Cultures in Conflict

...His wry manner, bureaucratic gravitas, tweedy dash, and doggily handsome face combined to endear him to superior and subordinate alike...

...Yet one respect in which Islamic society was superior to Christian on practical as well as humane counts was its tolerance...

...S pain's expulsion of the Jews, which foreshadowed the much larger-scale deportation of the remaining Moors one century later, was an early move in the Christian "counterattack" on the Infidel...

...Lewis tells almost in passing of the Jews of Salonika, settled there in the 1500s and exterminated more than 400 years later by the Nazi invaders—a striking reminder that the worst fanatics of the past were no match for the atheistic killers of our own century...

...He was a graduate of Winchester and Trinity, a resident of Carlyle Square in fashionable, vaguely literary Chelsea, a homburg wearer, a member of the Athenaeum Club and the Order of the British Empire...

...Islam was not geographically or racially restricted, as Christianity in effect was, and since the campaigns of the Prophet Mohammed the faith he founded had enjoyed a triumphalist tradition and an expansive momentum—momentum it took centuries for the Europeans to break...

...As to why the more backward culture eventually prevailed, Lewis offers several possible reasons, including superior gunnery, naval technology, and industrial production, all developed by Westerners in confrontation and competition with each other...

...If Africanism survives," Lewis muses with his occasional wryness, "this form of revolt against a Eurocentric universe will mark a final triumph of Eurocentrism in Africa...

...From his late fifteenth-century vantage point, Lewis surveys the thousand-year confrontation of Europe and the Muslim world...

...The author, who has devoted his career to the Middle East and its predominant religion, stresses the sophistication of Islamic civilization, which was enriched by acquaintance with ancient Greece and Byzantium as well as India and China...

...Their drive "to conquer, subjugate, and despoil other peoples" was an all-too-familiar element of human nature, but in this case it led to a transformation, or at least a modification, of that nature...

...Yet the Arabist Bernard Lewis, in three talks first given a few months after the quincentennial, does just that...

...Unsparing in his indictment of Christendom, he concludes in praise of it, offering his very criticism—that is, the spirit and the tradition behind it—as the West's particular redeeming feature...

...flag) that hung from the leaded-glass windows of a Yale undergraduate college in the fall of 1992...

...Lewis points to colonial slavery, which Europeans modeled on the practice of Muslims and non-Muslim Africans, and which they ultimately—and uniquely in history—abolished...

...To this he contrasts a Muslim "slave military society" unsuited to change...

...By comparison, medieval Europe "must have appeared to [the Muslims] rather as Central Asia or Africa appeared to Victorian Englishmen...

...Nor would it seem to help one's case to address two other momentous events of 1492: the reconquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain...

...Yet the cautionary, even pessimistic, note is an appropriate one to end on...

...Imperialism, sexism, and racism, Lewis points out, are not European inventions but European words, without which the evils they refer to would never have been challenged...

...The fact of a new continent did not undermine the classical Greek and Roman conception of geography but established it all the more firmly: "the appearance and acceptance of America ensured and confirmed the identity of Asia and Africa," terms that the inhabitants of these "imaginary entities" had never recognized but which they would inevitably come to accept—and with a vengeance...

...As he comes to the end of his remarks, the polemical climate 1 n the minds of his colleagues, Kim Philby's personality was a mosaic of Buchanesque virtues...

...It seems quixotic after all that to make Columbus the pretext for a defense of Western culture—particularly in an academic lecture...

...The spy of the century, Philby has been written about in countless books, of which Treason in the Blood is but the latest...

...Discovery was also an intellectual vindication...

...In all the lands they conquered Muslims allowed Christians and Jews (though not pagans or idolaters) the free exercise of their faiths and jurisdiction over their communities, in exchange for taxes and the recognition of Islamic authority...

...Isabel the Catholic hoped that Columbus would find a way to attack the Turks from behind, and that his contacts with non-Muslims would win new souls for the Church...

...Many of them were fiascoes...

...This last proved the greatest boon of all, not only to the Europeans but to the world they came to dominate...

...Anthony Cave Brown's new "dual biography" is in many ways more promising, however, for it resuscitates Richard Lamb is a writer living in New York...

...And when Philby was named, in 1945, head of R5, the anti-Soviet section of the British Secret Service, he had been a Soviet spy for eleven years...

...He leaves it to the reader to recognize the irony of a crusade that ultimately produced the safest haven ever for religious freedom...

...that attended their origin becomes most evident—a bit unfortunately, since an allusion to Stanford's canon wars is unworthy of a discourse of such magisterial scope and dignity...

...This summed up, if a little crudely, one side in the intemperate controversy of that anniversary year...

...With the West's most formidable military and ideological enemies defeated, the abysmal morale of its cultural custodians is today even more mysterious and frightening...

...At the same time, encounters with the people of the New World "contributed mightily to the breaking of intellectual molds and the freeing of the human mind and spirit...

...CIA historian Cleveland Cram attributed twenty-five major post-war intelligence disasters to Philby, who participated in some way in every British and American intelligence operation in White Russia, the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Albania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, and East Germany...

...Twelve years earlier the Muscovites had thrown off "the Tatar yoke," and two centuries later the Viennese would turn away the Turks for good...

...Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in Madrid...

...What darkens them, more CULTURES IN CONFLICT: CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS, AND JEWS IN THE AGE OF DISCOVERY Bernard Lewis Oxford University Press/101 pages/ $16.95 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA 64 The American Spectator April 1995 so even than the shameful aspects of our history which they recount, is an awareness of our propensity to dwell on those aspects, especially in the United States and most especially on university campuses...

...The expelled Sephardic Jews, whose talents were an incalculable loss to Spain, were welcomed in the Ottoman lands, and in the succeeding centuries were much in demand wherever "an economically active and politically reliable element" was required...

...The consequences of Columbus's voyage exceeded the hopes of his sponsors, even if they fell short of his own...

...These lectures are not "Three Cheers for the West...

...It was this counterattack that gave the impetus to the voyages of discovery...

...The defeat of the last Moorish kingdom on the Iberian peninsula meant the end of Islamic power in Western Europe...

...There were also of course material incentives for the explorer himself...

...The natural resources of the New World made many personal fortunes, and made possible the victory—in war and in trade—of Europeans over Muslims and other non-Christians...