party!

Many thanks to gr_c17's mum, who threw a lovely engagement party for soccer_fox and me yesterday on the principle that *someone* ought to and if our families were too far away, then *she* would make sure it was done properly. And it was! Loads of delicious food and drink, lots of fun company, and much merriment. We got a number of sweet and thoughtful presents and had a lovely time!

And belated thanks to my dad--he gave me a gift certificate to LL Bean's for my 42nd birthday which I only just redeemed today. I have a new belt and two pairs of shoes on their way, and his gift paid for the belt and one pair of shoes! Much appreciated, Pa! I will certainly use them "here or [in] the Scottish isles" as the note with the gift suggested. :-)

Everyone be nice to Neta today--her boys (Blackburn Rovers) lost at home to the Hammers this morning...

Now I have to go off and write a short essay on one good observation and one flaw I found in Bernard Lewis's "Islam and the West". The former will be MUCH harder than the latter.

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Bernard Lewis

I had to write an essay this week on passages from Bernard Lewis's "Islam and the West". While I think it would be injudicious of me to express my personal views fully (at least, if I want to retain a good grade in the class), I simply cannot pass by without letting off some steam. So you, dear readers, get to enjoy the force of my venting.

I have had occasion to read a number of Lewis’s works over the last few years, and I never fail to be astonished that a man of such impressive scholarship and experience can produce such a farrago of half-truths, distortions, and outright falsehoods about Islam, Christianity, and the history of the relationship between the two. His sweeping pronouncements ignore the gaping cracks in his overbroad assertions and sometimes founder confusingly with other, contradictory assertions he has made. He ignores or waves away details that if paid proper attention to would wholly confound his arguments, and he makes leaps of inference (I cannot call it logic) that any undergraduate would be excoriated for. Given his unquestioned credentials and undoubted intelligence, I cannot imagine that it is foolishness or misunderstanding—-I can only assume it is a purposeful activity. And since his work seems devoted to depicting the Islamic world as socially and culturally moribund, politically backward, and unquestionably dangerous and hostile to the West, his agenda seems fairly clear.