Paraphrasing Nisargadatta Maharaj,

'To know what someone believes, observe what they do, not simply what they  say.'

King Leopold, Kemal Ataturk, Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin and his ilk in sub-Saharan Africa, Pol Pot, Mao Tse  Tung, the too-numerous Jihadist/Salafists rapists, torturers, and murderers of men, women, and children -- all ideologists of inhumanity of the worst sort.

Of course, we should add to that loathsome list the suave Apologists for those haters and soul-warped perverts. Sickeningly, many of these maggots are our political, social, and academic fellow citizens.

You aptly note  "Lewis  [...] concludes with a stunningly contradictory observation"  then you quote the example.

In his 1988 'The Political Language of Islam' Lewis discusses freedom specifically on pp.65-66 and pp.108-112, also by and large in stunning contradiction to his recent 'Just So' fantasies.

For example Lewis writes:

"Neither the term 'free' or 'slave' was used in a political context, and the familiar Western use of the terms 'freedom' and 'slavery' as metaphors for citizen's rights and oppressive rule is unknown to the language of classical Islamic political discourse."  (p.65)

Further, he notes acutely the difficulty facing the Ottoman dragoman in finding appropriate words for the Turkish text of the 1774 Treaty with the Russians for the terms 'political freedom' and 'independence'.  Classic Lewis at his best.

But that was then and this is now. Why the shift?  Is what we are seeing some twenty years later a regrettable application to this particular historian of the second law of thermodynamics?

MBR