Professor Lewis Strikes Back

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, and why “Orientalism” is Bulls—t.
Part 5: Back to the Pilot.
By Michael Isenberg.

I began this series on Orientalism with the feud between Bernard Lewis and Edward Said. I’ve now come full circle and will wrap it up in the same vein.

Orientalism was a 1978 book by Professor Said, in which he argues that most Western scholarship on the Middle East is tainted: racist and in the service of the Armies of Imperialism. Among Western scholars, he singled out Mr. Lewis in particular. In a book chock full of attacks on the works of Orientalists, and even occasional praise for them, the attack on Lewis stands out as an attack on him personally, and an unusually bitter and abusive one at that:

Lewis is an interesting case to examine further because of his standing in the political world of the Anglo-American Middle Eastern Establishment is that of the learned Orientalist, and everything he writes is steeped in the “authority” of the field. Yet for at least a decade and a half his work in the main has been aggressively ideological, despite his various attempts at subtlety and irony. I mention his recent writing as a perfect exemplification [of an] Establishment Orientalist [whose work] purports to be objective, liberal scholarship, but is, in reality, very close to being propaganda against his subject material.

And,

One would find this kind of procedure objectionable as political propaganda—which is what it is, of course—were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists like Lewis writing about Muslims and Arabs are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism.

And again,

To look for a conscious, fair, and explicit judgment by Lewis of the Islam he has treated as he has treated it is to look in vain.

What are these "aggressively ideological" works of Professor Lewis? This "political propaganda?" Professor Said objects to a series of articles, which I wrote about previously, in which Lewis argues that despite the apparent victory of secular, nationalist dictators in the Middle East, Islamic movements were a rising force, and “Though they have all, so far, been defeated, they have not yet spoken their last word.” In Orientalism, Said dismisses that as “a project to debunk, to whittle down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam,” and “a charge intended by Lewis to explain to his latest public why it is that the Muslims (or Arabs) still will not settle down and accept Israeli hegemony over the Near East.” The role of Islam in the Arab world was certainly a topic over which reasonable people could disagree without either of them being guilty of trying to "discredit the Arabs." In any case, only a year after Orientalism was published, events in Iran would prove—in a tragic and spectacular fashion—that is was Lewis who was right.

Professor Said’s claim, that what this is really about is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, tells us more about Said than about Lewis. As I noted in Part 1, Said concedes in his Introduction that the subject was personal, “not for me an exclusively academic matter.” Nowhere does he let his personal feelings get in the way of his scholarly objectivity more than when it comes to the Jewish State. While he maintains a certain amount of academic detachment through most of the book, the final chapter, covering modern scholars, is entirely distorted by his partisanship as a Palestinian. Bernard Lewis is pro-Zionist and therefore must be at the receiving end of ad hominem attacks. But Louis Massignon, who viewed Zionism as “bourgeois colonialism,” possesses “sheer genius” and “overwhelming intelligence.” Said is even willing to give him a pass for equating the East with the ancient and the West with the modern, usually one of Said's top complaints against Orientalists.

Lewis calls Said out on this. In a rebuttal, published in The New York Review of Books, “the culmination of Orientalism” argues that what really bothers Said and other critics about so called-Orientalists is not their view of history, but rather their view of current events:

“Orientalism” has been emptied of its previous content and given an entirely new one—that of unsympathetic or hostile treatment of Oriental peoples. For that matter, even the terms “unsympathetic” and “hostile” have been redefined to mean not supportive of currently fashionable creeds or causes.

Or as we would put it today, the real sin of “Orientalists” is that they aren’t politically correct.

As for his overall assessment of the Orientalism hypothesis, Mr. Lewis sums it up in one word: “Absurd.” He points out that everything that Professor Said had to say about Western scholars of the Middle East could equally apply to scholars of Ancient Greece, until “the very name of classicist must be transformed into a term of abuse.” As ludicrous as that may seem, “if for classicist we substitute ‘Orientalist,’ with the appropriate accompanying changes, this amusing fantasy becomes an alarming reality.”

Or as we would put it today, “Orientalism” is bulls—t.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Haaretz, Bio.com

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, and why “Orientalism” is Bulls—t.
Part 4: The other things Said got wrong.
By Michael Isenberg.

In Part 3 of this series, “Polluters of the Brain,” I began to lay out all the flaws in Edward Said’s “Orientalism” hypothesis, the notion that Western scholarship of the Middle East is irredeemably tainted by imperialism and racism. In particular, I discussed how his eponymous book is polluted from intro to index by the philosophy of postmodernism. I quoted extensively from Said admirer and postmodernism critic Camille Paglia.

