WikiIslam:Sandbox/citazioni di famosi infedeli sull'islam: Difference between revisions

Bernard Lewis, FBA (born May 31, 1916) is a British-American scholar in Oriental studies, and political commentator. He is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West, and is especially famous in academic circles for his works on the history of the Ottoman Empire.

{{Quote||The golden age of equal rights [in Spain] was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was invented by Jews in nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians.<ref>Bernard Lewis, "The Pro-Islamic Jews," in ''Islam in History'' (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), p. 148.</ref>}}

{{Quote||There was a time when scholars and other writers in communist eastern Europe relied on writers and publishers in the free West to speak the truth about their history, their culture, and their predicament. Today it is those who told the truth, no those who concealed or denied it, who are respected and welcomed in these countries. Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation no to shrink the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently. Those who enjoy freedom have a moral obligation to use that freedom for those who do not possess it. We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made to falsify the record of the part and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was. All this is very dangerous indeed, to ourselves and to others, however we may define otherness - dangerous to our common humanity. Because, make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future.<ref>B. Lewis, "Other People's History," in ''Islam in History'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p130.</ref>}}