Suggested Readings: Middle East

The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.
By Bernard Lewis
ISBN: 0684832801

"This 'brief history of the last 2,000 years,' by the twentieth century's preeminent historian of the Islamic world, is written with its author's customary wit and gravity, sympathy and objectivity, breadth and precision. As in all his many works, Bernard Lewis is here neither an old-fashioned chronicler nor a with-it historical revisionist but rather a master distiller, one who combines a phenomenal range of knowledge with a humane temperament and a powerfully synthesizing mind." — Robert B. Satloff, editor of Campaign against Terror: The Middle East Dimension

Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923
By Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh
ISBN: 0674251520

"In a tour de force that offers a profoundly new understanding of a key issue in modern Middle Eastern history, Efraim and Inari Karsh review the relations between Europe and the Ottoman empire in the final century-and-a-half of the latter's existence, and in the process nearly reverse the standard historical interpretation." — Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum

The Muslim Discovery of Europe
By Bernard Lewis
ISBN: 0393321657

"A learned and typically balanced account of the divides and bridges between East and West that is characterized throughout by intellectual integrity and independence — and therefore as unfashionable as it is brilliant in avoiding the usual stereotypes that Islam was not a warrior religion and that the Europeans they met were simply backward and uncivilized." — Victor Davis Hanson, author Carnage and Culture

Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery
By Bernard Lewis
ISBN: 0195102835

"Unlike many others who have tried to tell this tale, Lewis does not indulge in facile castigation of the West or try to pretend that all cultures are equal in the multicultural dispensation. . . . He comes down squarely in favor of Western culture." — Robert Royal, author of 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History