Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I have sought not to make amends between “Islam and the West”, but to dismantle altogether this illusory binary, a solid byproduct of European modernity - or what they call “Enlightenment”, and the rest of the world knows as the darkest chapters of predatory colonialism.  I … propose that we read the fetishised concept of “the West” as an ideological commodity and civilisational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicentre for the rise of globalised capitalist modernity.   —Hamid Dabashi The entire binary is false Related Excerpts from The End of Two Illusions

Saying that Lewis was a historian of “vast erudition” and “ a usually very good author” is very arguable.  The review though is good. Note that on the demographic ‘problem’ the current fertility rate in countries like Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia is similar to France’s (see fertility rates of each country on wikipedia). The question remains: it is about the form of economic development.  What Went Wrong

From a response by Edward Said and Oleg Grabar to Bernard Lewis : Then there is the meaning of  thawra , the common modern Arabic term for revolution, and Lewis’s description of it. His discussion of  thawra inc identally is one of two occasions in an enormous article in which Lewis reveals that he is writing not just as a defender of Orientalism, but as someone I had criticized in two of my books. His declaration of interest, as so often, is extremely discreet. With bogus learning, Lewis parades meanings of  thawra  acquired from a superifical survey of sources. His Orientalist account of the word has very little to do with what it means in contemporary usage; thus his method of proceeding is peculiar to a field that studiously places a greater value on what European scholars thought and said than on what users of a language thought and said. One of his examples is that  thawra  is associated with the act of rising up, after which Lewis affixes to “rising ...