While Ms. Paglia was willing to overlook Professor Said’s postmodernist tendencies, she is too honest an intellectual to overlook his fundamental unfairness to Western scholars. Despite her praise for his brilliance, she felt compelled to point out “reservations” that she had about Mr. Said’s “caricature of the disciplines of anthropology, Egyptology, and Oriental studies.” (Which seems to me a little like saying that despite Camille Paglia’s brilliance, one has reservations about her views on feminism, the sixties, and that business about art and culture being man’s attempt to come to terms with nature.) Paglia is quite right that Orientalists’ “massive scholarship in the nineteenth century is the foundation of today’s knowledge…[Said] tends to accept others’ dismissal of a massive body of work of awesome learning and continuing relevance.” That massive body of work was sure relevant to my own research; it helped me out greatly.

Professor Said is so certain that Westerners can't tell Muslims anything about the Muslim world, that he ignores instances where they really have uncovered Muslim achievements long forgotten in the East. Abu Zayd ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), for instance, developed cyclical theories of history that were way ahead of their time. And in economics, no less a figure than Arthur Laffer acknowledges that ibn Khaldun preceded him by half a millennium in developing the principles underlying supply side theory and the Laffer curve. And yet, except for a brief revival in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire, ibn Khaldun’s works were nearly dead to the world, until a French Orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy, breathed new life into them in the early 1800s.

More generally, Professor Said takes a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” attitude toward Western scholars. He condemns them for appropriation if they adopt the works of Middle Eastern culture, and Eurocentrism if they ignore them. Those who disparage the Muslim are “racist” and “ethnocentric,” those who embrace the “Wisdom of the East” are appropriators. On the one hand, he is infuriated by Western representations of Muhammad as a fraud and a child molester, or criticism that Islam is “totalitarian.” On the other hand, he is infuriated by any suggestion that Muhammad and Islam are of any relevance to the modern Middle East, which he thinks is better understood in terms of the socialist, nationalist revolutionary movements which seemed to be in the ascendant at the time he was writing. Similarly, he argues that Orientalism creates artificial barriers between people. Then he damns one of the greatest achievements of human history, the Suez Canal, for shortening the distance to the East and thereby bringing the barriers down. “The logical conclusion of Orientalist thought,” he calls it.

As I noted in Part 2, there is some merit to Professor Said’s argument that many Orientalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were racist and in the service of imperialism. But it’s a stretch to extend that argument to the post-World War II era, when the European powers pulled up their stakes in their one-time colonies and the civil rights movement in America made racism socially unacceptable. Professor Said is the first to object when Western scholars characterize the Middle East as static and unable to evolve. And yet he is in denial that the West can evolve as well, even though he has to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to stay in denial.

The first hoop is language; in the absence of colonialists, he redefines his terms to create new ones. Oil companies are the new “empires,” America the new “imperium.” It’s been said that Americans make lousy imperialists—all they want to do is go home—but that doesn’t deter Professor Said from stretching the definition of “empire” beyond recognition in order to make his case.

Unable to find enough criticisms of twentieth century scholars by redefining his terms, he resorts next to package dealing by bringing pop culture into the mix. Yes, there are some pretty cringe-worthy stereotypes of Arabs in 1960s television, but one can hardly draw conclusions about the academics toiling in the Middle Eastern sections of university libraries based on what appeared on The Beverly Hillbillies.

Indeed, the very name that Professor Said chose for his book, Orientalism, is an exercise in package dealing. As I noted previously, the term was more common during the Imperialist era than it is today. Even at the time the book was published in 1978, it had fallen into disuse. The International Congress of Orientalists voted to drop the term in 1973 and is now the International Congress of Asian and North African Studies. Even Professor Said concedes that “Today an Orientalist is less likely to call himself an Orientalist,” although he correctly points out that the name lingers (even in 2018) in institutional names such as Oxford’s Faculty of Oriental Studies. But by reviving the nearly-extinct term, Professor Said is able to associate modern scholars with their imperialist predecessors, and thereby visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generation.

