If my memory is correct, I think Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis was in Kyoto University for a while as a visiting research fellow in the past. When I read some of his translated books into Japanese on Islam and the Middle East, I found almost all of the descriptions were correct and stimulating to read unlike recent other related materials on the same theme written by some of the experts. It was before and after the year 2003.
In 2004 or 2005, I listened to a lecture by a prominent Arab professor from the U.S. at one of the private universities in Kyoto. After the talk, I raised him a question. ‘In today's lecture, I learned well that you thought Bernard Lewis went wrong in his understanding on Islam and the Muslims. Then, why do you think that Bernard Lewis became wrong?' Very interestingly, the lecturer answered to me in front of the audience that 'Because Bernard Lewis is a Jew!’
I was simply surprised and very puzzled to receive his reply, because it was far from an intellectual discourse. No more explanation and no more academic communication was possible after this.
The two articles below were introduced on Dr. Martin Kramer's twitter, which I have been checking daily since a few months ago. Honestly speaking, I have been quite surprised to discover since then as to why there are so many matching points I have with Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis, Dr. Martin Kramer, and Dr. Daniel Pipes regarding views on Islam and attitudes towards the late Professor Edward Said(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20120226). I am just a Japanese researcher of Malaysia and have not met with these three scholars face to face yet, though. (Lily)
1. Chronicle（http://chronicle.com）
'Osama bin Laden Made Me Famous' , 22 April 2012
Bernard Lewis Looks Back
The Middle East scholar, now in his 90s, says he opposed the war in Iraq
by Evan R. Goldstein
Bernard Lewis left Princeton University in 1986, forced out at the then-mandatory retirement age of 70. At his farewell party, Charles Issawi, who was also retiring from the department of Near Eastern studies, delivered some remarks. "There are five ages of professors," he said, "tireless, tiring, tiresome, tired, and retired; but for people like Bernard and me, retirement means a new set of tires and full speed ahead."
Issawi was right: Lewis isn't the retiring type. He has spent the years since then producing 16 books and countless articles, carried on his decades-long spat with Edward Said over the direction of scholarship on the Middle East, helped found a learned society to challenge "intellectual conformism" in the Middle East Studies Association, coined the idea of a "clash of civilizations," became an informal adviser to the George W. Bush administration, and according to some observers, provided the intellectual firepower for the war in Iraq. Oh, and not least: At the age of 80, Lewis fell in love again.
Next month Viking Press will publish Lewis's 32nd book, a memoir titled Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian. It was written with the help of his companion, Buntzie Ellis Churchill, a former president of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.
"I wasn't happy," Lewis says about his retirement. We're sitting in his two-bedroom apartment at a senior living facility in Haverford, Pa. "I was still active and energetic and could have gone on." He leans forward in his rocking chair. "But these days nobody retires" he shakes his head "and they go on until they're senile idiots."
He is a few weeks shy of 96. His British-accented voice is gruff, his shoulders stooped, his hearing diminished, his stamina not what it once was. But Lewis, arguably the most prominent living scholar of the Middle East, seems spry and buoyant, greeting me with a firm handshake and news of a recent acquisition: "I just got some excellent Scotch."
When Lewis began teaching at the University of London, in the late 1930s, fewer than 100 people in all of Britain knew Arabic, he says. But languages came easily to him. He learned Latin and French in grade school, picked up Hebrew from a tutor, and taught himself Italian and Spanish. As an undergraduate, he met a cute Soviet refugee named Ada who insisted that he learn Yiddish. So he did. "Now I can understand the punch lines of Jewish jokes," he writes. In graduate school, he studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and dabbled in Russian.
During World War II, British intelligence put the polyglot professor to work. Lewis is sketchy on the details but allows that he spent time in Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem. After the war, he set off for Istanbul and became one of the first non-Turks to explore the Ottoman archives, research that established him as a leading authority on Islamic and Ottoman history.
