Rosetta stone territory in those two sentences. Thank you for taking the trouble to post this interesting interview.
I noticed that Lewis commits the very error he warns against by projecting his own world-view onto his subject.There is this tendency among "Islamic experts" to ascribe everything that is occuring to the religion of Islam. This is, of course, a projection of the obsessions of post-christian, secular scholars. As with historians of medieval Christendom, these scholars have an unintentionally ironic tendency to inflate the religious content of every worldy political, social, military and economic confrontation.
A perfect of example of this is in the linked article "The Roots of Muslim Rage" in which he casually speaks of the "terrible religious wars" in Europe as though their roots were entirely and specifically theological. This is a fantastic, and easily disproved assertion. These wars were far more complex than triumphant enlightenment analysis would have it.
It seems to me that to pay excessive obeisance to moslem religious scruples as a "root cause" of the ongoing "clash of civilizations" would be to miss the mark as widely as those who pay no heed to them at all.
Also, just as an aside, I noticed in the subtext of this interview how vulnurable "Christendom" is to having its history caricatured and de-natured by post-christian scholarship. Without a political base from which to exert "earthly" power a religious culture really has no chance of defining itself in the face of its enemies--active or passive.
We see this at work every day in the American media and the continual defensive posture of "fundamentalist" christians in the face of definitions of their behavior and beliefs by those who neither know nor care about their beliefs and are often actively hostile to them on the basis of their own prejudice against "fundamentalism".
Perhaps, in some strange way, "backwards" moslems are ahead of Western Christians in their understanding and analysis of who's zoomin' who.
I just finished flipping through a Mid-East travel guide published by Harvard Press. It acknowledged that Israel is important to the "Three Great Monotheistic" religions. It goes to great length to srupulously detail the religious "beliefs" and practices of moslems--with great approval and a sort of condescending contempt for the reader's assumed philistinism in the face of such delightful, spiritually uplifting and healthy practices.
The Jewish religion is presented more as a great, ongoing historical saga.
The Christian religion, on the other hand, is dismissed with a terse reference to the split between the Eastern and Western Church!!
Whenever we hear the theory of "the clash of civilizations" being bandied about--whether from the mouths of government officials, media commetators or as in this Lewis interview--we see a complete unwillingness to countenance a contemporary christian element to the struggle. Christianity is dismissed with terse references to the lingering resentments of the "horrors" of the crusades.
I can't help returning to the image of the two World Trade Towers collapsing onto the tiny Greek Orthodox Church. It seemed an apt metaphor to explain my unease with Bush's famous "You are either with us or you are with the terrorists," dictum. My unease has grown as large as Bush's poll numbers.