For many centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement--the foremost military and economic power in the world, the leader in the arts and sciences of civilization. Christian Europe, a remote land beyond its northwestern frontier, was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism. Bernard Lewis discusses how things changed as the West won victories in the battlefield and the marketplace. He discusses differences between the Western and Middle Eastern cultures from the 18th to the 20th centuries, comparing such things as Christianity and Islam, music and the arts, the position of women, secularism and the civil society, the clock and the calendar.