının genişliğini buna karşın Hristiyan milletlerin Avrupa'da sıkıştığını belirtiyor. Müslümanların eski Yunan ve Bizans'a karşı ilgisine rağmen Batı Avrupa'yı dünyanın geri kalmış bir bölgesi olarak kabul ettiklerini aktarıyor. Bununla birlikte Hristiyanların yavaş yavaş suyun akışını nasıl değiştirdiklerine yer veriyor. Fetihler, matbaa, kadınlar...

2. Bölüme, 1602 yılında Venedik'te yapılacak Türk Kervansaray'ına (Fondaco dei Turchi) karşı yazılan bir dilekçe ile başlıyor. 1492 sonrası olayları yani Yahudilerin ve Müslümanların İber yarımadasından kovulmasının hikayesini anlatıyor.

3. Bölümde ise eski dünya ve yeni dünya ile ilgili malumatlar veriyor ve kitabın nihayetinde nir tür günah çıkarmanın arkasından Batı uygarlığının rakipsizliğinden söz ediyor.

Okunması oldukça keyifli bir kitap.

[Metin Kartop · Rating 5 out of 5]

This extremely thin book has been by far the most influential on my view of the current state of the world. The final chapter is such a comprehensive examination of the ongoing trends in so-called philosophy that makes one wonder how a single person could see, narrate and offer solutions to the problems of the mankind, as well as making predictions about the near future. Bernard Lewis was certainly one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.

[Kaan Önem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ben bu kitabı Stefan Zweig'in Satrancına benzettim. Hem kısa oluşu, hem de okurken keyif verişi sebebiyle. Bu kadar derin bir konu, ancak bu kadar kısa ama çok yerinde bir özetle aktarılabilirdi. İleri okumalar için nefis bir başlangıç. Kesinlikle tavsiye ediyorum.

[Young Eagle 于高鹰 · Rating 3 out of 5]

老东方学家还是会讲故事，即使是不熟悉的中世纪历史也能读得津津有味。内容主要是从基督教与伊斯兰教世界斗争的角度来看地理大发现（或者说“大分流”），聚焦于伊比利亚半岛的再征服运动，将之视为基督教世界在君堡陷落后的“反败为胜”，并与俄罗斯打破“鞑靼枷锁”（实为扩张）的过程对比。当时犹太人被基督徒普遍视为亲穆斯林，甚至被一起骂成“不吃猪肉的人”。西班牙驱逐犹太人的行动为之后驱逐穆斯林打下了范本，而奥斯曼苏丹出于经济考量则鼓励犹太人在新征服领土上定居。地理大发现背后是“绕开”伊斯兰世界的需求，最后正是美洲的发现奠定了西方的优越地位。然而结尾对西方文明的护教意识过于强烈，损害了整本书的客观性。

[Ro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actual rate: 4.5 stars

[K. E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Avrupa'ya özgü Rönesans, İslam topraklarında hemen hiçbir etki yaratmadı ve Türk tarihçi Adnan Adıvar'ın sözleriyle, "bilimsel akım ilahiyat ve fıkhın setlerine çarpıp dağıldı. " "

[Allison Thurman]

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