Lewis, however, has never been a reclusive archive dweller. Indeed, he seems to have known everyone and been everywhere. In Notes on a Century, he trades gossip with Golda Meir; cracks wise about the Marx Brothers with the shah of Iran; stays up late chatting with King Hussein of Jordan; spends time in a tent with Qaddafi; speaks on "friendly, personal terms" with Pope John Paul II; counsels secretaries of state, and on and on.
But it is Lewis's relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney that will most intrigue readers. And on that score, Lewis drops a small bombshell. The war in Iraq, Lewis writes midway through the book's last chapter, is "sometimes ascribed to my influence with Vice President Cheney. But the reverse is true. I did not recommend it. On the contrary, I opposed it."
So, wait: The man who more than any other scholar is credited with shaping the Bush administration's view of the Middle East, who wrote widely read op-eds with titles like "Time for Toppling" in the lead-up to the war, in fact, opposed it?
Let us back up here.
It may not be exactly true that Osama bin Laden made Lewis famous, but it's not much of an exaggeration. On September 11, 2001, Lewis was putting the final touches on What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press), an account of how the Muslim world fell into "a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression." It was an instant best seller, and according to Ian Buruma, of Bard College, it was received "in some circles as a kind of handbook in the war against Islamic terrorism." Another best seller, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (Modern Library), soon followed.
Both books echoed themes that Lewis had been striking since the mid-1970s, when he first warned about a surge of religious passion in the Muslim world. Then, in 1979, the Iranian revolution swept the shah out of power. "My historical studies suddenly became relevant, and I was called to Washington more frequently," Lewis writes. Islam had moved "from the realm of musty archives and academic conferences to the evening news."
In 1990, Lewis's Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities was adapted by The Atlantic, which ran it on the cover under the headline "The Roots of Muslim Rage." "We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them," he famously declared, adding: "This is no less than a clash of civilizations." The magazine hit the newsstands just as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Lewis was summoned to meet then-Secretary of Defense Cheney. It was the beginning of a long relationship.
After 9/11, Lewis became an occasional visitor to the vice president's home and office, and on the eve of the war Cheney went on Meet the Press and name-checked the professor. "I firmly believe, along with men like Bernard Lewis, who is one of the great students of that part of the world, that strong, firm U.S. response to terror and to threats to the United States would go a long way, frankly, toward calming things in that part of the world."
Lewis's reported influence in Washington reached an apotheosis in February 2004, when The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about how Lewis's "diagnosis of the Muslim world's malaise, and his call for a U.S. military invasion to seed democracy in the Mideast, have helped define the boldest shift in U.S. foreign policy in 50 years."
In his living room, Lewis seems uninterested in rehashing recent history. He listens patiently, stone-faced. His disagreement with the Bush administration, he explains with a sigh, was not over the goal (regime change), but the tactic (full-scale invasion). Lewis says he argued for recognizing the leadership in northern Iraq as the country's legitimate government and arming those forces if necessary. In the decade since the first Persian Gulf war, he says, Kurds and Arabs had managed to build a nascent democracy under the protection of the no-fly zone.
"That was the way to do it," he says. "Simply to invade was the wrong way to do it, and I thought so and said so at the time." Why didn't he speak out before the invasion? "I didn't feel at that crucial moment that it was right to take a public stance against the war."
Private advice is difficult to verify, of course. But in Notes on a Century, Lewis tries to build a case, reprinting long excerpts from e-mails he sent to then-National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley in 2006. They suggest that Lewis was at that time more concerned about Iran than Iraq. "My job was not to offer policy suggestions but to provide background," Lewis recalls in the book, emphasizing that his "role in policy making was, at most, minimal." Furthermore, he says, his name appears only once, in passing, in Cheney's memoir, In My Time. (Notes on a Century incorrectly states that Lewis does not appear at all in Cheney's memoir.) Asked if he was relieved when he read Cheney's book, Lewis mumbles something unintelligible and smiles.
