Orientalist Bernard Lewis at 90

It was Bernard Lewis, a scholar of the Middle East, who wrote the seminal article in 1990 that warned of the gathering storm in the Middle East. “The Roots of Muslim Rage” warned “that our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force.”

His life is celebrated by Fouad Ajami today in OpinionJournal.com.

It was Lewis that noticed in the London paper
“Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in February of 1998... a declaration of war on the United States by a self-designated holy warrior he had "never heard of," Osama bin Laden.” Three years later the rules changed on 9/11.

For centuries,

Islam and Christendom had feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their enmity a "series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests." For nearly a millennium, Islam had the upper hand.

But then the tide turned, and Islam found that it started losing every war. It was humiliating.

And the special humiliation of Islam issues from its early success. Moses and the people of Israel wandered for years in the wilderness. Christ was crucified. But Mohammed the prophet was an immediate success in hearts, minds, and on the battlefield. Islam showed how politics and religion could be unified into a single successful empire of faith and of worldly success. Now all that was over. And it was intolerable.

Bernard Lewis worries about the West.

It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered.

The question is whether the rage of Islam is just another rebellion against the power and authority of the global middle class and its paradigm of enterprise, law, tolerance, markets, and prosperity, or whether the angry Islamists will sweep over the world like the recurring eruptions of nomads out of the Asian steppe.

The answer is up to us. The West certainly has the power to stop the rage from the Middle East. The question is: Does it have the will?