Said has yet another technique to make his case against scholars: he has the clairvoyance to read between the lines and uncover the coded racism and imperialism in their work. For example, consider his analysis of Bernard Lewis’s article, “Islamic Concepts of Revolution.” As noted above, revolution is central to Said's understanding of the modern Middle East. He objects that Professor Lewis disagrees, and finds particular fault with Lewis’s discussion of—etymology. Lewis points out that the root of the Arabic word for revolution, thur, means to rise, excite, or stir up, and originally referred to the motion of a camel rising up. It's a mildly interesting if somewhat pedantic discussion. Professor Said's response is completely out of proportion: “The entire passage is full of condescension and bad faith. Why introduce the idea of a camel rising as an etymological root for modern Arab revolution except as a clever way of discrediting the modern?” [I don’t know—maybe because a camel rising is the etymological root for modern Arab revolution?] Furthermore Professor Said argues that words like rise, excite, and stir up, are Freudian in nature and therefore evoke the racist stereotype of the oversexed Arab. Said’s “gotcha” tone reminds me of Dennis, the anarcho-syndicalist in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “What a giveaway! Do you hear that? Do you hear that, eh? That’s what I’m on about. Do you see him repressing me?”

The only difference is that in the movie, King Arthur really does call Dennis “Bloody peasant,” whereas the insults to Professor Said in Lewis’s article are figments of his imagination.

But Professor Said’s attacks on Professor Lewis did not stop with the latter’s etymological analyses, and I shall discuss that in the final part of this series.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), Old Scholar; YouTube

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, and why “Orientalism” is Bulls--t

Part 1: Who is Edward Said?
By Michael Isenberg.

In my recent obituary for Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), I noted that he had been party to a number of controversies during his long career. Among these were his involvement with the two Bush Administrations, his “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis, and the bitter accusations leveled against him in Edward Said’s book, Orientalism.

Professor Said and his Orientalism hypothesis have been significant forces in the field of Middle Eastern studies—not for the better—and they would be worth discussing in their own right, even if Professor Lewis had not been involved. In this post I will give some background on Professor Said and his magnum opus. Part 2 will go into more detail about what is Orientalism and give credit where credit is due for the things Professor Said got right. Then in Parts 3 and 4 I’ll cover what he got wrong. Finally, in Part 5, I’ll come full circle back to the Lewis/Said feud.

Edward Wadie Said (1935-2003) was born in Jerusalem, at the time part of the British Mandate of Palestine. His father was a Palestinian who had earned American citizenship through his service in the US Army during World War I. His mother was Lebanese. Both were Christian.

Growing up, shuttling between Cairo and Jerusalem, Edward felt alienated, part of many worlds, belonging to none. As he wrote in 2002’s Between Worlds, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays,

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like "Saïd", connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired Edward VIII the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth) I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity, at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.

Said came to the United States in the 1950s (is it called “immigration” if you’re already a citizen?), where he completed his education, earning degrees from Princeton and Harvard. In 1963 he joined the faculties of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia.

Professor Said soon became an academic superstar. His colleague in the field of literary criticism, Camille Paglia sang his praises in her review of his book Culture and Imperialism. She called him “one of the leading literary critics of his generation…a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, aesthete, and political activist, an inspiring role model for a younger generation of critics searching for their cultural identity.” He penned over two dozen books, but Orientalism, published in 1978, is the one he is remembered for. The book was a precursor to today’s ugly politically correct attacks on “dead white men,” and “cultural appropriation”—decades before those terms were in common use.

The terms “Orient” and “Oriental” on the other hand, had a long history. For most of us in the twenty-first century, they are somewhat old-fashioned and possibly racist terms (opinions are divided) referring to the Far East: China, Japan, and so on. However, Said’s use of “Orient” hearkens back to an earlier era, the eighteenth century, when it referred to what we now call the Middle East. And although Said bemoans that the term “Orient” expanded along with nineteenth century European imperialism to encompass all of Asia, he generally continues to use it throughout the book to refer to the Middle East. His choice of this outdated usage is not accidental. I’ll have more to say about that in Part 4.

The Introduction to Orientalism is not promising, fraught as it is with opaque academic-ese. For example, “My whole point is to say that we can better understand the persistence and durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints on writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting.” But don’t be discouraged by this. The language becomes marvelously readable once the introduction is over and the main body of the text begins.

