A pillar of wisdom in the great Islamic debate

By Dean Godson, research director of the Policy Exchange think-tank (THE TIMES, 02/05/06):

CONSIDER AMERICA the paradoxical. It is the most forward-looking country on earth, where one of the cruellest put-downs is “you’re history”. It is a youthful country, where the elderly are regularly dismissed as “old timers”. And its public discourse can be spectacularly anti-academic, with populist politicians railing against “pointy-headed professors”.

But yesterday, Dick Cheney — arguably the most powerful Vice-President in American history — commandeered Air Force 2 and flew to Philadelphia to speak at a luncheon in honour of a 90-year-old history professor. The event, hosted by the World Affairs Council, was none other than the birthday celebration of Bernard Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton and the last of the great Orientalists.

In the postwar era, perhaps only John Kenneth Galbraith among the economists, and Edward Teller and Albert Wohlstetter among the nuclear theologians, have enjoyed comparable influence. Cheney’s tribute is all the more noteworthy considering that Lewis never served in the US Government; his only stint in officialdom was wartime service in MI6.

So who is Lewis — and why and how does he exert such influence in his adopted land? Born in 1916 to a Jewish immigrant father and an Anglo-Jewish mother, he grew up in Notting Hill, Stoke Newington and Willesden and first became interested in oriental languages when learning Hebrew for his bar mitzvah. He subsequently studied under Sir Hamilton Gibb at the School of Oriental and African Studies — he lectured there from 1938 to 1974 — and speaks no fewer than eight languages.

Paul Wolfowitz, now President of the World Bank, who in the 1980s served as Ambassador in Jakarta, recalls Lewis sitting up till late into the night in Java discussing in Arabic some of the finer points of Sharia with a group of leading Islamic scholars — to the pleasure and surprise of the Indonesian divines.

Such is the quality of his work that his volume The Middle East and the West (1964) was even reprinted by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in two versions. “I do not know who this man is,” commented the editor. “He is either a candid friend or an honest enemy, but in either case he is one who refuses to deal in falsehoods.”

Lewis treasures the compliment: it was certainly more generous than anything accorded him by his great detractor in Western academe, the late Edward Said, who in his work Orientalism (1978) argued that the predominant school of scholarship on the Middle East and Islam (which Lewis personified) was little more than a tool of imperialism and domination.

Lewis successfully rebutted the accusations in intellectual terms, but for the time being has lost the war of numbers in academe. The Saidians triumphed, peddling an account of Arab and Muslim victimhood that is now the norm. “Narratives” of “humiliation” and “disempowerment” came to be valued above solid textual and philological analysis, Lewis says.

Until September 11, Lewis’s most intensive dialogue had been with Muslim leaders such as King Hussein of Jordan and President Ozal of Turkey. But shortly after the twin towers collapsed, Cheney (who had met Lewis earlier while Defence Secretary) convened a dinner of experts in his residence at the Naval Observatory.

Lewis was the star: he reaffirmed the Vice-President’s deep conviction that the jihadists believed that the US could not last the course — as exemplified by the American retreats after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the Somalian debacle of 1993. The perception of American strength was critical to anything the US wished to do in the region.

The two men met at least half a dozen times; Lewis has also met George Bush twice as well as Condoleezza Rice. But his impact upon American leaders has focused less on particular policy recommendations than on how to think about the problem. As the leading historian of modern Turkey, he argues that late Ottoman decline was self-inflicted rather than due to Western expansion. It resulted from an outdated cultural superiority complex, which held that infidels had little to teach them.

Similarly, Lewis contends that the West cannot be blamed for the ills of modern Muslim societies: it is up to Muslim elites to make the right choices that will be bring their societies into the 21st century — just as Ataturk did in the ruins of the Ottoman empire in the first half of the 20th century (Lewis is one of the last Westerners actually to have seen the founder of the Turkish Republic).

Not all of Lewis’s views have been accepted. How democracy is implemented is critical to him: unlike much of the Administration, he believes that free elections should be the culmination of the reform process, rather than the starting point (as shown by the ballots in Egypt and Palestine that have strengthened anti-democratic Islamists). Democracy, he contends, needs to be introduced “like an antibiotic — drip-drip, or else it kills the patient”.

But as he enters his tenth decade, Lewis is most alarmed not by the Arab world — where he detects signs of hope — but by what is happening in the EU and specifically in his native land. “The very composition of society is at stake,” he warned me. “The rate of immigration from parts of the Muslim world is altering the way in which society is run. And the Muslim populations of the EU, many of whom started out as quite moderate in their native lands, seem to be indoctrinated by some of the worst elements of their own co-religionists. Central to this is the oil money of Saudi Arabia, funding extreme Wahhabite doctrines.”

If the Saudi-friendly house of Bush listens to this message, then Lewis’s 100th will be an even more joyous occasion than was his 90th.