Bernard Lewis Obituary
David Shasha
Bernard Lewis, Influential Scholar of Islam, Is Dead at 101
By: Douglas Martin
Bernard Lewis, an eminent historian of Islam who traced the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to a declining Islamic civilization, a controversial view that influenced world opinion and helped shape American foreign policy under President George W. Bush, died on Saturday in Voorhees Township, N.J. He was 101.
His longtime partner, Buntzie Churchill, confirmed the death, at a retirement facility.
Few outsiders and no academics had more influence with the Bush administration on Middle Eastern affairs than Mr. Lewis. The president carried a marked-up copy of one of his articles in his briefing papers and met with him before and after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Mr. Lewis gave briefings at the White House, the residence of Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
His essential argument about Islam was that Islamic civilization had been decaying for centuries, leaving extremists like Osama bin Laden in a position to exploit Muslims’ long-festering frustration by sponsoring terrorism on an international scale. After Arab terrorists hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in a coordinated operation sanctioned by bin Laden, Mr. Lewis was immediately sought out by American policymakers.
He provided critical intellectual linkage between the religious fundamentalism of bin Laden, which he said was a response to oppressive Arab regimes, and the secular despotism of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Democracy, he said, was the solution for both. “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us,” Mr. Lewis wrote.
Though he later said he would have preferred that the United States had fomented rebellion in northern Iraq rather than invading the country, he was widely perceived to have beaten the drum for war. In an essay in The Wall Street Journal in 2002, he predicted that Iraqis would “rejoice” over an American invasion, a flawed forecast echoed by Mr. Cheney and others in the White House.
People spoke of a “Lewis doctrine” of imposing democracy on despotic regimes. His book “What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East” (2002) became a handbook for understanding what had happened on Sept. 11. (The book was at the printer when the attacks occurred.) Articles he wrote in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal were widely discussed.
On the war’s eve, Mr. Cheney mentioned Mr. Lewis on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” as someone who shared his belief that “a strong, firm U.S. response to terror and to threats to the United States would go a long way, frankly, to calming things down in that part of the world.”
In 2004, Mr. Lewis said in a PBS interview with Charlie Rose that pursuing Al Qaeda’s forces in Afghanistan was insufficient. “One had to get to the heart of the matter in the Middle East,” he said.
‘Clash of Civilizations’
Mr. Lewis long propounded his diagnosis of a sick Arab society. In a cover article in The Atlantic in 1990, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” he used the phrase “clash of civilizations” to describe what he saw as inevitable friction between the Islamic world and the West. (The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington borrowed the phrase in an influential article of his own in 1993, crediting Mr. Lewis.)
In his article, Mr. Lewis wrote: “Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world.
“But Islam,” he continued, “like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.”
In his view Islamic fundamentalism was at war with both secularism and modernism, as embodied by the West. Fundamentalists, he wrote, had “given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.”
Mr. Cheney once noted that in the 1970s, before the Iranian revolution, Mr. Lewis had “studied the writings of an obscure cleric named Khomeini and saw the seeds of a movement that would deliver theocratic despotism.” Supporters of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
Critics of Mr. Lewis said he treated Western imperialism, American interventions and Israeli displacement of Palestinians as consequences of the region’s political failures and social backwardness rather than as contributors to them. The political scientist Alan Wolfe called Mr. Lewis’s positions on Islam “belligerent.” The Islamic historian Richard Bulliet suggested that Mr. Lewis looked down on modern Arabs.
“He doesn’t respect them,” Mr. Bulliet said in an interview with Washington Monthly. “He considers them to be good and worthy only to the degree they follow a Western path.”
Mr. Lewis’s most prominent oppoinent, the Palestinian American scholar Edward W. Said, called Mr. Lewis a propagandist for Eurocentric views who distorted the truth and hid his politics under the veneer of scholarship. Writing in The Nation, Mr. Said said Mr. Lewis, along with Mr. Huntington, reasoned “as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly.”
Mr. Lewis had an answer for his critics: “If Westerners cannot legitimately study the history of Africa or the Middle East, then only fish can study marine biology.”
Mr. Lewis did not seem to mind antagonizing Arabs. Several times he defended the crusades as necessary to limit the power of Islamic civilization. He called Arab nations “a string of shabby tyrannies.” He said asking the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to give up terrorism was like asking Tiger Woods to give up golf. Discussing the power of Saudi fundamentalists, he drew a hypothetical comparison to the Ku Klux Klan’s controlling Texas oil revenues.
