By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 May 2018

Bernard Lewis, the great historian of the Middle East, died yesterday, aged 101.

Lewis was born in Britain on 31 May 1916 and became fascinated with the Middle East in his teens after studying Hebrew for his bat mitzvah. Having mastered that language, Lewis moved on to the other languages of the region—Arabic, Turkish, and Persian—and in time acquired more than a dozen languages. Lewis’ early studies focused on Ismailism, including the Nizari branch known in the West as “the Assassins”, and in this period his work was influenced by Marxism, as he was later to attest.

Lewis’ academic career was interrupted by a stint in British intelligence during the Second World War, about which he would say little, even seventy years later.

Returning to his studies in the post-war era, Lewis faced a complication. The restoration of Israel had led to the expulsion of Jews from the Arab States and restrictions on Jews even visiting these countries had been imposed. Lewis was a Jew and would not pretend otherwise, impeding his access to the Arab world. Turning to Turkey, Lewis was present for the culmination of the Kemalist Revolution in 1950—the first peaceful transfer of power after a free and fair election in a Muslim country—and was the first Westerner granted access when the Ottoman Archives were opened. His work in those archives resulted in, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), a seminal work used as the foundation of many courses on Turkish history to this day.

Lewis moved to the United States in 1974 to take up a post at Princeton University, where he would remain. Lewis became a U.S. citizen in 1982, but as Reuel Marc Gerecht has written, Lewis remained profoundly British: “unrelentingly ironic and nuanced, preferring to come at the most consequential of matters obliquely …[,] urbane and witty, punctuating the most serious of discussions with subtle, usually mischievous, often mordant humor”. It was Lewis, for instance, who suggested that Operation DESERT STORM—which evicted Saddam Husayn from Kuwait and then spared him—should have been renamed KUWAITUS INTERRUPTUS.

Lewis became best-known—and most “controversial”—in the wake of 9/11 because of his wildly exaggerated role in advising the Bush administration. It is quite difficult to explain at this distance how deranged many on the Left—which for sociological reasons, means a lot of journalists—became in the early and mid-2000s. Barely disguised antisemitic conspiracy theories about “cabals” of “neocons” running America gained mainstream currency, and a large part of the venom directed at Lewis was of that kind.

Lewis certainly did get called in for advice by the administration, as did Lewis’ friend Fouad Ajami, whom we lost four years ago, but Lewis had in effect become the adviser to the whole West because when 9/11 hit Lewis had already packed off a book to the publishers, a slender volume entitled, What Went Wrong?, which appeared in January 2002 and became a sensational best-seller: its prescience about the fury boiling in the Islamic world, and his diagnosis of what had brought us to this pass, influenced the intellectual climate of the post-9/11 public debate in a way few scholars have ever done. Lewis followed-up with The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, released a week after the invasion of Iraq began, and it, too, was a runaway best-seller.

As Lewis documents in his memoir, Notes on a Century (2012), this brought him a level of “celebrity” he had not had before—and at the oddest time in his life, well into his 80s—but what is notable is how little Lewis changed. There can be few scholars or even public intellectuals who have been on first-name terms with such an extensive roster of powerful people, from rulers and Popes on down, and who mentioned it less. The modern obsession with advertising proximity to power was never a part of Lewis’ personality, perhaps because he knew better than most how superficial the whole business of “access” is: you can give the advice, but people seldom listen. Lewis’ passion was for the archives and publicly communicating what he had found; he was an educator through and through.

The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 “affected my life and more particularly my role in academic and public affairs”, Lewis notes. The trendlines in academia building throughout the 1960s had culminated in Said, an English professor at Columbia University, launching a wholesale attack on the scholarly discipline Lewis had devoted his life to. The International Congress of Orientalists had formally abandoned the word “Orientalism” to describe their discipline in 1973, and Said scavenged the word to give it a new, negative spin—dismissing the history of Western scholarship about the Middle East as a record of racism and larceny. Lewis responded in print to Said’s book, and it was intellectually devastating: Said’s manipulations of, and flat ignorance about, the historical record were laid bare. But Said’s project was not an intellectual one; it was political. And on that front it succeeded.

Said proposed a simple ideological paradigm drawn from American race relations, with white oppressors (imperialists, Zionists) and black victims (Arabs, Muslims). Arranging historiography to buttress this narrative, and automatically discounting any findings that complicated the story or ran contrary to the modern political aims it was supposed to further, was much easier and thus more popular than trying to understand the past on its own terms. One after another, history and Middle East Departments were captured by this doctrine.

