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[djinnthespazz]

In a footnote of my personal journey, I find it interesting that just Friday I picked up Bernard Lewis' book 'From Babylon to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East' and read this essay: A Taxonomy of Group HatredRecommended reading. I think the entire essay in provided in the link

Comments

[djinnthespazz]

A book review of From Babylon to Dragomans

[cmcmck]

Bernard Lewis must now be a fair age! I've read a number of his books on early Islamic history over the years, although it's not my own specialist area. He's a renowned expert in the field of Islamic history

[djinnthespazz]

Wikipedia says: Born in 1916, still around.

[cmcmck]

Aye, he'd be pretty much a contemporary of my old MA history teacher, Prof Pat Collinson who is also still going strong and still writing about the English Reformation! :o)

[immlass]

I've really only read a dab of recent Lewis work and it's written in the shadow of 9/11 in ways I find kind of creepy, personally. He's not like Niall Ferguson on economics, where I tossed it over my shoulder over being able to read his politics clearly from his history, and swear never to read it again, but I'm kind of wary of his conclusions in his current stuff.

That Said's writing is infused by some annoyance at Western historical procedure and its privileging of Anglo-European (including American) perspective over the perspective of non-Westerners on their own history is almost certainly true. The hint that this makes Said somehow less objective than the people he's annoyed at is inappropriate. That's "only white men have no biases because they are default and everything is else measured by them" and is inherently suspicious as a stance.

[djinnthespazz]

I haven't made it to Lewis's essays post 9-11 yet.