Reflections on Bernard Lewis
By Hugh Fitzgerald
JihadWatch.org
June 17, 2004
Bernard Lewis is an acute scholar about many aspects of Islam; he
writes beautifully. He is well-trained in languages. He lived during
the war in Egypt. He is lionized in Turkey, and even in small shops
off Taksim Square the proprietors, when they discover a visitor
is from the United States, ask if that visitor may happen to know
“Professor Lewis.”
He has all the right enemies — the absurd Said, who knew nothing
about Islam but for some reason thought his being an Arab entitled
him to act as an expert (the footnote alone, on “thawra,” in Lewis’
“The Question of Orientalism,” is enough to delicately dismember
all of Said’s pretentions; he does not survive the essay); the
apologist Esposito, who is not fit to be mentioned at the same time
as Lewis (Esposito is an out-and-out apologist, an ignoramus, and the
producer of glossy picture-books about Islam that win the reader over,
and distract from the apologetic or vapid texts he has chosen, with
plenty of local color — venerable mosques, turbans and Iznik tulips,
the usual Mughal miniatures of hunting scenes, or Majnoun and Leyla,
an apothecary jar or two from Abbassid Baghdad, the obligatory Persian
poetry in nastaliq, and of course the Dome of the Rock — while so many
subjects, including Jihad and the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam,
are yet again ignored, or minimized to the point of disappearance.
In Lewis’ long academic career in England, he was not listened to
sufficiently by the Foreign Office, and their insulting behavior
(stemming from antisemitism) could not but affect him. He clearly
enjoys being appreciated (who does not?). He enjoys, on his visits
to the Middle East, being made much of by Turkish or Arab hosts. If
you had spent years learning, and learning well, certain languages,
and the only people who could fully appreciate your achievement were,
say, Muslim Arabs, or quasi-Muslim Turks, and if they seemed to you
to talk a good game of “moderate” Islam (in the case of the Turks, it
was meant), you too might not wish to offend those colleagues, those
friends, those hosts and patrons. Some may find it telling that Lewis
has reproduced, for both his book of translations from the Turkish,
Persian, Hebrew, and Arabic, and for his latest collection of articles,
“From Babel to Dragomans”, a photograph that shows him sitting in his
Western dress — he never stoops to the clownish indignity of going
native like the mythomane Lawrence, or St. John Philby, or dozens
of others — in the tent, or something like it, that belongs to none
other than the Hashemite Prince Hassan ibn Talal, that plummy-voiced
“dialogue-of-civilisations” apologist for Islam (the most plausible,
the most outwardly pleasing, the most subtle, and therefore the
most convincing and dangerous of such apologists); that photograph,
that desire to have that photograph used on two of his books, might
be taken simply as a way to show the members of MESA that — look,
the real Arabs know that I tell them the truth.
Lewis in various interviews does seem pleased that he can address
two audiences at the same time. “He doth bestride the world like a
colossus.” He is proud of the fact that so many of his books have
been translated into Turkish, Arabic, Farsi. But the truth is:
you cannot write with two audiences in mind, one of the Muslim, the
other non-Muslim. That Muslim audience is so prickly, so defensive, so
unwilling to admit to the events of its own history (the unwillingness,
for example, to even read the scholarship of Bat Ye’or, even among the
so-called advanced Arabs in the West, is absolutely flabbergasting),
that Lewis finds himself at every turn, either pulling his punches,
or enveloping the thought in veils of velleities. It is not a case of
being fortiter in re, suaviter in modo. He is suave in his prose all
right, but that suavity is not wrapped around a sufficient amount of
truthful iron.
*He is attempting a trick that cannot be achieved. You cannot write
simultaneously for an audience of Muslims (to get them to see, gently,
and with constant, almost formulaic, reassurance about the “greatness”
of high classical Islamic civilization — which Lewis always describes,
wrongly, as being far above any other civilisation of the time — has
he forgotten China? And does he still accept the older cliches about
the “Dark Ages”? He is a poor historian who appeals to the self-esteem
problem of part of his audience; that is not the historian’s task*.
*Lewis now seems, at last, to be fully recognized, and triumphant. But
is he? He was an enthusiastic supporter of the disastrous Oslo Accords.