Said’s main purpose was never in doubt: he was a member of one of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) bodies before Orientalism was published. Lewis’ great sin for the Saidians was to have stood athwart their irredentist ideology by telling the history of the Holy Land as it was, with all the complexities and ambivalences, and to have written about the PLO as it was, dispending with the fashionable vision of the group as a liberation movement and documenting its nature as a terrorist organisation closely tied to the Soviet Union whose “grievance” was Israel’s existence, not its size or the position of its borders. This clash between political ideology and scholarship—and the eclipse of the latter by the former—is much more familiar to us now, but it was quite novel at the time.

Lewis was unfashionable in another way: he digested the detail and supplied it in evidence, but he wrote in a form that was understandable and useful—earning him the undying enmity of many academics. Lewis covered great spans of history, elucidating generalisations (which is different from a stereotype), and acknowledged that cultures and civilisations are different and distinctive, with their own patterns of thought and practice.

It was this ability to sift hundreds of years and pick out the signal in the noise that made Lewis so acutely aware of the dual trends building in the Middle East in the last quarter of the twentieth century. On the one hand, there was a jihadist current that drew on the faith and gave direction to the rage in Islamdom that had been simmering since the eighteenth century when Muslims were shocked into an awareness of how far behind the West—Christendom, as Lewis would rightly say—they had fallen. In the modern era, this awareness was reinforced by radio and television that brought the decline visually into Muslim homes, night after night, showing Middle Eastern States being overtaken not only by Europe and North America but small countries like South Korea and Taiwan that had been backwaters compared with the Middle East only a short time ago. On the other hand, there was a growing sense that this rich Western world was weak, enfeebled and effeminised by luxury. It was a lethal combination.

In 1976, Lewis had written, “The Return of Islam”, detecting earlier than most that the imported “secular” ideologies were spent in the region. It prepared Lewis for the Iranian Revolution in 1978-79, when he tried—in vain, against a tide of hysterical invective from academics and journalists who had declared the Shah to be the devil incarnate—to point out what Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini actually believed. A decade on, in 1990, Lewis’ essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, which coined the term “clash of civilisations” later popularised by Samuel Huntington, warned against the prevailing “end of history” sentiment that something deep and malignant was brewing in Islamdom and was directed our way. It was Lewis who first found and translated Usama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa against the West. (Outside the Middle East, Lewis’ ability to read historical currents was also on display when he warned in 2008 that Russia would be back in the Middle East, something then-seemingly-doubtful and now a fact of life.)

Bin Ladin throughout the 1990s would refer to the same litany—the Americans fleeing Vietnam and Beirut after the Marine barracks attack and then Somalia. “Hit them and they will run”, Bin Laden had said. The attacks had mounted: the World Trade Centre (1993), the car bombing in Saudi Arabia (1995), Khobar Towers (1996), the East African Embassy bombings (1998), and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole (2000). “All those brought only angry but empty words and, at most, a few misdirected missiles”, Lewis wrote.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Lewis’ critics would regularly accuse him of “Islamophobia” and contempt for Arabs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lewis credited Muslims with being capable of making their own history. Lewis, for example, had little patience for efforts to explain what had gone wrong in Islamdom by reference to “Western imperialism”. From the time of the Arab Empire’s formation in the 630s and 640s, through the takeover of the Caliphate by the Turks, right up until the Islamic armies fell against the walls of Vienna in 1683, it was Christendom that was under threat. Southern Italy was recovered and eventually Iberia, after 800 years of grinding struggle, but the Christian lands of Palestine, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Anatolia were lost forever to Islam. The Crusades were a “limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad”: they occurred four centuries after the Arab conquests and could not even hold Jerusalem for a full century. The idea that the Crusades—which only acquired the status they presently have in the region due to an absorption of nineteenth-century European historiography—or the brief period of Mandatory rule between the wars is at the root of what ails a civilisation as old and sophisticated as Islamdom is absurd. The turning of the imperial tide in the last three centuries, after a millennium and more of Islamic advance, is a consequence of Islamdom’s decline, not its cause.