Age has not mellowed Lewis, especially on the topic of the late Edward Said, whose 1978 polemic, Orientalism, upended Middle East studies and placed Lewis in the position of having to defend his scholarship against charges of racism and imperialism. Lewis vividly remembers reading Orientalism for the first time. "Apart from Said's ill will," he says, "I was appalled by his ignorance."
He had never heard of Said, and it didn't occur to him that the Columbia English professor's ideas would get much traction. In 1982, however, Lewis responded at length in The New York Review of Books, highlighting what he saw as numerous factual errors in Orientalism. Said punched back, and their exchange remains one of the great intellectual donnybrooks of recent decades.
Lewis and Said met only once, in 1986, for a debate at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association. Dubbed the "shoot-out at the MESA corral," the event drew 3,000 spectators. Whether or not Lewis thinks he won that day's battle, however, he seems to be under no illusion that he lost the war.
"Middle Eastern studies in this country is dominated by the Saidians," he says, his voice rising in indignation. "The situation is very bad. Saidianism has become an orthodoxy that is enforced with a rigor unknown in the Western world since the Middle Ages." This groupthink, he says, taints everything: jobs, promotions, book reviews. "If you buck the Saidian orthodoxy, you're making life very difficult for yourself."
In 2007, Lewis and some like-minded scholars, including Fouad Ajami, of the Johns Hopkins University, founded the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. The idea, Lewis says, was to create space for opinions that deviate from the MESA mainstream, "to maintain an independent academic integrity in Middle Eastern studies." Lewis continues to serve as chairman.
As dinner approaches—Lewis eats at 6 p.m. sharp—he offers a tour of his apartment. He leads me to a small bookshelf in the living room. It's a far cry from the 15,000-volume library he maintained at his home and office in Princeton. When he moved here, last year, he donated those books to the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, where he has for many years been a visiting scholar.
Lewis pulls a Russian book off the shelf and slowly reads his name, in Cyrillic, on the cover. He smiles. His books have been translated into 29 languages. The Middle East and the West, published in 1964, was even translated into Arabic by the Muslim Brotherhood. Lewis is particularly fond of that edition's preface: "I don't know who this person is," the translator wrote, "but one thing is clear. He is, from our point of view, either a candid friend or an honest enemy, and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth." Lewis chuckles at that.
In the second bedroom, which he uses as an office, is a large desk, on which rests a small black-and-white photograph of Lewis on his first visit to the Middle East, in 1937. He's dressed in a long dishdasha. On that journey, he has said, he felt "like a Muslim bridegroom first seeing his bride, with whom he is to spend the rest of his life."
He can't get to the Middle East much these days. And even if he could, he says, it wouldn't do much good. "No one will tell you anything in the Middle East unless you have personal contacts. Otherwise it's too dangerous." He stares down at the photograph. "I used to have excellent personal contacts, but with very, very few exceptions, they're all dead."
The conversation turns to his legacy. Does he worry that his wading into current affairs has tarnished his reputation as a scholar? "No," he says flatly. "My scholarship is evaluated for what it's worth. People agree with me and people disagree with me, but that's on scholarly grounds." What about his standing as a public intellectual? Lewis flashes a smile. "Oh, that's easy," he says. "For some, I'm the towering genius. For others, I'm the devil incarnate."
・Click here for guidelines on submitting essays for the Commentary, Point of View, and Review sections of The Chronicle.Yahoo Buzz
・Martin Kramer 18 hours ago
"My scholarship is evaluated for what it's worth. People agree with me and people disagree with me, but that's on scholarly grounds." Lewis here gives the Middle East studies guild rather more credit than it deserves. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), over the years, has adroitly avoided naming him an honorary fellow (a status it had accorded, ironically, to Edward Said). The reasons are purely political. I pointed this out eight years ago, here: http://bit.ly/HSMbsI and the situation hasn't been rectified. This continues to cast a pall on the academic credibility of the main professional association of Middle East scholars. I notice there are still vacancies on the 10-person roster of honorary fellows...
