Bernard Lewis, Influential Scholar of Islam, Is Dead at 101

This is one of the most thoughtful and informative obituaries Douglas Martin has ever done. He's helped examine the complexities of American foreign policy when some of the world's finest academics got sucked into the vortex of political partisanship or national narratives. Bernard Lewis was an unimpeachable scholar, whose gravitas took apart Edward Said's powerful but flawed thesis on Orientalism--and then went too far, and became part of the partisan debate, lost his detachment, and to many tragically, his credibility. He represented the last generation of genuine Orientalists, non-political, great admirers of the Islamic world, translators, historians--who got caught up in the national aggressions of nations. The more's the pity....

As an Islamophobe (read antisemitic toward Muslims) he was a significant propagandist that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. His understanding of Islam was a cartoon character drawn by an infant who's only contact with reality was an accident caused by Muslims being human beings. Westerners considered him a "scholar" only because they were all the more willfully ignorant and he fed their bigotry like trump does the republican base. That he would give briefings to Cheney and the cabal of neo-cons in the PNAC is all you need to know about his moral honesty.

I see the roots of the decay of Islamic civilization as due to internal, not external forces, specifically the defeat of the intellectual Mutazillites by the literalist Asharis in the 9th and 10th centuries. At this time there were three great civilizations stretching from Persia to Ireland: Islam, the Byzantine Empire, and Western Christendom. One decayed and was conquered, one committed intellectual suicide (Islam), and one, Western Christendom, produced universities, rationalism, science, and technology, and went on to become an economic and intellectual powerhouse and thus shape the modern world. At a crucial point, ca. 9-10th century, the Mutazillites, who advocated the use of reason to understand the world and to metaphorically interpret the Koran, were defeated and eliminated by the Asharis, who advocated a completely literal reading of the Koran and strict predestination, and who denounced the use of reason and the analysis of natural laws as constraining the freedom of Allah. Thus the development of science was halted in its infancy and the Muslim world remained mired in obscurantism and poverty. In Western Christendom, however, Thomas Aquinas went on to advocate the use of reason to advance understanding, and after a century his views were accepted by the Church. This allowed an explosion of inquiry, literacy, and knowledge and led directly to the development of mathematics, science and technology, See ‘The Closing of the Muslim Mind’ by Robert Reilly.

The following appears in this well done obituary: “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.” Let no religion deny the seduction of such beliefs in its history. Today we see this being applied in the U.S. by Christian fundamentalists who for decades have supported and pursued a social conservative political agenda often in violation of the First Amendment. However, I have not seen that our national motto states: In [a Christian] God We Trust. It is the better and core values of faith that must be supported. And a recognition that faith and science co-exist. Science provides knowledge. Faith provides values.

A glaring and tragic example of how intolerance and lack of cultural empathy, cloaked in elegant language and supported by apparent erudition, can cause incalculable harm. Ideas matter, and bad ideas matter a lot. Iraq has paid the price for this terrible misuse of scholarship.

He is the scientist who put the light on the dark aspects of one religion, being the alternative voice to the 1001 night tale set by liberals.

The self-confident look in his face is interesting. He wrought influence. How many people (second grade of course) lost their life through his "influencing" didn't matter. Scholars and historians shouldn't meddle into politics. That is not their job. When will a certain degree of sanity reach this world? I doubt it.

I know people who absolutely HATED Bernard Lewis and uttered his name as if it were an epithet. And this was because as an octogenarian in the early 2000s Lewis made the mistake of associating himself with Bush & Cheney on Iraq. Let's be clear: Anybody who had at least two years of high school education (not college education, but high school education) under their belts by late 2002 or early 2003 should have had the good sense to realize it would be a very bad thing indeed for the armed forces of the United States to invade Iraq and overthrow the government there. Lewis was a great writer and orator and undoubtedly knew more about the Middle East than I or most people, and yet he failed such a basic test of judgement and competence on the Iraq question in 2002-03. Like George W. Bush (MBA from Harvard), Fareed Zakaria (PhD from Harvard), and Paul Wolfowitz (Phd from Chicago), Bernard Lewis (PhD from SOAS) on Iraq showed that people with postgraduate degrees from prestigious universities can easily end up being deeply wrong.

"Mr. Lewis’s most prominent opponent, 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." Far be it from me to get involved with the intricacies of Islamic history, but I think that it is only fair to point out that Edward Said was also not an Islamist. He was a professor of comparative literature and dealt with such topics as Joseph Conrad. Even when he began his work on post-colonialism, that did not make him an Islamist. Being an Arab does not make one an Islamist, just as being Jewish, or being a Jewish professor of comparative literature does not make a scholar of Jewish Studies. "Orientalism" of Prof. Said was a forerunner of academic identity politics. Its success was rooted in that more than in scholarship.

Most posts so far concentrate on Bernard Lewis's later writings. His first books, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, the Arabs in History, and the Middle East and the West, were outstanding contributions to scholarship, elegantly written, and remain of continuing importance. He can be compared with other great historians of the Arabs and the middle east including Albert Hourani and Philip K. Hitti. Then something happened that changed him from a historian interested in describing the past and trying to explain it into a pundit, who assembled facts to prove a previous point of view or hypothesis and also a political forecaster. In that capacity he was valued by Cheney, Wolfowitz, and other middle eastern policy makers. That something may have happened in the late sixties or early seventies when he was working in the historical archives in Cairo and was expelled by the Egyptian government for being Jewish and therefore biased in favor of Israel.

