In today’s Wall Street Journal is an appreciation, by Fouad Ajami, of the great historian and scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis. Read it here, and then go and read Lewis himself, to gain a better understanding of the cultural and historical underpinnings of the current “clash of civilizations” – which is, of course, but the latest convulsion in a grim struggle that has lasted over 1400 years.
Ajami quotes Lewis on the prospects for Western civilization:
It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered.
-from “Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery”