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The passing of Bernard Lewis last week at the age of 101 recalls to mind perhaps his most famous book title about the Muslim world, What Went Wrong? But maybe a successor of sorts has been found in Duke University economist Timur Kuran, who has a long article forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature that paints a pretty bleak picture of the economic and social structure of Islamic nations. Just check out the abstract of the article, which is bland in language but harsh in its conclusions:

Jewish-American historian Bernard Lewis, one of the most famous and influential Middle East scholars in the world who warned of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, died Saturday at the age of 101 in New Jersey. Lewis was a consultant to both Israeli leaders and two U.S. presidents. Generations of students, intelligence personnel and diplomats learned about the history of Islam through his writings. His research, which dealt with the history of the Middle East, brought him fame, but also many critics and enemies around the world. One of his strongest critics was the Palestinian-born intellectual Edward...

I spent an hour with my colleague, the prolific author Robert Spencer, discussing Bernard Lewis, nonagenarian doyen of Islamic Studies. The entire interview, conducted as a segment for Robert's outstanding weekly series of Jihad Watch programs on the Aramaic Broadcasting Network, is embedded at the bottom of this posting. Please read the summary assessment of my concerns before watching the interview. A more detailed analysis of Lewis's analytic pitfalls can be read here. Accrued over a distinguished career of more than six decades of serious scholarship, Bernard Lewis clearly possesses an enormous fund of knowledge regarding certain aspects of classical...

We can no longer negate Islamic Jew-hatred. it is time to negate the conventional wisom of ....Bernard Lewis. He is an apologist. Dr. Andrew Bostom painstakingly makes the case: "Yet to this day, thousands of reports and opinion pieces later (search 'Morsi' + 'apes and pigs' using Google.com to estimate the vast output), only a handful have noted this irrefragable link to a Koranic verse (i.e., 5:60) declaring the Jews to be apes and pigs. The apotheosis of this negationist trend was captured in a January 27, 2013 Times of Israel interview of Charles Small, head of the itinerant Institute...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

In the film "Groundhog Day," Bill Murray wakes up each morning and relives the previous day. A similar scenario is playing out in the Middle East between Israel and her enemies. The deadly "movie" always goes like this: Israel is shelled or attacked by terrorists groups, often called "militants" by the media, each one with the same goal: Israel's elimination. After demonstrating considerable restraint of the kind that would never be tolerated by any other nation, Israel fires back. Suddenly, the world awakens from its indifference. World leaders, who said little when Israeli civilians were wounded and killed, now urge...

Cultural adaptation is a perniciously slow process. It has been a decade since Bernard Lewis' classic "What Went Wrong?" appeared in the wake of al-Qaida's 9/11 massacres. That short book reflected on the failure of Muslim nations (Ottoman Turkey in the main) to compete with Western Europe's political and technological surge, which began in the 15th and 16th centuries. Geographic distance and slow transport and communication shielded the vast majority of Muslim populations from knowledge of the Islamic world's loss of economic and military dominance. But, Lewis wrote, "In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear that...

The West's leading scholar of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, sees cause for optimism in the limited-government traditions of Arab and Muslim culture. But he says the U.S. should not push for quick, Western-style elections. 'What Went Wrong?" That was the explosive title of a December 2001 book by historian Bernard Lewis about the decline of the Muslim world. Already at the printer when 9/11 struck, the book rocketed the professor to widespread public attention, and its central question gripped Americans for a decade. Now, all of a sudden, there's a new question on American minds: What Might Go Right?...

...Horovitz: Broadly speaking, the notion of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is much disputed – from being perceived as essentially benign, unthreatening, even secular, according to one remark (later corrected, by US National Intelligence Director James Clapper), to being perceived as a radical and terrible threat. How would you judge it? Lewis: To say that they’re secular would show an astonishing ignorance of the English lexicon. I don’t think [the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt] is in any sense benign. I think it is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If they obtain power, the consequences would be disastrous for Egypt. I’m...

Professor Lewis, as you know, is the dean of Middle East historians. Many of us regard an acquaintance with his books, articles, and ideas as indispensable to an understanding of the Middle East. National Review is very fortunate to count him as a friend. He has been a star of our cruises — including last November. I have just spoken to Professor Lewis by phone. He is in the Middle East, whose biggest concern at the moment is Egypt. I am in New York, whose biggest concern is possible snow. Lewis says, first of all, that “it’s too early to...

