Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

This has now just slipped off the Top Ten of the SUNDAY TIMES bestseller list which it has been on for a number of weeks. It was also featured in THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S Books of the Moment on 26 April. Reviews not surprisingly havebeen excellent and they're still coming in: 'Lewis is brief and authoritative.'Michael Binyon, THE TIMES 'Readers who have been saturated with televisioncoverage and newspaper articles since 9/11 will find much to enlighten them in this book. Lewis writes clearly and elegantly, and his style is refreshingly free from academic jargon'Malise Ruthen, THE SUNDAY TIMES 'Bernard Lewis is not only the most eminent of living Arabists; he is also by far the most interesting.His latest book began life as a long essay for the New Yorker in November 2001, soon after the Twin Towers were struck; the rest of the text is new. The author's characteristic virtues are all very much in evidence: concision, readability, dry wit and devastating logic. This is vintage Bernard Lewis: he improves with age.'Daniel Johnson,THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Bernard Lewis has an authority all his own. In his eighties now, he has devoted a lifetime to the study of all aspects of Islam.He is the best available guide to the fraught and mostly unequal relationships which have developed over such a long time between Muslims and non-Muslims, and which so bedevil the present. Humanist in outlook and an exceptional linguist, Lewis is, on top of everything else, a graceful writer."David Pryce-Jones, THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Lucid and stylish'THE ECONOMIST 'Bernard Lewis shows himself again to be a master of his material, a graceful essayist and a shrewd analyst of the complexities of Middle Eastern politics and religion.'Bill McSweeney, THE IRISH TIMES 'He delivershis argument in clear prose which will entertain and fascinate the non-expert.'THE IRISH EXAMINER We have reviews still to come in THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE OBSERVER and THE SPECTATOR.

UK Kirkus review

At a time when many in the world are anxious to learn more about Islam, to understand what it is that drives the likes of Osama bin Laden and his followers to commit their terrible atrocities in the name of jihad, this slim volume by one of the West's foremost historians of Islam is a welcome, indeed necessary, addition to the wealth of books on this and related issues which have been spawned by the events of September 11 2001. Islam in both its senses - religion and civilization - dates back over 14 centuries to the advent of the Prophet Muhammad. Today more than ever, though, religion remains, in most Islamic countries, a major political force; Lewis argues that it is not only a matter of faith and practice, but also 'an identity and a loyalty'. This perhaps goes some way to explain why a small minority of Muslims will go to such extreme lengths to rid the world of the forces of evil embodied by the United States of America and Zionism. Having considered the ideological background, Lewis goes on to consider the way forward - how so-called Islamic fundamentalists are likely to prosecute their cause in the future and how the West can best deal with a terrorist threat which can only be fuelled by the poverty and tyranny which affects most of the Muslim world and an exploding population of 'unemployed, uneducated and frustrated young men'. Lewis states that 'in devising means to fight the terrorists, it would surely be useful to understand the forces that drive them'; this book is a useful aid to that understanding. (Kirkus UK)