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Bernard Lewis: All That Glitters Is Not Gold
by Hugh Fitzgerald (April 2007)
Two weeks ago the American Enterprise Institute, with all kinds of its
associated panjandrums — members, friends, supporters, admirers —
present, gave the "Irving Kristol Prize" to Bernard Lewis.
In the audience was Vice President Cheney, who is reputed to be, if
not an acolyte of Lewis, at least someone who thinks of him as the
last word on Islam and how to deal with Islam. He apparently reveres
Lewis’ acuity, and accepts that "greatest-living-scholar-of-Islam"
stuff (of a piece with the development-office exaggeration of
"world-class" universities).
Lewis crept up on, but never quite got to, the very things one most
wanted him to speak forthrightly about. He alluded quickly, in his
scattered, à btons rompus discussion, to this or that topic, then
skittered away, on to something else. Nothing was concluded, nothing
told you where Lewis stood about matters today. He didn’t praise the
"war on terror" and he didn’t attack the "war on terror." He never
said that the phrase "the war on terror" is a misleading thing.
Instead, he pretended to be an historian deliberately au-dessus de la
melée, who would provide an historian’s perspective. He mentioned how,
centuries ago, Muslim jurists in Morocco were asked if it was licit
for Muslims to continue to live in the Iberian peninsula, but under
non-Muslim rule, and they were told that they were not. And then, the
audience waited to hear what he might say about Muslims living in
Europe today, and how they manage to reconcile the idea of refusing to
live under rule by non-Muslims with, for example, their new strength
in numbers and money and easy links, through technology (telephone,
Internet, airplanes) to Dar al-Islam, that make them able to remain in
Europe, but not be of Europe, not have their Islam weakened by
distance but, instead, often strengthened as a reaction to the new and
puzzling environment, where Infidels, against nature and reason and
Allah, are calling the shots. He said nothing about this.
And then he did something that was truly astonishing. He had earlier
mentioned the two Muslim assaults on Europe: the Arab one that ended
in the West, near Poitiers with the victory of Charles Martel in
732. And the one that started in the East, with the Turks, which was
marked by the two assaults on Vienna, the second one in 1683, the
high-water mark of Ottoman power in Europe.
And so, just toward the end, was this unremarked but remarkable
sentence:
"Third time lucky?"
And that was how Bernard Lewis, sage of the age, the man whom so many
in the Pentagon took as the last word on Islam because compared to
what is dished out by Esposito and MESA Mostra he may appear to be
that last word, dealt with the most terrifying danger to the survival
of the West, offered a flippant phrase. Muslims by the millions,
having settled within Western Europe, are now playing on the two
pre-existing mental pathologies of antisemitism and anti-Americanism,
as well as on the sentimental levelling (some call it
"multiculturalism") of the entire Western world, that world that
appears to have forgotten its own past achievements, and the legacy
that deserves to be preserved, and fails to recognize the West’s clear
superiority to Islam, to everything about Islam. Such words as
"superiority" and "primitivism" are regarded as smacking of "race
superiority" or assumptions about those living in what is called "the
Third World." But that is not how William James or Jacques Barzun used
that word. It means something. Not merely different. Better. More
admirable. Superior. Such words need to be brought back into
unembarrassed circulation, if the Western peoples are to visit their
museums and libraries, and law courts, and newspapers, and the
deliberations of their parliaments (however unseemly their current
leaders or those "taking a leadership role") and realize that yes, the
civilization they inherited is indeed not only different from, but
could never for a minute have been produced by, the world of
Islam. And they need to realize also that the whole thing can go
under, not through "terrorism" (though that has its place) but through
Da’wa and demographic conquest, if not now opposed, halted, and
reversed.
And all Bernard Lewis could do was allude to this, archly and quickly,
thus trivializing the subject, the islamization of Western Europe,
that should have been the subject of of the entire lecture, a lecture
that would have discussed the instruments of that islamization, and
the misdirected, now pointless war in Iraq for which, one needs to
remember, Lewis, too, bears a share of the responsibility. He has been
telling friends that that responsibility does not belong to him, his
influence was really quite exaggerated, so much was done wrongly. This
is a not-untypical response by Lewis, who still gets angry when forced
to declare he was wrong about Oslo and has yet to tell us WHY he was
wrong about the Oslo Accords, what he didn’t understand. Was it Arafat
only, or was it Islam and its deep effect on the minds of men, that
Lewis, friend of Prince Hassan and of Ahmed Chalabi, those most
unrepresentative men, just has never quite gotten? He has gotten it in
books but not grasped it, the way, for example, that St. Clair
Tisdall, or Snouck Hurgronje, or Arthur Jeffery, or even that bookish
man Joseph Schacht, grasped it? Has Lewis been led astray by his own
admirers in the Arab world and among those Turks who revere him?
Whatever it is, he had a chance to talk about the islamization of
Europe and how much more important it is than trivial and hopeless
Iraq. But he couldn’t. He was already compromised, and being Bernard
Lewis that means never having to say you’re sorry before the adoring
crowd at A. E. I.
His discussion of non-Muslims under Muslim rule was a travesty. Here
is how he put it:
"So you had a situation in which three men living in the same street
could die and their estates would be distributed under three different
legal systems if one happened to be Jewish, one Christian, and one
Muslim. A Jew could be punished by a rabbinical court and jailed for
violating the Sabbath or eating on Yom Kippur. A Christian could be
arrested and imprisoned for taking a second wife. Bigamy is a
Christian offense; it was not an Islamic or an Ottoman offense."