It is understandable why people such as Clinton, or Tom Friedman,
or all the others who know nothing about Islam, should believe in
the efficacy of such negotiations and such treaties. But Lewis — who
knows all about the rules of Muslim jurisprudence regarding “treaties”
with Infidel peoples and polities, and knows perfectly well why every
treaty Israel has ever signed with an Arab state has been violated,
sometimes completely, and knows too the significance of the Treaty
of al-Hudaiybiyya, which Arafat so frequently mentioned to his Muslim
audiences — what is Lewis’ excuse for supporting, so loudly and for
so long, the Oslo folly?*
*Lewis describes the series of political, legal, financial, social,
sumptuary, and other disablities placed on dhimmis in quite brisk
terms, usually limiting himself to a word or two about the jizya and
“other disabilities.” He does not stop to really go into the whole
monstrous system, or to quizzically ask what that phrase “protected
peoples” might mean, or how it was that everywhere that Islam
conquered, the treatment of dhimmis, whether they were Christians or
Jews or Zoroastrians or even Hindus or Buddhists — was remarkably the
same, and in all cases the post-conquest (i.e. post-Jihad) institution
of dhimmitude led to the enforced status of degradation, humiliation,
and permanent insecurity (including intermittent massacres that Lewis
hardly ever refers to) on all of these non-Muslim peoples*.
Lewis himself must, more and more, have come to see — especially
as his beloved Turkey slides away from Kemalism — that in certain
essentials he got it wrong. He actually got Islam wrong. He
underestimated its malevolence. He underestimated the difficulty
of reform. He took as representative men the scholars, or the
well-educated exiles, who came out of that world but were about as
representative of it as Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Nabokov could have
been said to represent Soviet Russia. He was wrong; he was wrong
on the Oslo Accords; he was wrong in his political advertisement
(written with James Woolsey) to promote Prince Hassan to be a new
king for Iraq; he remains wrong if he thinks that the United States
should continue to be preoccupied with Iraq, when there are so many
other ways to expose the political, economic, moral, and intellectual
failures of Islam — which in the long run, is the only thing which
will cause, from within, the engendering of lots of local Ataturks,
who may work to constrain or limit Islam, as its sacred texts,
including the authoritative recensions of hadith, are immutable.
Lewis was asked some years ago by the TLS to review Ibn Warraq’s “Why
I Am Not a Muslim.” He dawdled and dithered; by the time he told them
he just could not do it, it was too late, in the opinion of the TLS,
to run any review. Contrast that with how the lefist, even Marxist
French scholar of Islam, Maxine Rodinson, treated the same book. He
was given it to review by Le Monde, which assumed that Rodinson,
known for his tiersmondiste sympathies (which probably explains why
Edward Said gave an enthusiastic blurb to Rodinson’s quite crticial
book on Muhammad — but then Said was known to provide enthusastic
blurbs for hundreds of books he never opened, but just guessed as to
their general direction; his endorsements were spread around like
confetti, and even cheaper). But Rodinson produced a favorable
review, much to the chagrin of the editors at Le Monde — and they,
acting true to Stalinist form, simply refused to print the review
(it can be found in Rodinson’s other publications).
But how could Lewis, after all, praise Ibn Warraq publicly? And he
could not publicly deny that the book had great merit, either. So best
to finesse; delay like Kutuzov; the mere passage of time will solve
the problem; solve it, Time did, and consequently that book, one of the
most important in recent decades, never received a review in the TLS.
It is fascinating to compare the behavior of Lewis with two other
scholars of roughly the same age and status. S. D. Goitein wrote his
celebrated “A Mediterranean Society” based on his detailed study
of the papers found in the Cairo Geniza — a record of the Jewish
community in Cairo, and not only in Cairo, that extended over many
centuries. Goitein, who earlier had had a kind of sympathetic, almost
sentimental interest in promoting the idea of the natural sympathies
and similarities of Muslims and Jews, was severely chastened by his
last decades of scholarship. If there was one thing, he wrote, about
which he had to revise his opinion, it was about the severity of the
jizyah. He now realized what a terrible burden it was, especially on
the poor non-Muslims. Just before he died, Goitein was preparing a
favorable review of Bat Ye’or.
