In this book historian Bernard Lewis follows up on What Went Wrong (see separate review). Here Lewis attempts to explain why so many in the Islamic world are angry at the west, particularly the US, and why their anger comes out in violence.

Lewis agrees that widespread dislike of the US in the Islamic world is due, in large part, to specific US policies, which have – in the Middle East – tended towards short-sighted thuggishness. (Although Lewis points out that many Middle Eastern regimes have done far worse to their own people and should be just as disliked, but are not.)

But the Islamic extremists are a different story. Lewis claims the source of extremist violence is not specific policies, but the fact of the West’s material success and the Islamic world’s material failure. The West’s success provides a powerful lure to many in the Islamic world (hence the old Egyptian joke: “Yankee go home!…And take me with you!”). To prevent the Middle East from following in the West’s modernizing, liberalizing footsteps – which they see as spiritually corrupting – Islamic fundamentalists feel the only hope is to destroy the West through violence. It is a difficult argument, but engagingly made. The prose is intelligent and elegant, the content interesting, and the conclusions controversial.