In this visit to New York's 92nd Street Y, Bernard Lewis discusses the Islamic doctrine of Holy War and its manipulation by modern extremists. Lewis turns to history to answer the most critical question we face today: is this a clash of civilization, an intractable ideological face-off like the Cold War? These are topics that came out of his work on his book Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror.

Bernard Lewis is the author of the national best seller What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East as well as The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East; The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; The Emergence of Modern Turkey; and The Arabs in History. Lewis is internationally recognized as one of our era's greatest historians of the Middle East and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University.