The distinguished scholar Bernard Lewis has written a gem of a book, eminently readable and full of wonderful insights and brilliant aperçus. It combines narrative and analysis in just the right proportions and embraces the whole sweep of the history of the Near and Middle East, starting as far back as late antiquity. The study then moves forward, step by step, through the far-flung empires of the caliphs and sultans to the more recent emergence of the Arab world, after a long period of subjection and passivity, to independence and self-assertion. Professor Lewis concludes his book with some parting thoughts, elegantly and persuasively presented, on the reasons for the Middle East’s present uneasy confrontation with the challenges posed by European (and more recently American) modernity.

Spreading his canvas even more widely than the subtitle of the book would suggest, Lewis sets out to recount in vivid and telling detail the past glories and present discontents of the peoples who have lived and flourished in the heartlands of Islam, their politics and institutions, their societies and economies. Beginning—as is fitting for a work conceived on such a time-scale—with the advent of Christianity, he ends with the sequel to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Along the way, he ranges far and wide over an enormous expanse of territory that stretches all the way from the eastern approaches of the Iranian plateau to the foothills of the Atlas, from the Danube basin and the mountains of the Caucasus in the north to