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Bernard Lewis is the author of The Middle East, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The Emergence of Modern Turkey; and The Arabs in History, among other landmark books. Inter-nationally recognized as one of the twentieth century's greatest historians of the Middle East, he is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. [Edit review] [Delete review]

In times of war and in peace, from the earliest days of the Roman Empire to our own, Westerners have traveled to the lands of the Middle East, bringing back accounts of their adventures and impressions. But it was never a one-way journey. In this spirited collection of Western views of the Middle East and Middle Eastern views of the West, Bernard Lewis gives us a rich overview of two thousand years of commerce, diplomacy, war and exploration. We hear from Napoleon, St. Augustine, T. E. Lawrence, Karl Marx and Ibn Khaldun. We peer into Queen Elizabeth's business correspondence, strike oil with Freya Stark and follow the footsteps of Mark Twain and Ibn Battuta, the Marco Polo of the East. This book is a delight, a treasury of stories drawn not only from letters, diaries and histories, but also from unpublished archives and previously untranslated accounts. [Edit review] [Delete review]

"A magnificent collection that lays out the history of the Middle East like no other book before it. The sheer wonder of this book cannot be overstated."
--Denver Rocky Mountain News

"History in the hands of a master historian is an exquisite thing."
--The Charlotte Observer [Edit review] [Delete review]

PREFACE

Toward the middle of the tenth century, an Arab geographer and cosmographer from the great city of Baghdad wrote an account of the known world in which he included a few words about some of the strange, wild people beyond the northwest frontier of civilization-that is to say, the Islamic empire of the caliphs. Of the northernmost of these peoples, he observed, "Their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull and their tongues heavy. Their color is so excessively white that it passes from white to blue.... Those of them who are farthest to the north are the most subject to stupidity, grossness and brutishness."

In 1798 an Ottoman secretary of state wrote a memorandum to inform the Imperial Council about the recent troubles in Paris. He began his description of the events which, in the West, came to be known as the French Revolution: "The conflagration of sedition and wickedness that broke out a... [More...] [Edit review] [Delete review]