“As a specialist on Islam, I find myself disturbed by the nonsense being talked, by both Muslims and non-Muslims,” he said. “On the one hand, you have people who would have you believe that Islam is a bloodthirsty religion bent on world destruction. On the other hand, you have people telling us that Islam is a religion of love and peace — rather like the Quakers, but less aggressive.”
“The truth,” he concluded, “is in its usual place.”
A Scholar of Languages
Bernard Lewis was born in London on May 31, 1916, as World War I raged. His father, Harry, was a real estate broker; his mother, Jenny, was a homemaker. At 12, as he prepared for his bar mitzvah, he realized that Hebrew was actually a language with grammar, not an “encipherment of prayers and rituals,” he wrote in “From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East” (2004).
By the time he entered the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London (now the School of Oriental and African Studies), he had read widely and deeply in Hebrew and begun a lifelong study of languages, including Aramaic, classical and modern Arabic, Latin, Greek, Persian and Turkish.
History was another passion, and it, too, harked back to his bar mitzvah. One gift he received that day was an outline of Jewish history, about which he knew little. It led him to read about Cordoba, Spain, under the Moors; Baghdad under the Caliphs; and Istanbul under Ottoman rule. At the university, he became a star student of Hamilton Gibb, a great scholar of Islam, and graduated with honors in history in 1936 with special reference to the Middle East.
One day, as he recalled, Mr. Gibb asked him: “You have now been studying the Middle East for four years. Don’t you think it’s time you saw the place?”
Mr. Lewis embarked on a traveling fellowship to Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, and attended classes at Cairo University. His encounters with the people of those lands underpinned his later observations about them.
“There is something in the religious culture of Islam,” he wrote in one instance, “which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations.”
In 1938 he was named an assistant lecturer at the University of London, where he earned his Ph.D. the next year. In 1940 he was drafted into the British armed forces and assigned to the Army tank corps. He was soon transferred to intelligence.
After the war, Mr. Lewis wanted to study in Arab countries, but as a Jew in the late 1940s and early ’50s, he would have been denied a visa after Israel’s independence. Refusing to lie about being a Jew, as others did, he switched his focus to Turkey and Iran during the Ottoman period.
He happened to be in Istanbul in 1950 when the Turkish government opened the Imperial Ottoman Archives; he was the first Western scholar granted access to them. He also witnessed Turkey’s first free election, leading to his acclaimed 1961 book, “The Emergence of Modern Turkey.”
Some academics believe that Mr. Lewis mistakenly applied the lessons of secular, democratic modern Turkey to Arab countries with a far different history. Armenians contended that his attachment to Turkey had led him to deny that the Turkish slaughter of Armenians in 1915, which he acknowledged and condemned, was genocide. He defined genocide as government-sponsored premeditated mass murder.
In the 1990s, a French court fined him one franc for neglecting to cite objective evidence that might have refuted his opinion on the Armenian killings in an article for the newspaper Le Monde.
Mr. Lewis married Ruth Helene Oppenhejm, from Denmark, in 1947, and they divorced in 1974.
Besides Ms. Churchill, he is survived by a son, Michael; a daughter, Melanie Dunn; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandsons.
In 1974, he accepted joint appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and Princeton University, partly to gain more time for research. He also taught at Cornell from 1984 to 1990, among other teaching jobs. He became an American citizen in 1982.
His influence grew in the 1970s, as he advised Senator Henry M. Jackson, Democrat of Washington, and other foreign policy hard-liners who were later identified as neoconservative. Mr. Lewis accepted the neoconservative label for himself. In the mid-1970s, Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel required her cabinet to read his article arguing that Palestinians had no claim to a state.
Mr. Lewis, who wrote or edited more than two dozen books and hundreds of articles, was regarded as perhaps the leading expert on interactions between the Christian and Islamic worlds. He said that Jews had been treated better in Islamic countries than in Christian ones for much of history. He said he often chose to see events from the Muslim side.
“At Vienna, I’m at the Turkish lines, not with the defenders,” he said, referring to the 1683 European victory over the Ottoman attempt to conquer the Hapsburg Empire.
In “From Babel to Dragomans,” Mr. Lewis discussed how an earlier work of his had been translated and published in Hebrew by the Israeli Ministry of Defense and in Arabic by the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group.
