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The Conflicted Legacy of Bernard Lewis

A Clash of Interpretations
By Martin Kramer June 7, 2018
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2018-06-07/conflicted-legacy-bernard-lewis

The Conflicted Legacy of Bernard Lewis.html

Farn affair magazine m
ernard Lewis, historian of the Middle East, passed away on May
19, just shy of his 102nd birthday. No other person in our time has
done as much to inform and influence the West’s view of the
Islamic world and the Middle East. A long career of scholarship in
the United Kingdom, followed by decades as a public intellectual
in the United States, earned him readers across the globe. After
the 9/11 attacks, he became a celebrity: “Osama bin Laden made
me famous,” he admitted. The two short books he published after
the terror strikes became New York Times bestsellers. Charlie
Rose couldn’t get enough of him.

Regard for Lewis extended well beyond (and above) the general
public. He was also known to be a valued interlocutor of Turkish
and Jordanian statesmen, Iran’s last shah, Israeli prime ministers,
and U.S. President George W. Bush and his team. Bush was even
spotted carrying a marked-up copy of one of Lewis’ articles. As the
“war on terror” and its Iraqi sequel unfolded and unraveled, he
became the subject of magazine profiles and cover stories.
Bernard Lewis knew the Middle East, and America thought it
knew him.
Or did it? “For some, I’m the towering genius,” Lewis said in 2012.
“For others, I’m the devil incarnate.” Despite having written 30-
plus books (including a memoir) and hundreds of articles, and
undertaken countless interviews, Lewis was widely
misunderstood. Many of those misunderstandings, latent since he
went silent a few years ago, reappeared in his obituaries, mixed
with either admiration or vitriol.

Part of this is due to his sheer longevity. On 9/11, he was already

85 years old; he’d published his first book in 1940, over 60 years
earlier. He was hardly obscure when he became “famous,” but his
mass audience discovered him only during the last decade of his
seven-decade career. For those like me who met him much earlier
(I became his student at Princeton University in 1976), the
latecomers seemed not to grasp the
 Bernard Lewis, Influential Scholar of
Islam, Is Dead at 101
By Douglas Martin
 May 21, 2018

o https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/obituaries/bernard-lewis-islam-scholar-
dies.html
o Bernard Lewis, Influential Scholar of Islam, Is Dead at 101 - The
New York Times.html
 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.

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.
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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.

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.

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An essential takeaway from Lewis’s writings from 2001 through 2003 is the
extent to which the case for the invasion of Iraq was built on arguments
such as strength, local support, and the necessity of democracy promotion
abroad — in other words, arguments separate from Saddam’s supposed
possession of weapons of mass destruction. Lewis rarely mentioned
WMDs in his writings and interviews. Another takeaway is that every
argument Lewis made for Iraq also was made for Iran. In fact, Lewis
recounted in his memoir that his primary concern during his consultations
with the Bush administration was Iran, rather than ousting Saddam
Hussein from Iraq. None of this should be elided in a recollection of how
the United States stumbled into war before — especially since, as National
Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn recently noted in reference to the ascent
of National Security Advisor John Bolton, “the spirit of George W. Bush has
once more begun to inhabit the White House.”

May 21, 2018 Topic: Society Region: Americas Tags: Middle EastHistoryIraq

The Legacy of
Bernard Lewis
There were many views of the man—
none alone gets us to the truth.
by John Richard Cookson

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-legacy-bernard-lewis-25909?page=3%2C1

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The tributes to Bernard Lewis, the man who coined

the term 'clash of civilisations', fail to convey how
controversial he is.
Tue 2 May 2006 11.01 BSTFirst published on Tue 2
May 2006 11.01
 The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, headed a select
list of guestsyesterday to celebrate the 90th birthday
of Bernard Lewis, the White House's favourite
historian and the man who coined the term "clash of
civilisations".
An article in the New York Sun says Prof Lewis is
"considered the world's foremost historian of Islam
and the Middle East". It quotes a former student as
saying that his book, The Muslim Awakening of
Europe, is "one of the best history books ever written"
and adds that "even his rivals acknowledge his
intellectual power".
The Wall Street Journal has a similarly glowing
tribute ("A sage in Christendom"), as does the
Times ("A pillar of wisdom in the great Islamic
debate").
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/may/02/thehistoryman

Bush's historian _ Opinion _ The Guardian.html

Professor Bernard Lewis obituary

Influential British-born historian who foresaw the violent clash between Islam and the West
May 21 2018, 12:01am, The Times

Lewis, a prolific author of articles on a wide range of subjects, in his study in 1990THE LIFE
IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

On September 11, 2001 Islamic terrorists attacked New York. As George W Bush, the president,
his vice-president, Dick Cheney, and their aides sought to understand the causes of this visceral
hatred of the West, they turned to academics such as the historian Bernard Lewis.

Bush, who was seen carrying articles by Lewis, heard the historian cite the failed Ottoman siege
of Vienna in 1683 as key to understanding the end of the once-brilliant Islamic civilisation.
Lewis argued that Vienna represented the first significant defeat for Islam, which had led the
world in science, art, literature and astronomy for more than a thousand years. The siege
presaged three centuries of increasing animosity towards the West that would eventually be
expressed in violence.

It was a theory…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/professor-bernard-lewis-obituary-6wvjj6d9f

Professor Bernard Lewis obituary _ Register _ The Times.html