At times Bernard Lewis may have developed faulty analysis and unwarranted conclusions. However, he made you think, and if you were intellectually honest, he could not be dismissed with ad hominem attacks. If you disagreed with him, he helped you sharpen the thinking from which you drew your own conclusions. In any case, one should not be held accountable in giving ones opinions for the actions of those who have the power and choose to follow or reject that advice.

This is a first rate obituary. It has the virtue of extensively quoting Bernard Lewis. This respects the intelligence of the reader who is afforded the option of weighing Lewis' words and rendering an informed judgment regarding Lewis' philosophy, the quality of his analysis and the preconceptions he brought to his judgments.

Especially now, I wonder if there is an Islamic Bernard Lewis who would make the same argument about the decline and corruption of our Judeo-Christian civilization as he made about theirs.

We have lost a clear-eyed thinker.

Until recently he was teaching Islam 101 at age 101!

Muslim Scholars Need a "Bernard Lewis"-Equal I followed Bernard Lewis for nearly 30 years and, while I distaste and even hate his bias towards Israel and his seemingly candescent/arrogant presentation of his views, I actually see truth in his argument: "Islamic civilization had been decaying for centuries". As a Muslim, I want self-evaluation, because if we, Muslims, don't clean our act and correctly diagnose our ills, then others will! As Richard Nixon was quoted to have said, vis-a-vis the torturous realty of the American politics: "If you don't define yourself, others will define you". Indeed, the Muslims have been in horrible shape for so long that their creed - عقيده – and law - شريعه - have been smeared by their own rulers and their own "teachers/scholars". Lewis focused on the faith and culture of the Middle East, and, as an activist Jew, lived the Euphoria of the creation of the State of Israel and theorized on the roots for the misery and decadence of the Muslims; he even went on to argue that the Palestinians have no right to Palestine - a music in the ears of Golda Meir, the US Neocons and Christian Right! If the Muslim world does not produce scholars who would diagnose their ills correctly and present a plausible path for awakening, then the agony will continue, and the world will continue to read to Lewis instead of the Muslims! Dr. Lewis is no hero of the truth; he is, however, and to his credit, a clue to understand why the West views Islam as such!

"... one who does not distort or evade the truth," That was Bernard Lewis. He wasn't a neocon in the negative sense used today - he was a realist who accurately perceived what he studied. We cannot ever be at war with Islam unless we are prepared to be at war with Christianity - both ridiculous concepts. Lewis's great contribution has been to identify tyranny and despotism masquerading as religion. The Saddam Hussein's, Bashar al Assad's, Nasser's, Mubarak's, Khomeini's and Khameini's are the tyrants who have done their level best to destroy Islam and impoverish hundreds of millions, morally, spiritually and economically. Read Bernard Lewis.

See this comment on Bernard Lewis' outrage at the Muslim world and his generalizations about it: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00litlinks/naim/ambiguities...

To me, a would-be teacher who was false as a scholar. To be so prejudiced is per se to be false in your teaching. How sad.

A book by Lewis was translated into Hebrew and published by the Israeli defense ministry. The same book was translated into Arabic and published by the Muslim Brotherhood (unauthorized). In his preface to the Arabic version, the translator said, “I don’t know who this author is, but one thing about him is clear: He is either a candid friend or an honorable enemy, and in either case is one who has disdained to falsify the truth.”

If Lewis shaped the policy that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the never-ending no-win war against the Afghan Taliban, then he has a deep ideological connection to the most catastrophic U.S. foreign policy blunder since Vietnam. What's more, Lewis' thesis (at least as presented in this article) is strikingly ahistorical: the United States, NATO and Israel all backed radical Islamic militarist organizations (e.g., Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Hamas in Palestine, and even Al Nusra in Syria) as counterweights to Pan Arab Nationalism, or in Syria, in an as-yet failed effort to overthrow Syria's Assad government, despite the astronomical humanitarian costs (500K+ dead, 14 Million people displaced). It is hard to think of a scholar with a more destructive legacy in this Century.

Ironic that history will view the Iraq War as a sign of the decline of American “civilization”.

Mr. Lewis reached far beyond his understanding and expertise as a scholar to generalize about the Arab world and at times came up with pure rubbish. For instance, that the West should either bring democracy to the Middle East or itself be crushed was a sentiment as wrong-headed as it was harmful. He also greatly exaggerated the power of the West to bring about change in societies with their own long and troubled histories. We still need to see in the next few decades if Iraqi democracy holds up and does not unravel when American influence fades as it must, while Iran stays powerful through its proxies. Turkey's democracy, as Erdogan shows every day, was as fragile as pessimists always feared. Meanwhile, the denial of rights to Palestinians, even if endorsed by a well-known academic, is nothing but inhumane brutality, no matter the venality of Arab leaders.

One mourns the passing of any person, especially one who has achieved such a great age, but what is sad here is how much Lewis's very influential scholarship diverged from almost everything that came afterwards. Already in the 1980s when I was a graduate student his work was held up to me as an example of everything not to do. And yet none of the many talented, not to mention less prejudiced, scholars whose opinions diverged from his ever got nearly the same kind of hearing from those in a position to shape American foreign policy. The result has been decades of avoidable deaths.

There is such a thing as bias. If you have a dog in the race, you cannot sell yourself as an objective commentator.

An impressively gifted scholar who later became a narrow-minded neo-conservative ideologist. "What went wrong"...?

Being associated with Bush's foreign policy, as the caption states, may not be the kind of send off into the netherworld that most Americans would look forward to in light of our Iraq invasion based on phoney evidence that set off a chain of events resulting in the deaths of a million people from North Africa to Iraq, not to mention the trillions of dollars wasted. Who will be the pallbearers, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton and Netanyahu? Imagine if those guys read Jimmy Carter instead.

Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had. Bernard Lewis