“The translator of the Arabic version, in his introductory remarks, observed that the author of this book was one of two things: a candid friend or an honorable enemy, and in either case, one who does not distort or evade the truth,” Mr. Lewis wrote.
“I am content to abide by that judgment.”
From The New York Times, May 21, 2018
A Jewish Voice Left Silent: Trying to Articulate “The Levantine Option”
By: David Shasha
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586.html
The modern state of Israel is composed of Sephardic Jews, Jews from Arab-Islamic lands, and Ashkenazic Jews, Jews who hail from Christian Europe. Occidental Jews have taken on many of the traits of Western culture, while the Oriental Jews, many of whom continued to speak Arabic and partake of a common Middle Eastern culture until the mass dispersions of Jews from Arab countries after 1948, have preserved many of the folkways and traits of Arab civilization. The current demographic composition of Israel maintains a majority of people whose native family origins and history are in the Middle East - be they Jewish or Muslim.
Because of the stigma against all things Arab propounded by Zionism, many Arab Jews have surrendered their native Sephardic perspective in favor of the ruling Eurocentric ideology in Israel and have become among the most militant followers of the Likud and other Right Wing parties in Israel. The movement of Jews out of the Arab world and into the orbit of the Jewish state has greatly disrupted the bearings of Arab Jewry.
It is standard practice to see Jews and Arabs as embattled enemies rather than try to recall a time when the Jews of the Middle East were integrated into the Arab culture and civilization. But there was, contrary to today's assumptions, a time when Jews were culturally integrated into the Middle East.
This culture, what I have called "The Levantine Option," if adopted as a discursive model in the current dialogue, could speak in a sophisticated and humane manner to many of the underlying barriers that frame the culture of brutality permeating the region.
The term "Levantine" describes a polyglot Middle Eastern culture inclusive of the many ethnic groups that reside in the eastern Mediterranean under the rubric of Arab-Islamic civilization. The Levantine civilization is part of a Mediterranean world that in earlier times stretched from Muslim Spain all the way to Iraq and Syria, extending to India and even China.
The most recent chronicler of this forgotten civilization is the great Turkish writer and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who, in his excellent memoir Istanbul laments this eclipse of this venerable culture:
The cosmopolitan Istanbul I knew as a child had disappeared by the time I reached adulthood. In 1853 [the French writer Theophile] Gautier, like many other travelers of the day, had remarked that in the streets of Istanbul you could here Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, and English (and, more than either of the last two languages, Ladino, the medieval Spanish of the Jews who'd come to Istanbul after the Inquisition). Noting that many people in this "tower of Babel" were fluent in several languages, Gautier seems, like so many of his compatriots, to be slightly ashamed to have no language other than his mother tongue.
Sephardic Jews acculturated to the Arabic model as articulated in the first centuries of Islam. Prominent Sephardic rabbis, such as Moses Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra, disdained clericalism while espousing humanism and science. The synthesis that was created by these sages permeated the religious values of Muslim, Jewish, and Christians in what the scholar Jose Faur has called "Religious Humanism."
Sephardic rabbis were thus not merely religious functionaries; they were poets, philosophers, astronomers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, linguists, merchants, architects, civic leaders and much else. Samuel the Nagid, the famous polymath of Granada, even led military troops into battle in the 11th century.
While Ashkenazi Jews in the modern period broke off into bitter and acrimonious factions, Sephardim, true to "The Levantine Option," remained united rather than let doctrine asphyxiate them. A Jewish Reformation never took place in the Sephardic world because the Sephardim continued to maintain fidelity to their traditions while absorbing and adapting the ideas and trends of the world they lived in.
Arab Jews created a place for themselves in their countries of origin by serving in government, civic affairs, business, and the professions: James Sanua, an Egyptian Jewish writer, was at the forefront of the nascent Egyptian nationalist movement. The last chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire and then of Egypt (who died in Cairo in 1960), Haim Nahum Effendi, was elected as a member to the Egyptian Senate and was a founder of the Arabic Language Academy. By request from the Egyptian civil authorities Rabbi Masud Hai Ben Shimon composed a digest of Jewish legal practice written in classical Arabic that served as a primary source on Judaism for Egyptian courts.
