As I said below, yesterday morning with Newt inspired me. Newt says that our political debate has become unserious. For anyone who wants to get serious about what confronts us, there’s Bernard in the evening– that’s Bernard Lewis, whose dazzling talk at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner, has been posted on the web. I encourage you to read it.


Among other things, Lewis notes:


“That game [the era of the Middle East’s being dominated by outside forces and nations] is now over. The era that was inaugurated by Napoleon and Nelson was terminated by Reagan and Gorbachev. The Middle East is no longer ruled or dominated by outside powers. These nations are having some difficulty adjusting to this new situation, to taking responsibility for their own actions and their consequences, and so on. But they are beginning to do so, and this change has been expressed with his usual clarity and eloquence by Osama bin Laden.


“We see with the ending of the era of outside domination, the reemergence of certain older trends and deeper currents in Middle Eastern history, which had been submerged or at least obscured during the centuries of Western domination. Now they are coming back again. One of them I would call the internal struggles–ethnic, sectarian, regional–between different forces within the Middle East. These have of course continued, but were of less importance in the imperialist era. They are coming out again now and gaining force, as we see for example from the current clash between Sunni and Shia Islam–something without precedent for centuries.


“We see with the ending of the era of outside domination, the reemergence of certain older trends and deeper currents in Middle Eastern history, which had been submerged or at least obscured during the centuries of Western domination. Now they are coming back again. One of them I would call the internal struggles–ethnic, sectarian, regional–between different forces within the Middle East. These have of course continued, but were of less importance in the imperialist era. They are coming out again now and gaining force, as we see for example from the current clash between Sunni and Shia Islam–something without precedent for centuries.”


Another interesting thing Lewis noted is that Islam sees itself in a struggle to the death with Christianity. The West is largely secular now, and so our elite tends to dismiss this struggle– for many Islamic militants, however, it remains the dominating drive of history:


“Another thing more directly relevant to my theme this evening is the signs of a return among Muslims to what they perceive as the cosmic struggle for world domination between the two main faiths–Christianity and Islam. There are many religions in the world, but as far as I know there are only two that have claimed that their truths are not only universal–all religions claim that–but also exclusive; that they–the Christians in the one case, the Muslims in the other–are the fortunate recipients of God’s final message to humanity, which it is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves–like the Jews or the Hindus–but to bring to the rest of humanity, removing whatever obstacles there may be on the way. This self-perception, shared between Christendom and Islam, led to the long struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries and which is now entering a new phase. In the Christian world, now at the beginning of the 21st century of its era, this triumphalist attitude no longer prevails, and is confined to a few minority groups. In the world of Islam, now in its early 15th century, triumphalism is still a significant force, and has found expression in new militant movements.


“It is interesting that both sides for quite a long time refused to recognize this struggle. For example, both sides named each other by non-religious terms. The Christian world called the Muslims Moors, Saracens, Tartars, and Turks. Even a convert was said to have turned Turk. The Muslims for their part called the Christian world Romans, Franks, Slavs, and the like. It was only slowly and reluctantly that they began to give each other religious designations and then these were for the most part demeaning and inaccurate. In the West, it was customary to call Muslims Mohammadans, which they never called themselves, based on the totally false assumption that Muslims worship Muhammad in the way that Christians worship Christ. The Muslim term for Christians was Nazarene–nasrani–implying the local cult of a place called Nazareth.


“The declaration of war begins at the very beginning of Islam. There are certain letters purported to have been written by the Prophet Muhammad to the Christian Byzantine emperor, the emperor of Persia, and various other rulers, saying, ‘I have now brought God’s final message. Your time has passed. Your beliefs are superseded. Accept my mission and my faith or resign or submit–you are finished.’ The authenticity of these prophetic letters is doubted, but the message is clear and authentic in the sense that it does represent the long dominant view of the Islamic world.”


Meanwhile, we go merrily along, being unserious, not realizing that the West, secular or not, is in a battle. Not admitting this is not going to save us.