Notes on a Century:
Reflections of a Middle East Historian
By Bernard Lewis
Viking, 388 pages
“Osama bin Laden made me famous,” claims Bernard Lewis, the Princeton historian whose book What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East became an instant bestseller after 9/11. That book was followed two years later by the equally successful The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Together those works explained to a shocked America (and world— they were translated into 29 languages) why al-Qaeda was such a loathsome yet formidable force, and placed it in its proper historical and political context. Now Lewis, who has just turned 96, has presented us with the gift of a well-written and very direct autobiography, Notes on a Century.
As Lewis himself makes clear, he was a very serious and substantial force affecting the way the West viewed the Middle East many decades before al-Qaeda was spawned. Thirty-six years ago, Norman Podhoretz suggested that he write what would become his seminal article, “The Return of Islam,” which gave the following warning to readers of this magazine in January 1976: “Islam from its inception is a religion of power, and in the Muslim worldview it is right and proper that power should be wielded by Muslims and Muslims alone. That Muslims should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal. That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God and nature.” Lewis further explained that “the Islamic community is still recovering from the traumatic era when Muslim governments and empires were overthrown and Muslim peoples forcibly subjected to alien, infidel rule.”
Lewis was therefore “appalled but not surprised” by 9/11. The fortuitous coincidence of the publication of What Went Wrong? with the attacks left him remarking that “if Bin Laden claimed a percentage of my royalties for promoting the book, I would have to admit there was some justice in his claim.” One of the warmest encomia in the book is to the “thoughtful” Dick Cheney, who gave Lewis “a receptive audience” and asked “excellent questions” at their post–9/11 meetings. He is “saddened by the willful vilification of Cheney by the liberal media,” he says. “The Cheney that they described was not the Cheney I knew and respected.” Yet Lewis is careful categorically to deny that he had any influence over the decision to go to war against Iraq, about which he was unenthusiastic. Going to war with Iran is an entirely different matter, however, as he writes of the Iranian leadership: “For people with this mindset, Mutually Assured Destruction is not a constraint, it is an inducement.”
Certainly, the Bush administration could hardly have gone to a more distinguished expert for advice on the region. The English-born Lewis was the very first professional historian to study, teach, and write Arab history in England, beginning at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London in 1937. He had worked for British Intelligence during the Second World War and later told a friend in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War that he was surprised she had canceled her dinner party, “as the whole Scud episode would have amounted to a rather quiet evening during the London Blitz.” He later became the first non-Turk to be allowed into the Ottoman archives.
His first book, The Origins of Is’mailism, published in 1940, was a history of the Assassins, whom he points out were “the forerunners of the suicide bombers of today.” Lewis speaks 15 languages, has been awarded any number of major awards and prizes and no fewer than 16 honorary doctorates from universities across America, Israel, and Turkey.
If he has any single political message to impart, it is to amplify the British diplomat Harold Nicolson’s view, jarring to the present-day eye, that “one can never be certain what is in the mind of the oriental, but we must leave the oriental in no doubt what is in our mind.” All too often, Lewis believes, “we are transmitting the wrong signals. We must be clear and more definite on the need for freedom in the Middle East and our desire to help those who work for freedom.”
Yet Lewis is emphatic that in the Middle Eastern context, freedom does not mean one-man-one-vote elections, since “democracy is a political concept that has no history, no record whatever in the Arab, Islamic world.” Insistence on elections only helps the religious parties, because “they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political party can hope to equal….A dash to Western-style elections far from representing a solution to the region’s difficulties, constitutes a dangerous aggravation to the problem and I fear that radical Islamic movements are ready to exploit so misguided a move.”
The region’s difficulties are, if anything, only going to get worse, and Lewis gives us the extraordinary statistic that “the total exports of the entire Arab world, other than fossil fuels, amount to less than those of Finland.” He concludes that “sooner or later the oil age will come to an end. Oil will either be exhausted or superseded as a source of energy and then they will have virtually nothing.” Anyone who feels something along the lines of “serves them bloody well right” should consider how much worse hundreds of millions of starving Middle Easterners might behave even compared to the well-fed ones we have today.
Certainly, Lewis is clear-eyed about the peoples he has been studying for two-thirds of a century, pointing out how “opinion surveys show overwhelming proportions of Middle Easterners taking very bleak views on some aspects of human rights, supporting terrible punishments for adultery, benighted attitudes to homosexuality, and so on.” One suspects that it was because Lewis rejected special pleading for Arabs that in 1978 he became the central focus of the attack that Edward Said launched against what he dubbed “Orientalism,” arguing that any non-Arab writing about Arab history was automatically a knowing or unknowing tool of the imperialist Western exploiters. Lewis fits this category even better than most, having served the British Empire during the Second World War, about which he writes wittily in the early chapters of this at times very funny set of recollections.
“Edward Said’s thesis is just plain wrong,” argues Lewis, pointing out the worst of Said’s large number of egregious factual errors and philosophical contradictions, and employing coruscating language that is worth the price of the book alone. “The first thing that struck me when I read Said’s book was his ignorance,” Lewis states, “not only of the history of the Middle East but also of Europe. Some of his misstatements serve no polemical purpose and must be ascribed to straightforward honest ignorance [which] extends from history to philology.” Later: “The gap between facts and their interpretation is so wide that I often found myself wondering where ignorance ended and deceit began.”
He adds that because Said’s ideas “have become the enforced orthodoxy in most departments devoted to colonial studies” in American universities, he has noticed “a general change, a political correctness, in which Islam now enjoys a level of immunity from comment or criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism never had.”
This is not, however, the depressing book it easily might have been. “I was a soldier in the Second World War and I wasn’t killed or even wounded,” Lewis writes. “I was a Jew in 20th-century Europe and I wasn’t murdered or even persecuted.” In the 21st century, nearing his centennial year, Bernard Lewis is a giant in the intellectual life of the West, as it looks toward easily the most vicious, dangerous part of the planet and wonders how it got that way and what is coming next.