In his best-selling 2002 book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Bernard Lewis makes a telling statement in his interpretation of this ethno-cultural impasse. Echoing his infamous "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, made famous by the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, Lewis sees that the dichotomy between Judaism and Islam extends to the Jews of Israel as well:
The conflict, coexistence, or combination
of these two traditions [i.e. the Judeo-Christian and the Judeo-Islamic] within
a single small state, with a shared religion and a common citizenship and
allegiance, should prove illuminating. For Israel, this issue may have an
existential significance, since the survival of the state, surrounded,
outnumbered, and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very right to exist, may
depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.
Israel, according to this logic, must be a representative outpost of Western civilization in a brutal and barbaric region of culturally inferior Arabs.
Indeed, when they arrived in the state of Israel from the Arab world in the 1940's and 50's, Sephardim underwent a forced process of de-Arabization, losing their native tongue, Arabic, which led to a complete abandonment of the deep ties they once had with the rich civilization of the Middle East and set them at the very bottom of the social and economic ladder in the new state.
The opposition between East and West promoted by Lewis, a permanent feature of the discourse on the conflict as reproduced by the Western media, is a dangerous mechanism that has occluded the voice of Jews who once maintained a crucial connection to the organic world of the Middle East. The silencing or marginalizing of the Arab Jewish voice has had a profoundly deleterious affect on the conflict.
What if the future of the Middle East lay in the amicable interaction of the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in a symbiotic formation that lays out the commonalities rather than the deep-seated differences that are rooted in the Ashkenazi experience?
If such a symbiosis were desirable, the memory of Moorish Spain where the three religions were able to coexist and produce a civilization of great worth, would take prominence. The Sephardic voice would be central in articulating what was termed Convivencia, the creative cultural dynamic that fired medieval Spanish civilization, until its collapse in 1492.
"The Levantine Option" would help collapse the alienating cult of persecution harbored in classical Zionist thought and omnipresent in the rituals of the state of Israel, replacing it with a more positive view of the past. The nihilistic "realism" of the current Israeli approach, centered on the institutionalized perpetuation of the twin legacies of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, would be countered by memories of an indigenous Jewish past that had a constructive relationship with its surrounding environment. "The Levantine Option" would create a shared cultural space for Jews and Arabs to bring down the walls and barriers between the peoples.
Until we develop ways to talk to one another in a substantial and civilized way - from within a shared cultural space that exists for those of us who still espouse "The Levantine Option" - the questions surrounding Israel and Palestine, as well as the endemic violence that is a malignant cancer in the region, will continue to haunt Jews, Arabs and the rest of the world.
From The Huffington Post, May 5, 2010
Happy 100th Birthday Bernard Lewis!
We must never overlook the prominent role of Bernard Lewis in HASBARAH circles and Eurocentric racism.
Lewis has dutifully served Western political interests for many decades and brazenly used his scholarship to promote those interests under the guise of academic objectivity.
The very Right Wing Gatestone Institute, friend of the great Alan Dershowitz, praises the centenarian on the occasion of his birthday:
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8169/bernard-lewis-birthday
Not to be outdone, Daniel Pipes chimes in with his accolades:
http://www.danielpipes.org/16683/bernard-lewis-100th-birthday-appreciation
And there is this symposium from the National Review:
I was thrilled to see the vile Ayaan Hirsi Ali – who is married to the Imperialist apologist Niall Ferguson – add her voice to the amen chorus. I was expecting to see her pal Bill Maher as well – but no luck!
If only Christopher Hitchens were alive to add his voice to the cheering chorus of Lewis-lovers.
And where would we be without accolades from the arch-Orientalist Martin Kramer:
Here is an excellent précis of Lewis’ thought from the Kramer article:
Islam the religion, he wrote, was “the chief contender with Christianity for the hearts of men,” while Islam the civilization was both “the nearest neighbor and deadliest rival of European Christendom.” Because Islam and Christianity were “sister religions”; because both civilizations shared the legacy of Mediterranean antiquity; and because both owed much to Jewish religious tradition and Hellenistic thought, each “recognized the other as its principal, indeed its only rival.” Bernard described their bitter contention as a family feud over “an immense shared heritage,” between two civilizations “divided by their resemblances far more than by their differences.”
It would be hard to overestimate the significance of this insight. By the time Bernard wrote these lines, a cultural industry had developed around the notion that Muslims and Christians (as well as Jews) could be reconciled by emphasizing their commonalities. This would eventually develop into today’s faddish concept of three “Abrahamic” faiths, a kind of prophet-sharing plan intended by its advocates to blunt the fact of mostly Muslim hostility by emphasizing how much Islam shares with Christianity (and Judaism) and downplaying the differences.