・nader25 10 hours ago
This profile is excessively laudatory of Professor Lewis.
Notwithstanding his vast erudition of the Islamic world, Lewis has repeatedly and consistently misinterpreted and severely distorted some of the key transformative moments in the modern history and politics of the Middle East.
For examle on June 23, 1980 at a colloquium at Tel Aviv University, Lewis completely misread the rise and rise and importance of Islamic fundamentalism for the politics of the region. This is particularly shocking in that he was commenting on the topic in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in Iran where he predicted that “[t]he Islamic resurgence has reached its peak, and that from now onwards it [would] probably decline rather than ascend.”[1]
Similarly, one also searches in vain, prior to 9/11, for any serious analysis, criticism and prediction in Lewis’ writings on the rise of Wahhabism and it corrosive effect on the politics of Muslim societies; a critical element that contributed to the attacks on September 11, 2001.
Furthermore, despite his influential scholarship on the modern history of Turkey, very little in his vast corpus of writings helps us understand the contemporary politics of this country. His deep bias and sympathy toward Kemalism downplays the rise of religious politics and the transformative role the AK
Party has had on Turkey’s political development.
Finally, there is the Arab Spring.
When asked how he would characterize this transformative moment in the Arab world, he told the Jerusalem Post (February 25, 2011) that one of the key unifying themes of the Arab Spring has been “the sexual aspect of it.” He continued: "One has to remember that in the Muslim world, casual sex, Western-style, doesn’t exist. If a young man wants sex, there are only two possibilities; marriage and the brothel. You have these vast numbers of young men growing up without the money, either for the brothelor the brideprice, with raging sexual desire. On the one hand, it can lead to the suicide bomber, who is attracted by the virgins of paradise; the only ones available to him. On the other hand, sheer frustration."
It is partially for these reasons that today Professor Lewis’ writings are largely irrelevant to understanding the contemporary politics of the Arab and Islamic world and why his most passionate defenders remain a small group of people who share his ideological biases.
Nader Hashemi
[1] Cited by Gabriel Ben Dor, State and Conflict in the Middle East (New York: Praeger, 1983), 35.
・Martin Kramer 5 hours agoin reply to nader25
Did Lewis “completely misread the rise and importance of Islamic fundamentalism for the politics of the region”? I urge all to read or reread a series of articles by Lewis; “The Return of Islam” (Commentary, 1976), “The Revolt of Islam” (NYRB, June 1983), “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (The Atlantic, 1990);in which Lewis insisted that politicized Islam remained the rising and driving force in the region’s politics. (This, much to the chagrin of Said and his acolytes, who touted the force of secular “revolution,” be it “Arab,” “Palestinian,” or “socialist”all of which came to naught.) That's why 9/11 seemed to vindicate Lewis: readers remembered.
2. Tablet (http://www.tabletmag.com)
Bernard Lewis’ Stubborn Hope, 9 May 2012
In Notes on a Century, the historian is still optimistic about a ‘great civilization’ in the Muslim world
by David P. Goldman
Bernard Lewis beckons to us as if from the mists of legend. A poet-scholar, linguist, observer and sometime participant in the great events of the Middle East for seven decades, the London-born scholar belongs more to the world of T.E. Lawrence than to ours. At 95, his prose is translucent and his recollection luminous.
But Notes on a Century;his personal and professional memoir;makes for sad reading, for two reasons. The first is that we will not find another like Bernard Lewis; it is a valedictory essay not just for a remarkable man but for an epoch. No university today could train a poet capable of extracting the red thread of history from the obscure orthography of official archives, or a historian-diplomat who knows the songs of a dozen peoples in their own dialects. Part of the reason is ideological. The post-colonial-studies movement typified by the late Edward Said has ruined a field that once was called “Orientalism”; meaning simply a specialty in Near Eastern philology rather than Greek and Roman. Saudi and other Gulf State funding of Middle East studies programs, meanwhile, has made a critical stance toward Muslim culture an academic career-killer. Even without the ideological divide, though, our culture has grown too brittle to nurture another mind of Lewis’ depth.
