Bernard Lewis, one of the most influential historians of the Islamic world, passed away on May 19, 2018 at the age of 101. Lewis was a prolific author and a linguistic prodigy who had mastered Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and nearly all major modern European languages in addition to ancient Greek and Latin. He held professorships at the Universities of London and Princeton and was as much a scholar as a public intellectual and political advisor.
His influence on conservative policy circles in the United States began in the 1970s and persisted until he was well into his nineties. He was a controversial figure for his unabashed support of Western power and Israel, and also for how he allegedly represented Muslims in his writings. As a scholar of Islam, and especially of the Ottoman empire and its successor states, Lewis focused on the ways decline – political, military and intellectual – was debated by Muslims and what steps they took to reverse this. In other words, Lewis was keenly interested in Muslim agency and identity, and he did not blame the West for their failures.
Lewis’s opponents, led by the late Palestinian-American Professor Edward Said of Columbia University, accused him of essentialising both Islam and Muslims, reducing them to caricatures obsessed with violence and the loss of power vis-à-vis the West. They further asserted that his entire oeuvre was part and parcel of a system of knowledge – a discourse – aimed at dominating Arabs and Muslims and subjugating them to Western power. For many of Lewis’s critics, the West was responsible for the lamentable political and economic fate of the Middle East. Whereas for Lewis, the reasons lay primarily in the decisions, actions and attitudes of the Arabs and Muslims themselves, and these could be traced to well before the era of European colonial domination. The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between these opposing claims.
There is no doubt that a central theme in Lewis’s writings was the Muslim response to military defeat by Western powers, beginning with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 and lasting until today. He argued that Islam, because of its intimate closeness to Christianity, had a particular rivalry with the West which it did not share, for example, with either China or India.
Yet he was also well aware that Islam was not a monolith, but a highly differentiated civilisation in terms of peoples, sects, beliefs, languages, customs, ethnicity and geography. And while Lewis was often interested in power relations and dynamics, he did acknowledge the cultural achievements and high ethical and legal standards of Islamic civilisation. He often averred that Muslims had shown greater tolerance towards Jews than Christian Europeans, and being Jewish himself, this mattered.
The Arabs in History, 1950
Bernard Lewis
His appreciation for Islam can also be gleaned from his book The Arabs in History, which is an elegy to the glory of Arab civilisation and remains widely read even 60 years after it was first published. Another important work by Lewis is The Emergence of Modern Turkey, which describes how a secular nationalist republic emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. Lewis saw in Turkey a model for other peoples and countries in the Middle East to follow, not least because it was both allied to, and modelled on, the West.
Until relatively recently, Turkey was also an ally of Israel, a country that mattered greatly for Lewis. He kept an apartment in Tel Aviv, where he spent part of the year, and was deeply committed to its university, and this is where he was buried. In a sense, the rivalry between Lewis and Said centered on the fact that they were both products of Anglo-American culture, yet their nationalist commitments, and the fate of their respective communities, diverged radically under British, and later American, sponsorship.
For the Zionist Jews, the link to the Anglo-American world has meant glory and prosperity for Israel; whereas for the Palestinians that connection has been associated with repeated humiliation, dispossession and, for many, exile.
In the Arab world, many were able to make a distinction between Lewis the scholar and Lewis the partisan. As a teacher for nearly five decades, Lewis was the doctoral dissertation adviser of numerous Arab scholars. These included, for example, the preeminent historian of Lebanon, the late Kamal Salibi; the Iraqi, Abd al-Aziz al-Duri, an economic historian of the early and medieval Islamic period; the Egyptian, Hassanein Rabie, who acknowledges Lewis’s learnedness in his book The Financial System of Egypt and writes: “I shall never forget what I owe him in every respect.” And there are also those who did not study with Lewis but still valued his scholarship such as the late Syrian political philosopher Sadik Jalal al-Azm and the Lebanese scholar of Islam, Ridwan al-Sayyid, who wrote a respectful and detailed obituary in the Arab press.
Lewis penned remarkably prescient and influential essays. Among these was “The Return of Islam” that was published in the journal Commentary in January 1976. It alerted readers to the importance of Islamism as a potent and resurgent political force at a time when few journalists, let alone academics, noted this development. The Iranian revolution of 1979 made Lewis’s prediction prophetic. A second essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, which appeared in the Atlantic magazine in September 1990, again underscored Lewis’s ability to analyse religiously inspired political forces, such as al-Qaeda, which would strike US targets later that decade. This essay also offered the phrase “A Clash of Civilizations” that has been hugely influential, particularly after the late Samuel Huntington used it as an explanatory paradigm for understanding global affairs. Lewis, however, claimed to disagree with Huntington in that he did not believe Muslims to be irredeemably committed to violence, only some modern Muslims who had developed a specific ideology that sanctifies jihad.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Lewis’s influence grew significantly and he became very close to the George W. Bush administration. The lure of being close to power ended up becoming a serious pitfall for his reputation because he supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Senior Bush administration officials would publicly quote him to justify their policies.
As a student of Arab and Muslims societies, Lewis ought to have known better, not least because his own scholarship repeatedly analysed the malaise as internal and requiring domestic solutions, not change at the point of an American gun. Furthermore, he knew from his study of Muslim medieval scholars (ulama) that they were invariably averse to being too closely associated with political rulers. The ulama argued that this would inevitably require making compromises on matters of principle and vitiate the truth.
Nevertheless, the temptation of being the oracle of the global superpower proved too strong, and the belief that the Middle East could be remade anew overtook him. In the end, he was also overtaken by developments in the region, such as the resurgence of Islamism in his beloved and once secular Turkey as well as the rise of militantly religious Judaism in Israeli politics (Lewis was ardently secular), and finally, and more recently, the unimaginable rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel as they face a common enemy in Iran.