Bernard Lewis

British-American scholar at Princeton — the most influential Western historian of the Islamic world — author of The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, What Went Wrong — whose writings on Islam and the West influenced the neoconservative Middle East policy agenda.

Creates the civilizational decline thesis for the Muslim world — Lewis's What Went Wrong argument (that the Islamic world's civilizational backwardness is the result of its failed encounter with modernity, and that Islam's political theology is the cause) is the most debated and influential Western analysis of the Muslim world's political problems.