Lewis’s scholarship attacked Muslim racial-prejudice and slavery myths and probed Muslim disinterest in Europe

Evidence

Race and Color in Islam (1970) attacked the pious myth that there has been no such thing as racial prejudice in Islamic culture. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (1990) similarly explored the notion that the slave trade and the enslavement of black Africans was peculiarly the historical crime of the Christian West. One of the questions tackled in The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982) was why, until the nineteenth century at least, were Muslims so uninterested in Europe? — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 467

Categorization

• XREF: Directly contradicts Orientalism’s claim that Orientalists never critiqued Muslim societies; relevant to Irwin’s defense of Lewis. — connects to: Zakaria and Lewis framed Islam’s failure through rival racist essentialisms. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 500
• SEED: A possible essay on how Bernard Lewis courted controversy by dismantling anti-Western myths about Muslim societies.

Related

• Bernard Lewis’s politics obscured his genuine sympathy for Arab culture (similarity 0.82)
• Bernard Lewis held that the West’s triumph leaves Islam to accept Western modernity (similarity 0.80)
• Zakaria and Lewis framed Islam’s failure through rival racist essentialisms. (similarity 0.78)