While neglecting to explain in his introduction why the order of essays jumps from 2003 to 1978 to 1972 and back to 1993, Lewis litters this book with errors and contradictions. The contradictions are perhaps inevitable in diverse works spanning fifty years, but they make for difficult reading. Take a few examples. In a 1972 essay, "An Interpretation of Fatimid History," Lewis writes that the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo sent missionaries to the eastern Islamic world to win converts to Shiite Islam. He counts the creation of the office of the "Chief Missionary" in Cairo as a breakthrough, establishing "something previously unknown to Islam--an institutional church." This interesting insight is then contradicted elsewhere in the volume in an undated and "previously unpublished paper" titled "From Pilgrims to Tourists": "Muslims did not engage in organized missionary activity." Were there missionaries or not? There certainly are now, making Islam the fastest-expanding religion in the world.

Another 1972 essays says, "In a very real sense modern Hebrew is a reincarnation of Yiddish--the same soul in a new lexical body." This assertion, while not necessarily of political import, is at variance with the history of modern Hebrew. Those who performed the miracle of reviving a language nearly three millennia dead did so with the explicit objective of displacing Yiddish and all it represented in Jewish consciousness--the culture of exile, the authenticity of the Diaspora experience and the character of the "Yid," so detested by early Zionists like Zeev Jabotinsky. Hebrew contributed to the creation of a new man free of the ghetto in Theodor Herzl's "old-new" land. David Gruen of Plonsk was one of many who, in an act of secular baptism, abandoned his Yiddish name for the prouder Hebrew Ben-Gurion. There is no mention, let alone comparison, of the Yiddish literature of writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer with the modern Hebrew works of A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Kenan or with Arab Hebrew writers like Salman Natour, Emil Habibi and Sayed Kashua. Yet if modern Hebrew is the reincarnation of Yiddish, he must show a relationship rather than what the Hebrew pioneers claim to have achieved, a rupture. Lewis could be making an original argument, but it is no more than a statement that is at best contentious and at worst plain wrong.

Similarly, he says of music in the Middle East that only the cities of Turkey and Israel are on the "international concert circuit." He writes, "Elsewhere in the Middle East, those who compose, perform or even listen to Western music are still relatively few." Although hardly a matter of political significance, this is nonetheless false and, like his statement on modern Hebrew, asserted without evidence. My own memories of packed houses for the Cairo Opera, symphonies in Beirut and at the Baalbek Festival and auditions for the Damascus Conservatory lead me to the opposite conclusion. Classical music lovers are no fewer in the Middle East than they are in America's Midwest: a minority, but of a respectable size. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, established by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, includes talented young classical musicians from the Arab world and Israel. Lewis's East, even when it comes to music, is not the East as it is but as he imagines it should be--a place where terror is endemic and irrational--if it is to remain in polar, violent opposition to his West.

Writing of the Medieval Assassins in "Religion and Murder in the Middle East," Lewis quotes a thirteenth-century Persian poet's words: "By one single warrior on foot a king may be stricken with terror, though he own more than a hundred thousand horsemen." From that, he concludes, "that expresses, vividly and simply, the self-perception of the political assassin, or, as we might say nowadays, of the terrorist." He equates the Assassins with modern Islamic terrorists and locates them in the same countries, Syria and Iran. (Never mind that the Syrian and Iranian governments both detest Osama bin Laden, and that Al Qaeda has long based its operations in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other countries where the Assassins never worked.) There is a significant difference between the political assassin, who terrorizes leaders, and the terrorist, who frightens the general population. Sir Steven Runciman, in his History of the Crusades, noted that the Assassins killed far fewer people than did the Crusaders or the Muslim princes they battled. They raided no towns, sacked no villages and planted no bombs in public places. Runciman regarded them as more humane than the political leaders who murdered tens of thousands to achieve their ends. Assassination by the Ismaili brethren of Syria and Iran distinguished itself from terror in that it was focused, deliberate and harmless to innocent civilians. (Israel's "targeted assassinations," like those by the United States in Iraq, often cause more innocent deaths than those of the putative "targets.") Crusader and Muslim kings were terrified of them, but the general populations were not. Contemporary suicide bombers, in contrast, frighten everyone.

The book's title, From Babel to Dragomans, derives from one of the more interesting essays in this collection, a 1998 lecture on language, interpreters and translators in the Middle East from biblical times. Out of linguistic confusion emerged those who interpret one people, its culture and its worldview to another. The dragoman, translator, begins in Genesis as the Hebrew melitz; "more often it means something like intercessor or advocate or even ambassador." Melitz was translated into Aramaic, the lingua franca of Greater Syria by the time of Christ, as meturgeman. In Arabic, this was turjuman and the Turkish dragoman. The Ottoman dragoman became a broker and fixer for Europeans traveling or trading in the Ottoman Empire. Many grew rich. The Ottomans appointed Jews and later Christians, whose children studied abroad and learned European languages, to perform this delicate task until the Turks could do it themselves. Lewis is at his best here, making apposite observations about the development of this necessary bridge among cultures. He may see himself as a kind of dragoman--hence his choice of title. But, as nineteenth-century Western travelers like Alexander Kinglake in Eothen and Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad noted, the dragoman usually forswore an accurate translation in favor of what he believed his employers wanted to hear.

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