The second, even sadder reason is the disappointment of Lewis’ hope for what he calls the “heirs of an old and great civilization.” For decades, Lewis balanced a clear-sighted critique of the failings of Muslim society with an underlying optimism about the future of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians. The backwardness of Muslim societies, he insisted, was a self-inflicted condition rather than the crime of Western colonialists. But he never lost faith that the West that defeated Hitler and overcame communism also could find a way to nurture modern institutions of civil society in Muslim countries. Lewis not only reported their history but also translated their poetry, befriended their men, and loved their women.
This optimism made Lewis an icon for American conservatives, and an enormous, if reluctant influence on American policy: Although he advised against the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Lewis is indelibly (if unfairly) linked with inflated neo-conservative expectations for Muslim democracy. But Lewis explicitly warned against a simple-minded rush to parliamentary forms in the Muslim world, hoping instead for a gradual expansion of existing consultative mechanisms into something that would approach democracy at some undermined date. But Lewis and the neo-conservatives shared an inherent optimism about the changing Muslim culture that informed the national mood after Sept. 11.
Lewis’ autobiography went to press just as the wave of optimism that attended the Arab Spring had begun to fade, and his lifelong optimism appears to be curling a bit around the edges, as a different and much darker picture than the one he imagined is emerging from Morocco to Afghanistan. His criticism of Muslim society was always tempered by respect and even affection. Part of his great popularity as a writer may be explained by the fact that his hopes resonated with characteristic American generosity and optimism. And so his disappointment also is ours.
Bernard Lewis was the child of Jewish immigrants to England whose modest success in business made it possible for him to attend a respectable school and then the University of London. His skill at languages brought him to the wartime British intelligence services. He stood out from his peers both as a writer for a broad audience;his 1950 popular work The Arabs in History went through six editions;and as a scholar. He was the first Western scholar to gain access to the vast archives of the Ottoman Empire, and one of very few with the skills to examine them. His 1961 book The Emergence of Modern Turkey made him the outstanding scholar in the field.
But his single most influential utterance may have been a 1990 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” with a warning that would be remembered 11 years later after the World Trade Center attack:
Islam is one of the world’s great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. 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, 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.
Islam saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, Lewis explained, and divided the world into the House of Islam and the House of War;that part of the world yet unassimilated into the true faith. Muslims could not accept that the ascendancy of the West had left them weak, backward, and humiliated. As he explained,
The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world. … The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life. … The third;the last straw;was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. … It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties.
After Sept. 11, 2001, Lewis explained Muslim rage to anguished Americans in two best-selling books, What Went Wrong? (2002), and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003). He notes that in April 2003, the former was at the top of the New York Times paperback best-seller list while the latter topped the hardcover list. As a public intellectual who knew personally most of the leading figures in Middle Eastern politics and as a scholar of unquestioned credentials, Lewis combined admonition and reassurance. The dark side of Islam, he continues to insist, ultimately is an anomaly for this “great civilization” in whose ultimate success Lewis still believes.
“They have gone through some bad times,” Lewis writes in the present volume, “but there are elements in their society which will help, which can be nurtured to develop into some limited consensual government in their own cultural tradition.” This guardedly optimistic view Lewis opposes to the uncharitable claim “that these people are not like us; they have different ways, different traditions. We should admit that they are incapable of setting up anything like the kind of democracy we have. Whatever we do, they will be governed by tyrants.”
Lewis parses the world of policy into two camps: those who believe in the promise of modernity in the Muslim world, even if it is achieved by a cautious and circuitous path; and the self-styled realists who consign a fifth of the world’s people to perpetual tyranny. Surely these two possibilities do not exhaust the list of possible outcomes; it is conceivable, for example, that both putative democrats and tottering autocrats will go together to their mutual ruin, and Muslim society will deteriorate into chaos and depopulation. It is sad that this elegant and affecting memoir should appear at a moment when the path of least resistance in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen leads neither to dictatorship nor to “consensual government” but to chaos.
