The Crisis of Islam - Holy War and Unholy Terror, by Bernard Lewis

Like What Went Wrong?, by the same author, this is an interesting and informative book about the causes of islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Elegantly written, it depicts in a clear and intelligible way the tenets of Islamism and how they have been used - and distorted - by the fundamentalists to comply with their agenda. Like other religions, Islamism can be and is used and interpreted according to the wishes of the interpreter. So, you could argue that Islamism is no worse than Christianity, with its long list of religious wars and atrocities. And in that way it isn't, actually I usually say that Islamism, being seven centuries "younger" than Christianity, is now where we were in the Middle Ages. The big difference, and by no way negligible, is that we're not living in the Middle Ages, but right now, in the 21st century, and right now Christianity, apart from the right wing evangelicals in the United States and the pernicious influence of Catholicism in Africa - and those are certainly big problems - is not much of a threat, and the former christian countries are christian mostly in name only. In my opinion, only real education and probably economic improvement will free the Muslim peoples from their present stagnation and backwardness, and religion will go then the same way it did in the West. But I'm sure it's not easy, and maybe it will take a long time. I don't know how the West should deal with this problem, there are no easy recipes, but I believe we must defend our way of life, with no misguided feelings of guilt or condescension, keeping in mind that these peoples are as human as we are, so with basically the same goals and yearnings in life. And they are indisputably much farther from those objectives than we are.