The flow of the book is more or less chronological, a series of theatrical tableaus—to use one of Said’s favorites metaphors—tableaus that the West has staged to represent the East. These go back to ancient times, where Euripides’ The Bacchae portrays the drunken, demonic, and ultimately murderous acolytes of Dionysus as, according to Said, symbols of Asian Persia, in contrast to the Apollonian rationality of European Greece. From there, Said races through the millennia, slowing only when he gets to nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the bulk of his book. Along the way we meet a cast of prominent scholars and authors whose work has been indispensable to those of us who have done research in the field: William Jones, “the undisputed founder of [modern] Orientalism,” Silvestre de Sacy, Ernest Renan, Edward William Lane, Sir Richard Francis Burton, H.A.R Gibb, Louis Massignon, and of course, Professor Lewis.

Professor Said concedes that the book is personal for him.

In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. The nexus of knowledge and power creating “the Oriental” and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter.

As we shall see, when Said says that he does not always approach his subject in a spirit of unemotional, academic emotional detachment, we should believe him.

Perhaps you’ve notice that so far, I have not defined “Orientalism.” That’s problematic, because neither does Professor Said. At no point in his three hundred page doorstop does he provide a concise statement of what Orientalism is. Nevertheless, during the course of the book, certain recurring themes emerge, and we can piece together a definition from that. Which I will do in the next installment of this series.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): PalToday.ps

Fighting for God

Bernard Lewis and the Clash of Civilizations.
By Michael Isenberg.

Yesterday I posted an obituary for Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, a towering figure in twentieth century Middle East studies who was no stranger to controversy. I noted that two controversies in particular will be forever linked with his name: his “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis, which is the subject of this post, and “Orientalism,” which I will cover in a future article.

The Clash of Civilizations theory concerns the origins of Islamic conflict with the West, a topic which Professor Lewis explored in a 1990 essay in The Atlantic, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” and expanded upon in his 2003 book, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror.

Lewis rejects the idea that Islamic radicalism is a reaction to particular policies of Europe or the United States. In The Crisis of Islam, he points out that one of the founders of modern jihadist theory, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb, formed his views about the West during a stay in the United States from 1948 to 1950. At that time, most of the US policies which are supposedly responsible for radical Islam—from the fall of Mossadegh, to the two Gulf Wars, to the invasion of Afghanistan—hadn’t happened yet.

Admittedly, America was a supporter of Israel at the time, and that did influence Mr. Qutb, but Professor Lewis argues that American support for the Jewish state during its early years was lukewarm at best. Lewis claims that Israel was far closer to the Soviet Union than the US at that time. In fact, during the 1956 Suez crisis, when Israel, France, and Great Britain attempted to wrest control of the Suez Canal from Gamal Nasser’s Egypt, the Eisenhower Administration intervened on the Egyptian side, applying diplomatic pressure that led to the withdrawal of Israel and its allies. And yet, the US’s support of Egypt brought no goodwill for America from the Arab world, whose governments proceeded to build alliances with the Soviets.

“Clearly,” Professor Lewis writes in the Atlantic article, “something deeper is involved than these specific grievances, numerous and important as they may be—something deeper that turns every disagreement into a problem and makes every problem insoluble.” If nothing the Western nations did can explain Muslim antipathy, one must look elsewhere. “It should by now be clear,” he continues,

that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both [emphasis mine].

This “clash of civilizations,” a phrase which was subsequently taken up by Samuel Huntington in his eponymous book, has its origins in both ideology and history. Indeed, as early as 1964, Lewis wrote about “The Revolt of Islam” as a force to be reckoned with in Middle Eastern affairs. Its origin is in the absence of a separation between the sacred and the secular in Islamic ideology. There is no rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s in Islam. It’s all God’s.

In Islam the struggle of good and evil very soon acquired political and even military dimensions. Muhammad, it will be recalled, was not only a prophet and a teacher, like the founders of other religions; he was also the head of a polity and of a community, a ruler and a soldier. Hence his struggle involved a state and its armed forces. If the fighters in the war for Islam, the holy war "in the path of God," are fighting for God, it follows that their opponents are fighting against God. And since God is in principle the sovereign, the supreme head of the Islamic state—and the Prophet and, after the Prophet, the caliphs are his vicegerents—then God as sovereign commands the army. The army is God's army and the enemy is God's enemy. The duty of God's soldiers is to dispatch God's enemies as quickly as possible to the place where God will chastise them—that is to say, the afterlife. Clearly related to this is the basic division of mankind as perceived in Islam...In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam. But the greater part of the world is still outside Islam, and even inside the Islamic lands, according to the view of the Muslim radicals, the faith of Islam has been undermined and the law of Islam has been abrogated. The obligation of holy war therefore begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.

