Bernard Lewis is easily the most famous western scholar of the Middle East. And also – among other scholars – hugely controversial.

In this book Lewis tries to explain “what went wrong” with Islamic civilization. Already this raises eyebrows – can one glom together Saudis, Turks and Indonesians and say anything meaningful? And his thesis, leaning heavily on culture, is also politically incorrect. Loosely, he argues that the Islamic world could never separate church and state because Muhammad – unlike Jesus – was both a religious and political leader. And this shut off cultural, scientific and economic development.

That is a tremendous over-simplification of this subtle and nuanced book – as, necessarily, are so many of the attacks on Lewis. It’s fascinating and readable, though one easily comes up with counter-examples to Lewis’s arguments, and probably should.