Spencer echoes Lewis when he elaborates that “all the mainstream sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach as a matter of faith that Islam is intrinsically political and that Muslims must wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law.” The fact that most Muslims do not engage in violent jihad, whether out of practicality, indifference, or what have you, does not change what Islamic doctrine says. Nor does it mean these Muslims are “rejecting” that mandate. They are ignoring it. Moreover, as I’ve noted on several occasions, the point of jihad is to spread sharia,...

In a recent YouTube video, a de facto symposium of world-class scholars and political authors, including Paul Williams, Melanie Phillips, Bernard Lewis, and Mark Steyn, have united to articulate a grim and pressing warning to a seemingly insensible Western world. As Steyn tells it, the worldÂ’s most advanced societies are starting to go out of business, on the one hand refusing to assess and confront the gathering Islamic storm that threatens their survival and, on the other, losing out in the reproductive sweepstakes. Europe in particular is poised to suffer a Damoclean fate. Tracing an inverted family tree in...

LAMB: What's the point of the book? Prof. LEWIS: How shall I put it? Let me s--let me put it this way. Here you have in the Middle East a very ancient and a very great civilization, which for 1,000 years or so was in the very forefront of human endeavor. It was the richest, strongest, most powerful, most wealthy of--of all living societies. It was also on the cutting edge of science, technology, in virtually every field. And then suddenly, within a very short period, this society is eclipsed by--is--is overshadowed, outperformed in almost every respect by what they...

The current fighting in the Gaza Strip raises again, in an acute but familiar form, the agonizing question: What kind of accommodation is possible, if ever, between Israel and the Arabs? For a long time it was generally assumed, in the region and elsewhere, that peace was impossible, and that the Arabs' struggle against Israel would continue until they achieved their aim of destroying the Jewish state. Meanwhile, Israel could survive and even serve a useful purpose as the one licensed grievance in the various Arab dictatorships, providing a relatively harmless outlet for resentment and anger that might otherwise be...

He is one of the world’s foremost scholars of Islam and the Middle East. Bernard Lewis shares his thoughts on Iraq, “Islamofascism,” the roots of terrorism, and the two biggest misperceptions about the Muslim faith. Foreign Policy: What do you see as the biggest misperception about Islam? Bernard Lewis: Well, there are two. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, predominates. It depends when and where. I would call them the negative one and the positive one. The negative one sees Muslims as a collection of bloodthirsty barbarians offering people the choice of the Koran or the sword, and generally bringing tyranny...

Lewis’s Claim (1): What we are seeing now in much of the Islamic world could only be described as a monstrous perversion of Islam. The things that are now being done in the name of Islam are totally anti-Islamic. Take suicide, for example. The whole Islamic theology and law is totally opposed to suicide. Even if one has led a totally virtuous life, if he dies by his own hand he forfeits paradise and is condemned to eternal damnation. The eternal punishment for suicide is the endless repetition of the act of suicide. That’s what it says in the books....

Scholar: MAD doctrine does not apply to Iran Feb. 25, 2008 JERUSALEM — Iran could welcome a nuclear war with Israel or the United States. A leading U.S. scholar on the Middle East has asserted that Iran's leadership does not resemble the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Bernard Lewis, a professor at Princeton University, said the mullah regime in Teheran believes that the Shi'ite messiah would be ushered by a nuclear war, Middle East Newsline reported. "It's not an Arab country, but rather a Muslim country, ruled now by a Muslim theocracy, which calculates its policies not by Iranian...

Herb Denenberg: The Advocate As Europe Yields To Islamofascism, Is U.S. On The Same Path? By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin 02/13/2008 The once mighty, the once invincible, the once courageous and brave-beyond-belief Britain is in the process of surrendering to Islamofascism without firing a shot. Here are the latest examples indicating how far along that process has gone: British government ministers have declared that Islamic terrorism will no longer be so described. In the future, Muslim fanatics, murderers and suicide bombers will be referred to as pursuing "anti-Islamic activity." This new language, turning the truth on its head, was announced...

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?" A few examples may...

At 91, Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern Studies who for more than half a century has been considered one of the West's foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, is the author of more than 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 and is the subject of envy because of his remarkably lucid mind and memory. Both qualities were on display on Wednesday evening, May 2, 2007 when he addressed an overflow audience in the ballroom of the Loew’s Philadelphia...