The holy war went well…at first:

For the first thousand years Islam was advancing, Christendom in retreat and under threat. The new faith conquered the old Christian lands of the Levant and North Africa, and invaded Europe, ruling for a while in Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and even parts of France. The attempt by the Crusaders to recover the lost lands of Christendom in the east was held and thrown back, and even the Muslims' loss of southwestern Europe to the Reconquista was amply compensated by the Islamic advance into southeastern Europe, which twice reached as far as Vienna. For the past three hundred years, since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, Islam has been on the defensive, and the Christian and post-Christian civilization of Europe and her daughters has brought the whole world, including Islam, within its orbit. For a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third—the last straw—was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties.

Clearly, the “roots of Muslim rage” run deep in Islamic ideology. But fortunately, Islam is not monolithic and Muslims do not have to choose between waging perpetual war against the West or giving up on Islam altogether. There are other, gentler ways to interpret Muslim scripture. Quoted in his New York Times obituary, Professor Lewis says,

As a specialist on Islam, I find myself disturbed by the nonsense being talked, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. On the one hand, you have people who would have you believe that Islam is a bloodthirsty religion bent on world destruction. On the other hand, you have people telling us that Islam is a religion of love and peace—rather like the Quakers, but less aggressive. The truth is in its usual place.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo source: thirtyfifthcenturyromance.blogspot.com

RIP Bernard Lewis

by Michael Isenberg.

The world has lost an icon in the field of Islamic studies: Princeton historian Bernard Lewis died May 19, a couple weeks shy of his 102nd birthday.

Born in London in 1916 to Jewish parents, Lewis was launched on a lifetime of language studies when he learned Hebrew in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1939, he earned his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London where he joined the faculty.

At that time, professional historians had little interest in the Muslim world. Such research as was done was carried out by “Arabists,” specialists in the Arabic language. Professor Lewis wrote in his 2012 autobiography, Notes On A Century (written in collaboration with longtime partner Buntzie Ellis Churchill), “As my teacher [H.A.R] Gibb told me more than once, I was the first professional historian to study, teach and write Arab history—the first, that is, in England.”

Like much of his generation, when World War II broke out, he entered military service. He was initially sent to tank school, but, “Either because of my aptitude for languages or my ineptitude with tanks, I was transferred from the tank corps to the intelligence corps.”

After the war, Professor Lewis made a name for himself with his first commercial success, 1950’s The Arabs in History, and his dive into the archives of the Ottoman Empire—he was the first Western scholar to be allowed access by the Turkish government. Professor Lewis takes little credit for that accomplishment:

It was my good fortune, rather than any particular merit on my part, which caused me to submit my application precisely at the moment when the custodians of the archive decided to adopt a more tolerant policy and no longer limit access only to their own nations. I was both astounded and delighted to receive the coveted permit. Feeling rather like a child turned loose in a toy shop or like an intruder in Ali Baba’s cave, I hardly knew where to turn first.

Still, accomplishment it was. In his article, “Bernard Lewis: an Appreciation,” R. Stephen Humphreys explains the significance of Lewis’s Ottoman scholarship:

For the first time, historians could hope to penetrate a premodern Islamic society in depth, to produce not only properly documented political studies, but also serious analyses of governmental structure, economic change, and demography. Moreover, the Ottoman archives were as valuable for the Arab and Balkan possessions of the Empire as for its Turkish core. Turkish scholars, notably Omer Lutfi Barkan and Halil Inalcik, had begun after World War II to make serious use of these treasures, but it is Lewis who revealed them to European and American scholars. In so doing he opened up what still remains the most dynamic and creative field in Middle Eastern history.

In his 1964 book, The Middle East and the West, Professor Lewis included a chapter “The Revolt of Islam,” in which he wrote,

From the beginnings of Western penetration in the world of Islam until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original movements of thoughts have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and of the community overwhelmed by infidels, rather than of the nation or country overrun by foreigners.

This was an astonishing statement at a time when the Muslim world was dominated by secular, nationalist, socialist dictators like Egypt’s Gamal Nasser. Even Professor Lewis had to concede that “In recent years these militant religious organizations appear to have lost ground, and in many countries they have been outlawed or restricted.” Still, he predicted, “Though they have all, so far, been defeated, they have not yet spoken their last word.” In particular he singled out Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as “The most active and most successful of these leagues.” He returned to this theme in a 1976 article (having moved to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the meantime), “The Return of Islam,” in Commentary magazine.