Even at their advanced ages, both Rodinson and Goitein were willing
to break, in part, with their own pasts, to declare that new evidence,
and final summings-up, had led them to conclusions that were not nearly
as favorable to Islam as they might once have hoped. Goitein’s study
of the Cairo Geniza led him to rethink the problem of the dhimmi,
to reconsider his old pieties and sentimentalities. Rodinson, who
had been (of course) a great defender of the Arabs against French
colonialism, a die-hard tiersmondiste, a Marxist, found that Ibn
Warraq’s relentless assault on Islam, above all for its intellectual
constraints and failures, deserved the highest praise — and he
was willing to disappoint his editors at Le Monde in insisting that
they either publish his enthusiastic review, or squash it altogether
(of course, they squashed it).
Lewis himself once wrote an essay that identified the philo-Islamic
strain in Jewish Orientalists who found what seemed to be the more
welcoming world of Islam, compared to the brutalities inflicted on Jews
by Western Christendom. *He was good at diagnosis, but not as good at
self-diagnosis. He has never quite described, for his many admirers
and his wide audience, the full panoply of disabilities placed on
non-Muslims under Islam, usually being content with a sentence or
two about the “jizya” and “other disabilities.”_ _*
*Lewis has in the past been unwilling to endorse the scholarship of
Bat Ye’or, describing it as “too polemical.” Really? If the scrupulous
scholarship of “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam”
is too polemical (is that a word which one applies when scholarship
is sometimes informed with passion?), what of all the scholarship on
which that book rests? What of Arakel of Tabriz? Or Armand Abel? Or
Charles Dufourcq? Or Levi-Provencal? Or what about the scholarship
that Bat Ye’or did not use, that of Mary Boyce on the Muslim treatment
of Zoroastrians, or K. S. Lal on the Muslim treatment of Hindus?_ _*
*Bat Ye’or managed both to create a work of scholarship and analysis,
much of which was original to her, as well as a synthesis of a
large amount of scholarly literature — by French, German, Armenian,
Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, and other scholars — scholarship which
does not paint quite the picture of the Ottomans as that which Lewis
has favored. Not that he has ever been an open apologist for Islam,
but he has failed to convey, in book after book, the real nature and
horror of dhimmitude. To describe, for example, the forced levy
of Christian children by the Turks, as a “recruitment” (which to
the modern mind evokes mental images of college or army recruiters
dangling inducements), which was often envied by the Muslim parents,
is to ignore the scholarship, by scholars from parts of Europe once
under Ottoman rule, detailing the fear and horror of such events as
the devshirme levy. The subject of dhimmitude has not been part of
Lewis’ main bailiwick. It is one thing not to treat of a subject,
quite another to mislead as to its real significance; quite another
still to simply shut out of serious consideration a lonely scholar,
outside the regular academic system, who has produced the body of
work that Bat Ye’or has produced, and continues to produce.*
One hesitates to criticize Lewis for this because of the disgraceful
treatment of him by the members of MESA (the MIddle Eastern Studies
Association). Their relation to Lewis reminds me of a story that
the late Tibor Szamuely once wrote in The Spectator. He described a
functionary, the compleat chinovnik, of the Soviet Writers’ Union,
giving a speech in Tula, famed for its samovars, in the southwest
of Moscow. “In bad old Czarist days,” he intoned, “we had only one
writer from Tula Province.” And then he noted proudly: “But now,
but now we have 3,247 members of the Union of Soviet Writers from
Tula Province alone.” (Wild cheering, laughter, applause).
