I first became interested in Bernard Lewis after hearing he connected the dots on the significance of Ahmadinejad’s promise to let the U.S. know where he stands on his nuclear program on August 22^nd. That specific date was a red flag to Professor Emeritus of Near East Studies at Princeton University, who has written extensively on issues in the Middle East in books like The Crisis of Islam and What Went Wrong. Ninety-year-old Lewis is still sought after by government administrations in an effort to make sense of the world’s Islamic Terrorist threat.

So what’s the big deal about August 22^nd you may be asking. The majority of Shi’as believe the 12th and final Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, at seven years old went missing in a cave below a mosque in Samaria in 874 AD. Allah has miraculously kept him hidden and Shi’as are awaiting his return to finish his mission of establishing Islam as the global religion. “This year, August 22^nd corresponds in the Islamic calendar, to the 27^th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to the ‘furthest mosque,’ usually identified as Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back,” explains Professor Bernard Lewis in his August 8^th op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. This, coupled with President Ahmadinejad’s speech on September 17, 2005 where he stated that the 12^th Imam’s aura formed around him captivating all the world leaders preventing them from blinking, should give the thinking and non-thinking alike pause.

In that same op-ed piece Bernard shares with us what an 11^th grader in the Iranian school system learns about Islamic Eschatology. “I [Ayatollah Khomieni] am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world devourers i.e. the infidel powers, wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all of them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another’s hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours.”

My curiosity was piqued. I took advantage of yet another insomniac moment after reliving 9-11 through the eyes of Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center movie. I wanted to understand more about how Lewis saw the world according to Islamo-fascists. Armed with google, a laptop, a topic to research and absolutely no interruptions, four hours later I had a ream of downloaded articles from Lewis. I was most fascinated about the rise of Wahhabism in a conversation with Bernard Lewis on Islam and the West. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life sponsored this discussion on April 27^th of this year. Assembled were some of the best and brightest reporters representing both sides of the pond and ideological leanings from Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post to Jane Little of the BBC. Mr. Gertz asked Lewis if he agreed with President Bush’s assessment that Islamic extremist is a perversion of Islam. I copied and pasted his answer for accuracy beginning with the next paragraph.

“Well, a lot of what is being done is certainly a perversion of Islam, simply in the light of their own texts. Take, for example, the suicide bomber. Now, the classical Islamic legal and religious texts are quite clear on the subject of suicide. Suicide is what Christians would call a mortal sin. Even if a man or a woman had lived a life of unremitting virtue, by committing suicide they forfeit paradise and go straight to hell, where, according to the sacred texts, the eternal punishment of the suicide consists of the eternal repetition of the act of suicide. So, if you poison yourself, an eternity of bellyache; if you strangle yourself, an eternity of strangling; and presumably for these people, an eternity of exploding fragments.

We ask, well, why do they do it? How does it happen? This is a very recent development. It came in stages. Stage one is a question that was asked quite a long time ago: Is it permissible to throw oneself against a superior enemy, knowing that this will lead to certain death? Is this permissible or does it count as suicide, which is forbidden? And the jurists consider this permissible. And that was where it stood for centuries and centuries. Even the famous Assassins of the Middle Ages never died by their own hands and never killed anyone but the marked target.

And it isn't until comparatively recently that they asked another question: Is it permitted to kill yourself in attacking the enemy, provided you take a sufficient number of the enemy with you? And the answer was, yes, if you take a sufficient number of the enemy with you, it is permitted to kill yourself. Now, this is a radical departure from more than a thousand years of Islamic theology and law, and you ask, where does it come from? Well, like so much else of what has gone wrong with Islam, we can trace it quite specifically to Wahhabism. Wahhabism is about as central to Islam as, shall we say, the Ku Klux Klan to Christianity. It originated in Najd, what is now part of Saudi Arabia, in the 18th century. It was a reaction to the general perception of that time that things were going wrong.

There have always been two reactions in the Muslim world to an awareness of things going wrong. One is, we are falling behind the modern world; the answer therefore is to modernize, to catch up with the modern world. The other is, as we see now, what has gone wrong is that we have tried to ape the modern, i.e., infidel world and the right answer is to return to the true and authentic traditions of Islam. That was the Wahhabi line, and Wahhabism is a peculiarly violent and fanatical version of this.

This would have remained an extremist fringe in a marginal country except for the unfortunate combination of two circumstances. One was the creation of a Saudi kingdom in the mid-‘20s. The House of Saud were the local tribal sheikhs of the area where the Wahhabis flourished and followed the Wahhabi faith. By creating the kingdom, controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and also therefore the pilgrimage, it gave them enormous power and influence in the Islamic world. And the other, of course, was oil and money, which gave them resources beyond the dreams of avarice.

So what you are getting now in the Muslim world, all over the Muslim world, and more particularly among the Muslim communities in non-Muslim countries is the spread of the Wahhabi version of Islam, which, as I said, is about as typical of what you might call mainstream Islam as the KKK of mainstream Christianity. Wahhabism is the major trend of that sort. There are others, the so-called Salafia. It's run along parallel lines to the Wahhabis, but they are less violent and less extreme — still violent and extreme but less so than the Wahhabis. And now, of course, also the Iranian Revolution.”

Professor Bernard Lewis picked up on the Wahabbi theme later as he was addressing Mr. Wooldrige’s comment and concern that assimilation in European countries seems to be off to a rocky start for the Muslims. Here is Lewis response, “Regarding the Muslim populations of the Western world, I spoke a few moments ago about the Wahhabi menace. This is particularly strong among the Muslim communities in Europe and America. And just think, for example, for a Muslim living in Hamburg, Birmingham, Los Angeles, or whatever it may be, it is very natural that he should want to give his children some sort of grounding in his religion and culture. So he looks around for evening classes, weekend schools, holiday camps and the like. These are now almost entirely controlled, financed, funded by the Wahhabis, so that you get, among the Muslims in the Diaspora more than among the Muslims in Muslim countries, an intense indoctrination from the most radical, the most violent, the most extreme and fanatical version of Islam.

I'll give you a specific example. In the German constitution there is strict separation of church and state, but Germany, unlike the United States, allows time in the school curriculum for religious instruction. The way they do it is this: Time is provided in the curriculum of the German schools for religious instruction. Attendance at these classes is entirely optional, and the state provides neither teachers nor textbooks. The religious communities said, if they want this, provide the teachers and the textbooks.

The Muslim community in Germany is largely Turkish, and when they reached sufficient numbers they went to the German authorities and asked if they could have religious instruction in Islam in the German school curriculum. The Germans said, yes, you're entitled to that, according to the law, but you will have to provide the textbooks. And the Turks said, no problem, we have excellent textbooks, which are used in Turkish schools and we can use those. And the German authorities said, no, that you cannot do. These are government-controlled textbooks. We cannot have government textbooks on religion. You have to produce them from your own community, with the result that Islam, as taught in Turkish schools, is a sort of modernized, semi-secularized version of Islam, and Islam as taught in German schools is the full Wahhabi blast. The last time I looked, 12 Turks had been arrested as members of al Qaeda. All 12 of them were born and educated in Germany, not in Turkey. Does that answer your question?"