When, three years later, the Iranian Revolution proved him right in a spectacular and tragic fashion, Professor Lewis began his transformation from “mere” academic superstar to PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, a transformation that was completed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, perpetrated by Muslim Brotherhood alumni and their disciples. “Osama bin Laden made me famous,” he said.

His growing fame brought the US government a-calling. During the run-up to the first Gulf War, then-defense secretary Dick Cheney consulted him, together with “almost every Middle East expert in the country.” But Professor Lewis stood out. While most experts warned that the United States should not get involved in another Vietnam, Lewis correctly predicted that defeating the Iraqi Army would be “quick, cheap, and easy.” In Notes on a Century he conceded that he merely echoed the opinion of his friend, then-Turkish president Turgut Özal.

He was consulted again in the run up to the second Gulf War, prompting The New York Times to write in his obituary that “Few outsiders and no academics had more influence with the Bush administration on Middle Eastern affairs than Mr. Lewis.” Lewis himself, however, downplayed that influence. He insisted he opposed the second war and pointed out that the extent of his involvement with the Bush administration was little more than a few meetings with Vice President Cheney, meetings not important enough to warrant a mention in Cheney’s lengthy memoirs.

The role of Professor Lewis (or lack thereof) in advising the Bush Administration was not the only controversy of his long career. He was singled out by Columbia University’s Edward Said, who accused him of being the “culmination of Orientalism,” a term which Said never actually defines in the three hundred pages of his eponymous book, but which is apparently a form of racist scholarship in the service of Imperialism.

In recent years, Professor Lewis’s name has become synonymous with his “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis, a phrase he coined in a 1990 essay in The Atlantic, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” and expanded upon in his 2003 book, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Building on the ideas in “The Revolt of Islam,” Lewis argued that the conflict between Islam and the West was not the result of anything the West has done, but rather driven by the ideology of Islam itself.

(For more about the Clash of Civilizations, see my article, "Fighting for God." I'll cover Orientalism in a future post.)

Professor Lewis was well known for his bon mots and humorous anecdotes. One of his commanding officers during the war felt it necessary to note in his file “His sense of humor should not be taken as seditious.” Judging from Notes on a Century, Lewis was often content to play straight man in his own stories, and let other parties be the comedians. Thus, there is the story of the Turkish general with whom Professor Lewis was discussing Turkey’s entry into NATO. “The real problem with having Americans as your allies,” the general said, “is you never know when they will turn around and stab themselves in the back.”

On another occasion Professor Lewis was talking with a Pakistani general about the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Israel, Great Britain, and France made an abortive attempt to wrest the Suez Canal from Egypt's Nasser, who had nationalized it. “We are strongly opposed to military aggression,” the general said. “Especially when left unfinished.”

But perhaps the trait of Professor Lewis that contributed the most to his success as a scholar was his commitment to objectivity. “The historian should not set out to prove a thesis and select material to establish it,” he wrote, “but rather follow the evidence where it leads.”

Furthermore,

If you look back and find that in every single dispute between your group and other groups, yours has been right and the others have been wrong—then you should reexamine the hypothesis on the basis of which you are conducting your researches, because it is not in the nature of human entities to be always right.

And again, “It is perfectly legitimate to reject and refute someone else’s arguments, but you must not distort his arguments in order to make your task easier.”

He was even willing to reject and refute his own arguments when he thought that was warranted. Looking back at The Arabs in History late in life, he called it a “sin of my youth.” He felt it was unduly influenced by the Marxist phase he was going through at the time he wrote it. “Quasi-Marxism was my measles or chicken pox,” he said, “which I got over at the age when one recovers from these ailments. Some younger people presumably find it necessary to go through the same phase now but I don’t think one should make an intellectual virtue of childhood infections.”

Judging from the reaction to his work, he had some success in staying objective:

I am not an expert in theology or scripture, and I looked at these, if at all, only with a historian’s eye…This has not prevented my critics from attacking me for my treatment of Muslim scriptures and sacred biography. In this as in other matters, the attacks came from both sides. On the one side I am accused of traducing Islam and its sanctities, on the other of defending and even condoning its flaws. As long as the attacks continue to come from both sides, I shall remain confident of my scholarly objectivity.

The Arabic translator of The Middle East and the West wrote in his preface, “I don’t know who the person is but one thing is clear. He is, from our point of view, either a candid friend or an honest enemy and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.”

As another non-Muslim writing about the Muslim world, I can only dream that someday a Muslim writer will praise my work in this fashion.

RIP Bernard Lewis.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit: New York Times