During the George W. Bush Administration, senior officials frequently sought Lewis’ advice, although they did not always follow it. “The second invasion of Iraq in 2003,” he observes, “is sometimes ascribed to my influence with Vice President Cheney. But the reverse is true. I did not recommend it. On the contrary, I opposed it. It is, to say the least, annoying to be blamed for something I did not do.” There is a broader sense, though, in which Lewis does bear some responsibility for America’s abortive campaign to institute democracy in the Middle East: His eloquence and unfeigned affection for the Muslim world helped persuade Americans that their blood and treasure were well spent on the ultimate goal of Islamic democracy. That was not a casual conclusion, but the distillation of long reflection on the character of Muslim as well as Western societies.
His greatest worry today is about the Muslim Brotherhood. As he writes, “The Muslim Brotherhood is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If it obtains power, the consequences could be disastrous for Egypt. I can imagine a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations of the same kind obtain control of much of the Arab world. I would not say it’s likely, but it is not unlikely. If that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor.” Considering that the Brotherhood and its allies won 77 percent of the vote in Egypt’s parliamentary elections earlier this year, Lewis’ dictum already seems overtaken by events.
Medieval squalor really is not an option for Egypt, which had fewer than 8 million people in late antiquity and exported food. With 10 times that number, Egypt imports half its caloric consumption. The country is a modern construct, with a population that is more than two-fifths illiterate and dependent on a military autocracy for subsidies. Were Egypt to revert to medieval conditions, the result would not be squalor but starvation on a horrifyingly large scale.
**
Academic criticism of Lewis’ work came overwhelmingly from the left, starting with Edward Said’s 1978 polemic Orientalism, “in which,” Lewis writes, “Said imputed to Orientalists a sinister role as part of the imperialist domination and exploitation of the Islamic world by the West. In particular, he imputed to me an especially sinister role as what he called the leader of the Orientalists.” With a few strokes in this present book, Lewis severs Said’s head and holds it up to show that it is empty. For those who care about defending the saving myths that all groups concoct for themselves, Said’s work will stand as a cri de coeur on behalf of Muslim dignity. Those who are interested in facts will agree with the assessment of Robert Irwin, the Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who called Said’s book “a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is difficult to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misinterpretation.”
Said’s attacks on Lewis seem especially churlish given that the British scholar did more than give Muslim society the benefit of the doubt; he sees a moral equivalence in a way that some Americans may find surprising. “Corruption and oppression are corruption and oppression by whichever system you define them,” he writes. “There’s not much difference between [the Muslim] definition of corruption and our definition of corruption. In the Western world one makes money in the marketplace and then uses it to acquire political influence or access. In the Middle East the traditional practice is to seize power and use that power to get money. Morally I see no difference between them; economically, the Middle Eastern method does greater damage.” That seems an odd parallel; Mitt Romney did not stage a military coup and kill his opponents to get rich with Staples. Is he really morally equivalent to Bashar al-Assad or Saddam Hussein?
Of greater interest is Lewis’ own evaluation of the gaps in his own work. His earliest writings, he concedes, betrayed a Marxist influence;what he calls his own intellectual version of “measles and chicken pox,” a juvenile disease he outgrew in time. Startling, though, is an observation about the authenticity of Islam itself. “When I wrote my chapter on the Prophet in 1947 … I was able to present the advent of Islam in the form of a narrative of events and then try to interpret its significance in the framework of Arab, Muslim and general history.” Since then, “Radical, critical scholarship has called one source after another, one narrative after another into question. In a brief but broad-ranging historical essay of this type, it would not be possible, nor indeed would it be appropriate, to examine the arguments of the radical critics of early Islamic history, but neither is it possible to disregard them.”
