The eminent scholar of Middle Eastern studies

The eminent scholar of Middle Eastern studies Bernard Lewis passed away in May 2018 after a career spanning some seventy years. Among his over thirty books and hundreds of articles and essays, Lewis’s 1982 study, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, was particularly influential. Based on a homonymous article published in 1957, it asserts that Muslim knowledge about Europe in the Middle Ages was limited, distorted, and largely unchanging, and Lewis ponders why, in his view, Muslims were “uninterested” in Europe. He argues that it was because the latter held a particularly low prestige in the Islamic world, relative to other civilizations on its borders. Muslims “looked on Europe as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief, offering nothing of interest and little of value.” At the same time, Lewis asserts that a basic curiosity about other cultures defined medieval European thought, setting the stage for Europe’s rapid expansion as a global power in the early modern period. “It was a peculiarity of the European and one can, indeed, be more specific, of the Western European during a certain period in his history, to exhibit this kind of interest in alien cultures.”1 Lewis’s argument has had a preponderant influence on subsequent representations of Muslim attitudes about and knowledge of Christian Europe (for example, in scholarship by Francesco Gabriele, George Makdisi, Carole Hillenbrand, and Jacques Waardenburg). Despite critical assessments by Edward Said, Oleg Grabar, and Nizar