BERNARD LEWIS

Faith and Power

Religion and Politics in the Middle East

2010

IN THE LATTER PART of his life, Bernard Lewis may well have been the most influential intellectual in the world. He was on terms with Presidents and Popes, and his books, sold in huge numbers, told the public what to think about Islam. It was a historic fluke that the man and the moment matched so well.

Having lost the struggle for supremacy with the West, Islam had nevertheless been surviving and even strengthening underground. The Cold War in the Middle East was effectively the take-over of the whole region by non-Muslim powers, and as soon as it was over, Islam was free to burst into the open. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran and Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States in September 2001 are classic expressions of Muslim empire-building. The West, Christendom, has been here before, its rulers obliged to turn back invasions that might have left the continent of Europe in Muslim possession. Now, in what seems as sudden as a flash of lightning, the general public has to confront the world of Sunni and Shia, jihad and sharia, all terms unfamiliar hitherto and whose significance is therefore primarily in the hands of experts, most of whom are academics. An interview with a Dutch journalist left Bernard the memory of an exchange that was a shocking illustration of ignorance. Rotterdam will soon be a Muslim-majority city, said Bernard. “So what?” said the Dutchman. So you’ll have sharia, Bernard said, and the Dutchman repeated, “So what?”

To some extent, I suppose, my view of Bernard has been shaped by his generosity to me. In 1972, I published The Face of Defeat, a book about the Palestinians after the Six Day War. Bernard, then a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, wrote to me out of the blue to say that it had been his “unhappy fate, or rather duty, to read many books on the Arab-Israeli conflict” but he couldn’t recall “any that conveyed the sights and sounds and feelings and realities of the situation with such power, understanding and compassion.” And much more in this vein. Those who take up the issue of Palestine and make a cause of it are urging young men to risk their lives in acts of violence that they themselves steer well clear of, and Bernard even gave the page reference where I point out this moral humbug.

Before the war, Bernard studied with Sir Hamilton Gibb, Professor of Arabic at Oxford and an advocate of the nationalism that in fact has brought harm rather than relief to the Arabs. Another of his eminent teachers was Louis Massignon, a leading scholar of Islam at the Sorbonne. Much of Bernard’s work has been technical, to do with definition, language and linguistics, ethnicity and identity, issues of gender and race and slavery specific to Islam. I once received an original lecture when I asked him to explain how it came about that an Arab nominative often bears the Greek suffix of–id, as in Fatimid or Abbasid. As well as Arabic, Turkish, Farsi and Hebrew, he knew the major European languages. I once heard him discuss whether or not to deliver a lecture at Siena University in Italian. He traveled extensively in the Middle East and even had a tale to tell about how he had surreptitiously set foot in Saudi Arabia. In the Intelligence Service during the war, he had given propaganda broadcasts to the Arabs. At one point he was responsible for a hundred or so who spoke only Greek, most of them Cypriot waiters. If the officer in the field shows himself to be a coward or a traitor, one of them asked, is it all right to shoot him or is permission required?

A Zionist, every January Bernard liked to hold a seminar in Tel Aviv University. He had strong opinions and saw no reason to keep them to himself. He was the first to be able to say with authority that the old absolutism of the Islamic order is bankrupt and constitutional societies are not replacing it. The enforced imposition of European ideas and values has not put Muslims and non-Muslims on an equal footing but creates conditions for a clash of civilizations. Not a pacifist, he more than once in my hearing summarized current confusion in the Middle East with a good example of his slightly mischievous humor: “We should have dealt with Iraq and Iran in alphabetical order.” What was happening in the Gulf, he was highly pleased to say, was Kuweitus interruptus.

In September 2004, I was invited to a think tank in Washington, as my diary records: “Breakfast with Bernard Lewis in his hotel, the Jefferson. He’s aged but his head is very dignified, even noble. In 1940, he says, he and everyone he knew, was certain we would win the war. Today he feels anxiety, despair. People have not realised our predicament. The choice he foresees is between a Muslim Europe and fascism. Harold Rhode [a Pentagon specialist who habitually refers and defers to “Uncle Bernard”] arrives and brings along Qulat Talabani, son of Jalal Talabani [President of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq 2005–2014], a very young man who puts the secular and Kurdish case with just the right emphasis. He fears that Iraq is heading for a Shia Islamist regime, and the U.S. isn’t doing much to stop it.”

In 2006, Bernard went on one of the cruises that National Review organizes so that readers of the magazine have the opportunity to meet its writers and a celebrity or two thrown in to enliven proceedings. We set off from San Diego past Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas down the west coast of Mexico. My diary again: “We also spent a lot of time with Bernard Lewis. He’s very mellow now in his nineties, and much cared for by Buntzie Churchill – a very cheerful lady, well informed too. He quotes a recent article by Sadiq al-Azm [Marxist philosopher from a leading Syrian family] to the effect that either Islam is Europeanised or else Europe will be Islamised. The latter seems the more likely. He also believes that Ahmadinejad [President of Iran 2005–2013] will succumb to messianic end-of-days theology, and cannot be trusted to act rationally. Everyone seems to agree that in the hour Iran finally gets the nuclear weapon it will use it on Israel.”

Mongols, Ottoman Turks, the British or the French are often held responsible by Arabs and Muslims for the tragic disintegration into violence and war of Islamic civilization, once so great. In the light of his learning, Bernard took the view that the social structure of Islam had not allowed for change, preventing Muslims from finding their place in today’s world, or to put it another way, they had brought their fate upon themselves. Edward Said, a Palestinian American and a Professor of literature at Columbia University, had the intelligence and the authority to analyze how the Arabs have come to their present pass and what to do about it, in short to be the Edmund Burke of Islam. Instead he published Orientalism in 1978, a polemic fantasizing that Western contacts with Muslims were not what they might seem but the continuation of centuries of struggle for supremacy. He took every opportunity to accuse Bernard of bad faith. This slander has encouraged the anti-Western animus of enough academics and journalists in the next generation to ensure that ancient bigotry still makes a virtue out of war and violence. One of the last acts of Said’s career was to have himself photographed throwing a stone at the fence separating Israel from Lebanon. Corruptio optimi pessima – the corruption of the best is the worst of all. Bernard was at first taken by surprise that his scholarship should be so insulted, then shocked and finally angered. For him, there was such a thing as truth, and he took his stand on it.