Lewis, that is, acknowledges that the received history of Islam might be an invention of whole cloth, but he declines to discuss the matter further. One wishes he were more candid. It is a career-killer (and perhaps a killer of more than a career) to challenge the authenticity of the Quran and the received story of the Muslim conquests, yet a vast body of research over the last several decades makes it impossible for a rational observer to accept the Muslim account at face value. Unlike the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Gospels, the Muslim accounts are close enough to modernity to stand scrutiny against known facts, and on many accounts they fail basic tests of credibility. The German Muslim scholar Sven Muhammed Kalisch of the University of Münster surveyed the evidence in 2008 and concluded that no one resembling the Prophet Mohammed ever existed, and that the figure was concocted to serve the notion that the Arabs rather than the Jews were the chosen people.
If the critics are correct, then Islam cannot coexist with rational inquiry and has no future in modernity. The distinguished Georgetown University political philosopher Fr. James V. Schall wrote last year, “Scholars, mostly German, have been working quietly for many decades to produce a critical edition of the Koran that takes into consideration the ‘pre-history’ of the Koran. Due to the Muslim belief that any effort to question the Koran’s text is blasphemy, the enterprise is fraught with personal risk to the researchers. … The fragility of Islam, as I see it, lies in a sudden realization of the ambiguity of the text of the Koran. Is it what it claims to be? Islam is weak militarily. It is strong in social cohesion, often using severe moral and physical sanctions. But the grounding and unity of its basic document are highly suspect. Once this becomes clear, Islam may be as fragile as communism.”
Schall suggests an alternative that Lewis does not acknowledge, namely that Islam will neither persist in autocracy nor progress to some form of democracy, but will collapse as a civilization just as communism did. Some of Islam’s most obstreperous leaders, like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoan, proceed from fear of this outcome, and with good reason. The data suggest yet another reason to expect Islam to collapse rather than modernize.
During the middle of the past decade, demographers noted with astonishment that in some Muslim countries, fertility had fallen from among the world’s highest to the world’s lowest within the space of a single generation. The average Iranian woman bore seven children when Ayatollah Khomeini took power but now has only 1.5, the same as the European average. Turkish women (women, that is, whose first language is Turkish) also bear only 1.5 children on average, while Turks whose cradle tongue was Kurdish have between four and five children. “If we continue the existing trend,” Erdoan warned in May 2010, “the year 2038 will mark disaster for us.”
Lewis, incidentally, has nothing to say about Turkey’s shift to Islamism under Erdoğan. That is his least pardonable omission. His hopes for the Muslim future were founded on his perception of Turkey’s modernization, the subject of his most lauded academic work. Lewis’ affection for the Turks pervades his new book; he recalls nostalgically a decadelong liaison with “an aristocratic Turkish lady” who presided over his Princeton dinner parties. He took an unpopular Turkophile position in declining to characterize the mass murder of Armenians during World War I as a “genocide.” Now that Turkey appears to have returned to political Islam under a government that routinely jails its critics, Lewis’ silence is disturbing.
What drives this great and sudden demographic shift in the Muslim world? As I wrote in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die, almost all the variation in Muslim fertility rates;among population cohorts within Muslim countries, and across the universe of Muslim-majority countries;is explained by education. Muslim girls who complete high school breed like Europeans. Modernity’s great precondition, namely education, leads to a demographic tailspin in the Muslim world, which appears to jump from infancy to senescence without passing through adulthood.
Bernard Lewis’ era was a better one than ours, buoyed by a sense that the victorious West had the power to set a successful example for societies that had lingered in backwardness. His generation went young to World War II and saw the Cold War through at the cusp of middle age. Lewis himself is one of the very last of a race of giants. We have the sorry task of managing the chaotic decline of the Muslim world. If Bernard Lewis speaks to us from a better time, he reminds us all the more poignantly that we had better move on and address the unpleasantness of our own.
・David P. Goldman, Tablet Magazine’s classical music critic, is the Spengler columnist for Asia Times Online and the author of How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too) and the essay collection It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You.
（End）