Lewis palpably admired what Islam had achieved, as a system able to give meaning to the lives of millions, enabling vastly diverse populations to live together united by the faith, channelling creative energies into what we would now call Science, in art, commerce, governance, and so much else. He went to great lengths in The Jews of Islam (1984) to record Islamdom’s better record, as compared to Christendom for a long time, in terms of tolerance towards Jews. Far from seeing despotism as inherent to Islam, Lewis argued forcefully that it was modernisation—the attempt to copy from the West—that had swept away the traditional consultative models of government and ushered in all-powerful states. Lewis was fond of quoting a letter from the French ambassador in Constantinople shortly before the French Revolution—it can be found in A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History (2000)—replying to complaints from Paris about his slow progress by explaining: “Here things are not as in France, where the King is sole master. [The Sultan] has to persuade … the holders of high offices, and [even] those who no longer hold them.” The regimes like Saddam’s were European in origin, Lewis contended, copied from the one-party state Lenin pioneered and Hitler duplicated.

Since 2001, the challenges of integrating ever-larger Muslim minorities in the West have become part of the conversation and an aspect that has gained attention—some reasonable, some more feverish—is the shari’a (Islamic law). Lewis often pointed out that terrorism (attacking non-combatants) was forbidden by the classical shari’a, as was suicide, a mortal sin to be punished by eternal repetition of the act of suicide in hell. Here again the problem was modernity, with religious license given to suicide bombing by clerical entrepreneurs like Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Lewis saw the way out of the malaise as a revival of Islamic traditions—not exactly the views of an “Islamophobe”.

Relatedly, Lewis was always very delicate in dealing with the origins of Islam. In The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2, 000 Years (1995), for example, Lewis is upfront that the only textual account of Islam’s origins comes from “Muslim scriptures, traditions, and historical memories”, and that this presents a “problem to the historian”, but he then essentially side-steps the issue by saying that in this Islam “resembles” Judaism and Christianity, and he recounts the Muslim story, caveated with phrases like “according to tradition”—and does not touch the issue of how the Qur’an came into being at all. It is a glaring contradiction to the thesis that Lewis was hostile to Islam or Muslims that he expended so little energy evaluating the origin myths of the faith—indeed, one might rank it as a criticism that he was so “soft” on Muslim sensibilities in this area. It is not, after all, true to say that the problems in assessing Islam’s early history are comparable to the other two monotheisms: they are far more difficult. To make the point in a different way: Lewis wrote some of his best-known works after the 1970s revolution in Islamic Studies—when the “revisionists” like John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, and Gerald Hawting took apart the Tradition using methods of critical scholarship—and Lewis’ references to this literature are fleeting.

What Lewis’ critics, especially those in the Saidian mould, did not like—other than his refusal to blame “Western imperialism” for all of Islamdom’s ills—was that Lewis accompanied writings about Islam’s splendour with recognition of its darker sides. After the September 11 attacks, when commentary about what Islam “really” meant was running rampant, Lewis pointed out that there were two opposing forms of nonsense in circulation:

On the one hand we have the image of Muslims as barbarians, the traditional image of a Saracen riding out of the desert on horseback with a sword in one hand and a Koran in the other offering their victims a choice between the two. On the other hand, we have Islam as a religion of love and peace—like the Quakers, but without their aggressiveness. … [T]he truth is in its usual place somewhere between the two.

In The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), perhaps Lewis’ best book, he shows the heights of Islamic achievement—but also why it was that Islamdom, having dominated the clash of civilisations for so long, lost ground. Lewis’ explanation, relying on the distinctions between the two worlds, only angered the Saidians further. To say that Islamdom proved capable of importing the products of Christendom, but not the intellectual methods that led to these innovations, was considered on its own to convict Lewis of something sinister; that it is true never has been a defence with such critics.

Likewise, Lewis pointing out that Christendom’s learning for learning’s sake about other civilisations was one of its distinctive features could not be tolerated by the Saidians. Said’s whole premise was that Christendom’s learning about Islamic civilisation was on a “knowledge is power” basis, the better to pursue its malign intentions against Islamdom. Lewis showed that this did not meet the simplest test of the timeline: Oriental scholarship began in the medieval period when Christendom was threatened, rather than during the phase of the Christian counter-offensive. Moreover, Orientalism focused on Arabic, not Turkish—the language of Islamic government. It was not, therefore, of practical utility for Christians states. And, of course, Orientalism flourished in places like Germany that never acquired an Empire in Muslim lands. This contrasted sharply with the Islamic Empires, which never showed the slightest interest in the barbarians beyond their borders—or within them, come to that. The Balkans was occupied for centuries and the Ottoman governors never learned the languages; the Reformation passed without any notice by the Sublime Porte, though Europe’s divisions might have been geopolitically useful; and so on. What Lewis underlined was that it was the Muslims who were being normal, and Said thus stood in a long tradition that, quite understandably, found Christendom’s anomalous curiosity suspect.

