Ebook: From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East

Bernard Lewis is certainly one of the most articulate and prolific authorities on the subject of Islam and the Middle East.
In this compendium of essays and speeches on the topic covering the last 60 years, Lewis makes a palpable contribution to the subject and gives us some much needed answers.

Important points explain the Muslim prohibition on accepting the rule of non-Muslims, especially in lands that were ever under Islamic rule. This is illustrated by the Islamic faith's division of the world into the realms of Dar el Islam (House of Islam) and Dar el Harb (House of War) applied to any nation that is not under Islamic rule.
According to Islam, for misbelievers (non Muslims) to rule over true believers (Muslims) is evil and blasphemous and leads to the corruption of religion and morality or even the abrogation of Allah's law.
This may go some way to explaining the conflicts around the world where Muslims are under the governance of non-Muslim majorities such as Indian Kashmir, Serbian Kosovo, Israel and when it had a Christian majority-Lebanon.
It also may explain why Muslims in Western and Central Europe demand a high degree of legal protection which those countries no longer give to Christianity and have never given to Jews. Or even demanding Sharia law in parts of Europe, and for example harassing and attacking non-Islamic women who they see as being dressed immodestly.

Lewis' study of propaganda in the pre-modern Middle East may go some way to explain how Islamic propaganda (under tutelage during the 20th century of Fascism, Nazism and Communism) developed against Israel and Jews.
He studies monarchy in the Middle East pointing out the important point that republics and democracy are not synonymous at all. In Europe the surviving monarchies are without exception constitutional democracies, while the tyrannies of the world today, are, almost without exception, republics.
He also mentions republican dynasties where rule belongs to a single family.
One also has to look at Syria of the Assads, Iraq before the liberation of 2003 (where Saddam was grooming his sons to take over from him) and Libya and Egypt (where Gaddafi and Mubarak respectively are grooming their sons to succeed them).

Perhaps my favourite chapter is an Address to meeting in Jerusalem entitled 'The British Mandate for Palestine in Historical Perspective'
Over here Lewis puctures the myth that there was ever a country in the Levant called 'Palestine'.
While there were states in the region before the British Mandate, none of them were called 'Palestine'. Palestine was begun as a Greco-Roman term. The authorized version 'Old Testament' names 'Palestine' three times. all three were REMOVED in the revised edition because they are mistranslations of the word Philistia-Hebrew:Peleshet- not Palestine but Philistia.
The name was first used for two and then three provinces in the Roman Empire, survived briefly in the early Arab Empire and then disappeared. The Crusaders called the country the holy Land, and their state the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Under Ottoman rule people in the area identified themselves by religion or descent, most often by allegiance to a particular tribe. when they identified themselves by locality it was by the city or immediate district of province. so they would have been Jerusalemites or Jaffaites, or like the Syrians identified with the larger province of Syria (The Syrians regarded the Holy Land was regarded as a part thereof, as did many of it's Arab inhabitants).

Lewis dissects quite a few myths and propaganda ploys.
Including the purile argument that Arabs and pro-Arabs cannot possibly be anti-Semites because Arabs are themselves Semites.
The term anti-Semtism was an invention of the anti-Semites to provide a pseudo-scientific cover for Jew-hating and Jew-biting and did not apply to other Semitic peoples and certainly not Arabs.
Lewis also rights how universities and the powers that control academic and information discourse have repressed history that is not politically correct.
Hence students have been discouraged from studying the Arab role in the slave trade and slavery in the Middle East, even though the European slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries was begun by the Arabs.
If this was made more apparent those who demand reparations for slavery from Europe and America would also have to demand the same from Arab states, which would certainly expose the anti-Western Third Worldist agenda.
He also points out that there is a very good argument for the case that, as the Crusades were preceded by Islamic Jihad against Christendom , there is a very good case for the argument that the Crusades were a long delayed, limited response to Muslim Jihad.

The author's 1970's essays on the hypocrisy of the United Nations are more true today than ever given the UN's obsessive focus on condemning Israel while ignoring all the real atrocities around the world.
A great exploration of the questions involving conflict in the Middle East region, though not an easy read.