Szamuely drily added: “Yes. He was right. But he forgot to add that
the one writer from “bad old Czarist days” was named Lev Tolstoy”
and no one would ever remember any of the 3,247 current members of
the Writers’ Union from Tula. Well, something like that comes to mind
when one thinks of Lewis, and his scholarship, compared to the heaps of
Rashid Khalidis and Hamid Dabashis and Joel Beinins, some of whom are
former propagandists for the PLO, others of whom spend their academic
leisure beavering about in the busy “construction of the Palestinian
identity” — which if it really existed, as more than a transparently
useful notion, would not require so much endless “construction.” In
relation to the MESA members who continue to deny him the recognition
he deserves, reminds us of Tolstoy, in Szamuely’s anecdote, in relation
to his numerous (3,247, to be exact) epigones. *But that does not
absolve Lewis of his failures, his elisions, his distortions, his
underappreciations, his allowing vanity to cloud his keen sight (how
could he continue to deny the Armenian genocide? out of what misplaced
loyalties to Ottomanists and Osmanlis, and to decades of friendship
with many Turks, to what perverse parsing of the word “genocide,”
could he have found himself denying what masses of evidence, and
eyewitness testimony, support? Which was more important — the
continued friendship of Turks, or the scholarly approval of Vankh
Dadrian and others who have studied the Armenian genocide?*
If one is to believe the Wall Street Journal and other publications,
Lewis has had an important influence on American policy in
Iraq. By that, one means not the original invasion itself, but the
Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project, which was to bring “democracy”
to Iraq, and then that “democracy,” in turn, would serve as a model for
other Arab states, and lead to all manner of good things, including
the diminishment of the role of Islam. But Lewis, like those in
the Pentagon, was making judgments on the basis of friendship with
highly misrepresentative men, Iraqis who were well-educated in the
West, who had spent decades in the West (Chalabi has been in the
West for 45 years), and who not only had become Western, rational
men, but had themselves forgotten just how irrational Iraqi society
is, with its ever-present substratum of Islam, the hostility that
Islam engenders toward all non-Muslims (which means, of course,
that any gratitude toward Infidel Americans for rescuing them from
the regime of Saddam Hussein will be either feigned, or fleeting, or
both). *Lewis likes to think of himself as unswervingly unpolemical,
the historian au-dessus de la melee — but he did not hesitate to
co-sign a political advertisement (written with James Woolsey) on
behalf of Prince Hassan of Jordan, to become the new king of Iraq —
an advertisement that required him to praise the ahistoric fantasies
of Amartya Sen about the historically “democratic” strain in Islam,
which if we are talking about modern “democracy” and its connection to
human rights, completely misstates the case). Lewis allowed himself
to forget, because he wanted not to remember, the essential tenets
of Islam, the manichaean split between Believer and Infidel, the
inability of the Believer to accept any authority other than the
sharia (and certainly not an authority stemmming from the votes of
mere mortals), the impossibility of their being a real defense of
human rights (beginning with full freedom of conscience, which is
impossible in any Islamic regime)_. _*
Lewis lived,in Egypt during World War II, when Egypt was essentially
ruled by the British under extraordinary, wartime conditions
(it was the British who jailed Answar Sadat for his pro-Nazi
activities). Otherwise, Lewis has visited the Middle East as a
dignitary, and in Turkey a celebrity. He is feted, treated with famous
courtesy. In Amman Prince Hassan himself is a host and patron. In
Princeton, dissenters now eager for support within the Administration
make sure, as Saad Eddin Ibrahim did, to visit Lewis in Princeton
(Lewis was instrumental in putting pressure on the Egyptian government,
through threats to withhold $30 million, to change its treatment of
Ibrahim in the courts). All of this attention, all of this lionizing,
has had an affect. Lewis has retailed on more than one occasion his
bon mots to gathered Arab admirers in Amman; his natural wariness
seems strangely absent in his retelling of a story where his sally
met with appreciative laughter. Few of us would respond otherwise;
everyone likes to have a receptive audience.
*Lewis did not grow up in the Arab and Muslim world, as did the dry
and brilliant Elie Kedourie; nor did he live, among the Arabs in situ,
as did J. B. Kelly. (It is quite another thing to live among Arab
colleagues in the West). He does not recognize quite as easily, and
thus dismiss quite as completely, the nonsense, lies,and blague that
are the stock-in-trade in the Arab countries as Kelly, for example,
is wont to do*.
What is passing strange is that Lewis’ first and greatest interest
was modern Turkey. He admired the Kemalist reforms. He understood
how difficult it was to undertake them. He knew that save for that
reforms, the class of secularist Turks — the very class from which
his own colleagues and friends came — would never have attained the
critical mass it did. Yet, when confronted with Iraq, he did not draw
any lessons from Kemalism. He did not stop to think that Kemalism was
a result purely from within, a result derived from an enlightened
despot, convinced that Islam explained the failures, political,
economic, social, and intellectual, of the Muslim peoples, including
the Turks — and it was Islam that would, in its practice, have to be
constrained by government fiat. That was what Kemalism was all about.
Now, confronted with Iraq, Lewis ignores the lessons of Kemalism. Yet
he must know that had the British tried, for example, with their
soldiers still walking the streets of Istanbul, to impose the kind of
de-islamizing reforms that Mustafa Kemal imposed, it would never have
worked, now seems to be promoting the idea that “democracy” can come to
that most unlikely country, Iraq, where tribalism and not the idea of
the individual, still rules, where ethnic (Kurd and Arab) and sectarian
(Sunni and Shi’a) rivalries and hatreds, have a long and deep history,
and where the underlying ideology of Islam is opposed, in every fiber,
to the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights —
including the right to freedom of conscience (apostasy), the right
of equal treatment under the law for believers in all religions
(directly contradicted by the sharia), the right to equal treatment
of men and women (also contradicted by the sharia), and so on.
