Bernard Lewis

"The Iranian revolution was a real revolution, not just a coup d'etat or a putsch or whatever. It was a genuine revolution in the sense that the French and the Russian revolutions were revolutions. It …"

"In talking of the Christian world, in English and, I suppose, in all the other languages of the Christian world we use two terms: Christianity and Christendom. Christianity means a religion, in the st…"

"In the 19th century you had two important events in Europe: the unification of Italy and the unification of Germany, and both of these had a tremendous impact in the Arab world. They saw in this, a mo…"

"You know the expression "My country, right or wrong." Well, these days, Americans are apt to think, "My country, wrong."

"The whole question of blackness was discussed in a special essay by Jahiz of Basra , one of the greatest prose writers in classical Arabic literature and said by some of his biographers to be of partl…"

"The surest test of one's understanding of a text in another language is translating it into one's own."

"In the Islamic world, from the beginning, Islam was the primary basis of both identity and loyalty. We think of a nation subdivided into religions. They think, rather, of a religion subdivided into na…"

"Insulting the Prophet is something that has been going on in Europe for a very long time. In Dante's Inferno, if you're interested in the 28th Canto, where Dante is being taken on his conducted tour o…"