Amazing Academic Life of Bernard Lewis

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Bernard Lewis, the eminent scholar of Middle East politics and religion, died on May 19. The outlines of his long career are well known. Born to Jewish parents in London in 1916, Lewis received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1939.

After serving in the British army during the Second World War, Lewis became a professor of history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London, from 1949 to 1974. 

Subsequently, he was appointed professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He retired from Princeton in 1986.

The author of some 30 books and 200 articles, his works have been translated into more than 25 languages. Most deal with Islamic history, chiefly Arab and Turkish, although he also translated poetry from Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian into English. He published his own memoirs, Notes on a Century, in 2012.

Most famous – and controversial – were the books What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002), and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003). 

In “The Return of Islam,” an article Lewis published in Commentary magazine in January 1976, he predicted that Islam’s conflict with Christendom and the West would once again take centre-stage in global politics, because each “recognized the other as its principal, indeed its only rival.”

Lewis argued the roots of the battle lay in the similarities at the core of the two faiths. “You had two religions with this shared ideology living side by side,” he told National Public Radio in 2012. “Conflict between them was inevitable.”

Lewis was also notable for his public debates with the prominent Palestinian academic Edward Said, a humanities professor at Columbia University. Decades of discord between Lewis and Said led to a famous debate between them in the New York Review of Books in 1982. 

Said contended that Lewis had an “extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong” and Lewis responded by calling Said’s comments “an unsavory mixture of sneer and smear, bluster and innuendo, and guilt by association.”

In a 1990 article for the Atlantic, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” he warned 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” – a term that three years later was popularized by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 had already helped transform Lewis into a well-known academic, because it made Washington pay attention to political Islam. Two decades later, in “License to Kill,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1998, he drew attention to Osama bin Laden’s call for jihad against America--three years before 9/11. After September 11, 2001, Lewis observed, “Osama bin Laden made me famous.”

Lewis harbored few illusions about the “Arab Spring” of 2011. “Many of our so-called friends in the region are inefficient kleptocracies. But they’re better than the Islamic radicals,” he told Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at the National Review.

Not that Lewis was infallible: For instance, in “The Revolt of Islam,” an article published in the New Yorker in November 2001, he seemed to suggest that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may have been implicated in the al-Qaeda 9/11 operation and that he had what Lewis called “unconventional” weapons. This, we now know, was untrue. 

Lewis also wrote that in both Iraq and Iran, “there are democratic oppositions capable of taking over and forming governments.” In an essay in the Wall Street Journal in 2002, he predicted that Iraqis would “rejoice” over an American invasion. That, too, did not happen.

Lewis summed up his whole career this way: “For some, I’m the towering genius,” he told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2012. “For others, I’m the devil incarnate.”