Why did Lewis not employ the lessons of Kemalist Turkey, the only
successful or quasi-successful, democracy in the Muslim world,
and apply them to Iraq? Surely the goal is not to bring “democracy”
which would mean a Shi’a takeover. The goal for Infidels should be
to bring about the kind of end-of-our-tether conditions that will
allow a sufficient number of people within the Muslim world to see
that Islam itself has failed, politically, economically, morally,
and intellectually, and that the Kemalist approach — not to try,
hopelessly, to “reform” Islam but rather to grimly and relentlessly
create the conditions that constrain the practice of Islam, so that a
secularist class may be nurtured. And in turn, that class will have
a stake in continuing to adhere to the local version of Kemalism,
to continue to suppress any signs of backsliding, so that Islam could
continue to be tamed. As Lewis must know from his own encounter a few
days ago with the Turkish Prime Minster, Mr. Erdogan, Kemalism is now
under assault, perhaps a successful assault. The assumption that the
gains were permanent, that Turkey would remain unaffected by Islam’s
natural distempers (not, as Lewis would have it,merely reactions to
the disappointments of the modern world), has turned out to be shaky.
Lewis has noted, in public lectures, that more has been achieved to
bring “progress” to the Muslim world by those who would be properly
described as enlightened despots, such as King Muhammad V of Morocco,
Bourguiba in Tunisia, Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, and especially, and
most successfully, by Ataturk in Turkey. Belief in the “people” (i.e.
in”democracy”) in the Muslim world is likely to lead to retrograde
legislation, and a situation that makes things worse, not better,
for Infidels.
So why did he apparently promote the idea of Iraq as a likely candidate
for something called “democracy’? Just how was that to take place, and
what was the final outcome likely to be in Iraq’s power structure? And
since there is nothing self-evident about the idea that “democracy” in
Iraq will necessarily be worth the vast allocation of men, materiel,
money, and attention that is now being spent, monomaniacally, on
this project, just how does it relate to encouraging, from within
Islam, lots of local and little Ataturks to recognize the failures
of Islam, and in their own way, for the sake of their own peoples,
to cunningly fashion ways to constrain its practice and dampen its
appeal? *What, one wonders, does Lewis think of the many Muslim or
ex-Muslim scholars who have written about the total contradiction
between the principles of sharia and the principles enshrined inthe
Universal Declaration of Human Rights — such scholars, for example,
as Rexa Afshari, or Ali Sina, or Ibn Warraq, or Azam Kamguian. Does
he give weight to their views, or regard them all as malcontents and,
as he has sometimes employed the Muslim word, “renegades”?*
Particularly when it comes to the Middle East, where Muslims do not
brook the slightest criticism of Islam, its greatness, the greatness
of its civilisation, and so on, it is hard for scholars who perceive
things otherwise to speak their minds fully. There is often a gap
between what is said publicly, and what is admitted privately. And a
good many people like to think that if they spent many decades studying
a subject, it must have inherent worth, its civilisation must have been
a glorious thing indeed. Those mental pictures pass by in vivid array,
those mosques in Samarkand and Tashkent and Bokhara, the Dome of the
Rock gleaming in Jerusalem, those turbaned Turks and Iznik tulips, all
the local color of that “high Islamic civilization” that Orientalists
today still feel that they must formulaically overpraise (and in so
doing, either tacitly accept the long-discarded notions of a European
“Dark Ages,” or belittle the vaster achievements of other non-Western
civilizatons — those of the Mayans, or the Hindus, or the Chinese).
Lewis has outlived almost all of his colleagues. The kind of training
he received goes far beyond what the Beinins and the Khalidis can
even conceive of, and much further still beyond what they could ever
attain. Because he towers over those who foolishly attack him, he
has been mistaken for a Giant Sequoia. Had those colleagues remained
in the field, he would now be seen as still something impressive —
a sturdy English oak, Quercus robur, say — but not quite as tall,
or as impressive, as that Giant Sequoia.
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