Bernard argued exactly the opposite. Yes, Islam regarded Christians (and Jews) as “people of the Book,” and so showed tolerance to those who submitted to Islamic rule. But there could be no greater affront to Islam than the continued existence of an independent Christendom, precisely because of its declared prior claim to many of the same proofs of superiority as were claimed by its Islamic rival.
Indeed, not only were the two civilizations rivals; they were locked in “almost permanent conflict” from which there were no true respites. For well over a millennium, from the first Islamic conquests in the 7th century through the last Ottoman siege of Vienna in the 17th, Islam had been on the march. Later, Europe would launch “a counterattack into the lands of Islam and establish European imperial domination in old Islamic territories.” For Bernard, this “ebb and flow of Muslim empire in Europe and of European empires in the land of Islam” was part of one “long and—alas—unfinished struggle.” No matter how much modern Westerners might wish to consign that struggle to the dustbin, Muslims would not oblige them—hence, the “alas.”
Kramer confirms what has now become standard operating practice in the HASBARAH world: Christianity is not only superior to Islam, but is the very driver of civilization against the barbarity of the East.
Lewis was the first to articulate a “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, later popularized by Samuel Huntington, which has become ubiquitous in Right Wing discussions of the West and Middle East.
It is crucial that Lewis reject the Convivencia of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East and emphasize the dystopian theme of conflict and persecution. Like many Ashkenazim he turns a blind eye to the long Christian persecution of the Jews, fixating instead on the sporadic cases of Muslim persecution of Jews and Christians.
We have most recently seen this idea coming from self-hating Sephardim like Rabbi Marc Angel and Vanessa Paloma which reflects the toxic Lewis spirit:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/_nrcdGWekO0
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/zwaRDoJ0IRo
It was my attack on Lewis’ vile Anti-Sephardi and Anti-Arab racism that prevented my article on “The Levantine Option” from being published by The New York Times Op-Ed page many years ago.
The article was eventually published by The Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586.html
Here is the quote from Lewis’ best-seller What Went Wrong? which expresses his contempt for Arab Jews and their culture:
The conflict, coexistence, or combination of these two traditions [i.e. the Judeo-Christian and the Judeo-Islamic] within a single small state, with a shared religion and a common citizenship and allegiance, should prove illuminating. For Israel, this issue may have an existential significance, since the survival of the state, surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very right to exist, may depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.
Here is my response from the article in which I defend the classical Sephardic heritage and the spirit of Convivencia:
The opposition between East and West promoted by Lewis, a permanent feature of the discourse on the conflict as reproduced by the Western media, is a dangerous mechanism that has occluded the voice of Jews who once maintained a crucial connection to the organic world of the Middle East. The silencing or marginalizing of the Arab Jewish voice has had a profoundly deleterious affect on the conflict.
What if the future of the Middle East lay in the amicable interaction of the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in a symbiotic formation that lays out the commonalities rather than the deep-seated differences that are rooted in the Ashkenazi experience?
If such a symbiosis were desirable, the memory of Moorish Spain where the three religions were able to coexist and produce a civilization of great worth, would take prominence. The Sephardic voice would be central in articulating what was termed Convivencia, the creative cultural dynamic that fired medieval Spanish civilization, until its collapse in 1492.
“The Levantine Option” would help collapse the alienating cult of persecution harbored in classical Zionist thought and omnipresent in the rituals of the state of Israel, replacing it with a more positive view of the past. The nihilistic “realism” of the current Israeli approach, centered on the institutionalized perpetuation of the twin legacies of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, would be countered by memories of an indigenous Jewish past that had a constructive relationship with its surrounding environment. “The Levantine Option” would create a shared cultural space for Jews and Arabs to bring down the walls and barriers between the peoples.
Until we develop ways to talk to one another in a substantial and civilized way - from within a shared cultural space that exists for those of us who still espouse “The Levantine Option” - the questions surrounding Israel and Palestine, as well as the endemic violence that is a malignant cancer in the region, will continue to haunt Jews, Arabs and the rest of the world.
So while the Zionists celebrate the career of Bernard Lewis, Sephardim have much less to be appreciative for, as his “success” has led to our continuing failure and exclusion from the mainstream Jewish discussion.
David Shasha
From SHU 745, July 6, 2016