A Sage in Christendom

Fouad Ajami writes a tribute to Bernard Lewis, a historian who in 1990 wrote an essay entitled "The Roots of Muslim Rage":

The rage of Islam was no mystery to Mr. Lewis. To no great surprise, it issued out of his respect for the Muslim logic of things. For 14 centuries, he wrote, Islam and Christendom had feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their enmity a "series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests." For nearly a millennium, Islam had the upper hand....

...The great turning point came in 1683, when a Turkish siege of Vienna ended in failure and defeat. With the Turks on the run, the terms of engagement between Europe and Islam were transformed. Russia overthrew the Tatar yoke; there was the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula.... Britain, France, the Netherlands and Russia all soon spilled into Islamic lands.... But Mr. Lewis has been relentless in his admonition that Muslims were under no obligation to accept the new order of things.

Worth reading in its entirety.