When it comes to “imperialism”, a word Lewis would often wryly note is never applied to the period of Islamic advance, Lewis wrote:

Why then did the peoples of Europe embark on this vast expansion and, by conquest, conversion, and colonization, attempt to create a Eurocentric world? … The question is unanswerable because it is wrongly posed. In setting out to conquer, subjugate, and despoil other peoples, the Europeans were merely … conforming to the common practice of mankind. … The interesting questions are not why they tried, but why they succeeded—and then why, having succeeded, they repented of their success as of a sin. The success was unique in modern times; the repentance, in all of recorded history. The attempt was due to their common humanity; their success to some special qualities inherent in the civilization of Europe and its daughters and deficient or lacking in others.

This is decidedly not how modern academia thinks about these things, but Lewis was quite content to be out of step with the post-modernists and post-colonialists.

Few issues got Lewis into more trouble—with progressives and “realists”—than his consistent argument that the treatment of women was the single biggest factor holding Muslim societies back. Lewis would often quote the nineteenth-century Ottoman journalist Namik Kemal, who said that Islamic countries’ social-political ostracism of women had created a situation where states were like a human body that had been paralysed on one side. For the progressives, this was at best cultural supremacism and probably racism; for the “realists”, it suggested remedies that sounded too much like social work.

What this gets at, though, is what Lewis’ critics missed, with their accusations he was the architect of a racist program to dominate and exploit the Arab world. Lewis was conservative in political disposition, but his guiding ethical frameworks were liberal: a commitment to humanism, secularism, and democracy. One of many reasons Lewis saw the abuse of history to support factional and fashionable causes as evil was that these causes often aligned with the despotic regimes in place—the Saidian vision, after all, lifts basically all responsibility for present circumstances off of Arab governments, and charges it to the American and Israeli accounts. We saw this in Soviet times, when Moscow’s propaganda that it sought “peace” and the West was the aggressor had wide purchase in the Western academy; still does. Lewis saw this as a betrayal of the scholarly—and the human—duty to speak for those who are presently unable to, not least because these regimes will not last forever, and once people are free they will look with contempt on those who provided the excuses for their oppressors.

As a democrat, Lewis was optimistic about the so-called “Arab Spring”, though his sense of history—and his admiration for Atatürk’s model—made him cautious about rushing to elections that Islamists would probably win. Lewis repeatedly tried to impress upon Westerners that the Anglosphere model of parliamentary democracy that has become something of a norm for contingent reasons is not “the natural human condition, [where] any deviation from it is a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured.” The principles of limited, representative, law-bound government might be common, but the forms would be various, Lewis said, and allowing such systems to emerge based on the customs and traditions of each place was much more likely to make such governments durable.

Lewis’ commitment to truth and free inquiry also made him worried about developments within the West, where demographics and what we would once have called “political correctness” have combined to create an orthodoxy, especially on campus, that is more stifling to intellectual life than anything seen since the Early Modern period. A particular part of this Lewis highlighted was that Islam has obtained an immunity from criticism—or even comment—that Christianity has long since lost and Judaism never had. This is a dangerous situation for many reasons, among them that if the mainstream of liberal society approaches Islam in a spirit of pre-emptive cringe, as Lewis phrased it, it creates space for extremists to offer themselves as the solution to a problem everyone can see.

Lewis was literally the last of the Orientalists—all those who worked under that banner before the International Congress abandoned the label passed from the scene some time ago. He was also the greatest. As Gerecht put it, “[Lewis’] range of writings … is simply unparalleled by any other scholar, even from the golden age of Islamic studies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the field’s terrifyingly erudite, multilingual European founding fathers … bestrode the earth.” The loss of such a figure is always terribly sad, especially when it is twinned with the realisation that we will not see his likes again. The sense is that this is one more step in the decline. Still, however embattled they are, there is still a cadre of people around committed to the Lewis tradition, and it is to be hoped that Lewis’ legacy will live on in the curious and the open-minded who find their way to the vast corpus he leaves behind and his example of how scholars should conduct themselves in public affairs.

It might seem strange to give the Muslim Brotherhood the last word, but such are the ironies of Bernard Lewis’ extraordinary life. When the Brotherhood translated one of Lewis’ books, it included an introductory note that read: “I don’t know who this person is but one thing is clear. He is … either a candid friend or an honest enemy, and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.”