storian, noting that he or she depends more than other historians on documentary evidence. All historians of Islam face a problem in that there is a lack of such evidence, and Lewis says Islamic history can be divided into three phases according to the "availability and quality of documentary sources" (87). This might make a Westerner believe that history is less important in Islam, but this is not the case, and Lewis shows how important history is for Muslims. Indeed, history has a divine element, because the "mission of Muhammad and the promulgation of the Qur'an are events in history" (103) and are taught in terms of historical memory and record. However, the full historical record has been difficult to assess, for while there are many texts, most have been available only in manuscript and are scattered in many libraries: "Very few were printed, and the small production of published texts was for long due largely to the efforts of Western scholars" (101). Western scholars examining their own history look to a wide variety of texts, Western and non-Western, for information. Muslim scholars have been less likely to do this, since they think of their own civilization as the end of an evolutionary process rather than a beginning: "The external interests of Islamic historiography were thus limited to the prehistory of the Islamic community itself and were moreover confined to the earlier period" (118).
Lewis examines a variety of Middle-Eastern issues in terms of historiography rather than the historical record itself. For instance, he addresses the ancient roots of the antipathy between Muslims and jews in terms of the histories written by each group of their own history and of the history of the other group. Some Jewish historians were pro-Islam, and others were not. Lewis considers the intentions of different historians with reference to what they wrote about Islam, and he also considers the Islamic response to these wri...