Lewis carefully sticks only to matters that are entirely within either
the Jewish or the Christian legal system: it is the Jew who violates
the Jewish Sabbath or a Jewish holiday, to be punished by Jewish law,
in a case that does not involve any non-Jews. It is the Christian who
takes a second wife who has violated Christian law, and who is dealt
with by Christian authorities, in a case that does not involve any
non-Christians. In other words, Lewis entirely leaves out what happens
to those Jews and those Christians whenever they have any kind of
problem, that might require a legal decision, with Muslims. Nor does
he give one word to that most important matter: the legal status of
non-Muslims under Muslim rule, to which the Lebanese scholar Antoine
Fattal devoted a book, and which has been the subject of several books
by the pioneering scholar on the treatment of non-Muslims under Muslim
rule, Bat Ye’or, with "The Dhimmi" and "Islam and Dhimmitude" and "The
Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam." Not a word about this
from Lewis to his distinguished guests, including Vice-President
Cheney, who perhaps could use a little more learning as he continues
to push this "war on terrorism" centered on that Iraq the Light Unto
the Muslim Nations policy which, Cheney may think, is the only
possible course to follow.
After all, Lewis has done nothing to disabuse him. While behind the
back of the Administration Lewis may deplore what he now sees, or
describes, as its many mistakes in Iraq, he appears to absolve himself
from any part in those mistakes. He appears not to realize that he had
an important role to play, both directly, in his talks with Cheney,
and indirectly, in his influence over his acolyte Harold Rhode, who
was the go-to expert on Islam, at least for Douglas Feith, when Feith
was third in rank at the Pentagon and in charge of post-war planning
for Iraq. Lewis may think he can utter phrases like "either we give
them freedom or they will destroy us" and that this will not be taken
to heart by such people as Bush and Cheney and Rice, but when it was
obviously taken to heart, and all they could think of was to "give
them [the Muslims in Iraq] freedom, rather than in halting Muslim
immigration, taxing gasoline and oil to recapture OPEC"s oligopolistic
rents, threatening to seize Saudi assets the way German-owned assets
were seized World War II unless the Saudis stop funding certain
instruments of Jihad, including well-financed campaigns of
mosque-and-madrasa building, and propaganda efforts that have involved
a small army of Western hirelings, apologists for the Saudis and for
Islam, or doing everything to convince the peoples and governments of
Western Europe to recognize the threat of Islam to their political,
legal, and social institutions, and to overcome their inertia, and to
both recognize, and transcend, the pre-existing pathologies of
anti-Americanism and antisemitism that have done so much to confuse
the peoples of Europe, to blind them to the real threat, and to
distance them from their natural allies, such as the United States and
Israel.
Lewis did none of that. He alluded to how Muslims, five hundred years
ago, were taught to view living under non-Muslim rule. And though
Lewis has declared that Europe will be Islamized before the end of the
century – he said this as a fact, as something inevitable, as
something which the Europeans were apparently helpless to resist, said
nothing about Muslim discussion of the same subject today, now that
tens of millions of Muslims are living in non-Muslim nation-states in
Western Europe and North America. Lewis gave no guidance, no hint of
what might be done. He, who had lived through World War II and the
movement, often forced, of peoples after that war, never thought to
allude to the Benes Decree. I assume that like all educated Europeans
he thinks that the efforts of Masaryk and Benes, by which 7 million
Czechs and Slovaks managed to expel 3 million Germans, was justified,
but why does he not hint that perhaps the same kind of expulsions like
those which were required to reduce what at the time was merely a
theoretical future threat posed to 7 million non-Germans in
Czechoslovakia, could certainly justify the need to preserve the
civilizational legacy – Plato and Spinoza and Hume, Leonardo and
Shakespeare, Dante and Quevedo (from whom Lewis borrowed some
affectionate Spanish for a dedication) -of the Western world, lest it
be undone by the most inexorable, and entirely unworthy, of
subversives – mere demography, mere migration and overbreeding. Nor
did Lewis say anything, on what might have been an occasion for
salutary truth-telling and not for the usual slightly off, never quite
direct or forthright, conversation à batons rompus.
It was a spectacle. It was something to behold. Lewis, tel qu’en
lui-même, and not even having to wait, as Mallarme makes Poe, for
eternity to transform him into it.
Bernard Lewis is not to be compared to Karen Hughes. He’s very
intelligent, and she’s not intelligent at all. But he’s not the last
word on the subject of Islam, as lazy people like Dinesh D’Souza seem
to think or want to think, and his inability to make sense of what he
knows, and his behind-the-coulisses feline attacks on Bat Ye’or, his
attempt, during the Oslo Accords nonsense, to prevent others from
mentioning all of the violations by the "Palestinian" side (what did
he hope to achieve, Bernard Lewis, by keeping such information
quiet?), his love of having access to power, and working
behind-the-scenes (he takes credit for urging the American government,
for example, to threaten to cut a mere $30 million from Egypt’s aid in
order to secure a better judicial outcome for Said Eddin Ibrahim —
but why doesn’t Lewis discuss with his powerful friends the entire
matter of cutting all Jizyah-aid to Egypt? Why doesn’t he discuss
Egypt as a world center of anti-Americanism and antisemitism?). Lewis
is feted in Istanbul by Ottomanists, and one wonders if the
astonishing change in his own description of the mass murder of
Armenians, which a few decades ago he had no difficulty calling by its
right name and then silently changed his own texts, removed those
words — how much does that have to do with an Osmanli girlfriend, or
Turkish friends who finally wore him down? And his recounting of
anecdotes about his own bons mots (so well received, by the way) in
Amman, where he is feted by Prince Hassan in his version of
big-tentism, and likes to allude , to those connections, proof that —
unlike the espositos, who are merely despised hirelings — he, Bernard
Lewis, is truly accepted in the East as in the West, and he is
particularly pleased to note the translations of his books into the
languages — Farsi, Arabic, Turkish — of the Muslim East.
Yet he has never explained about his nearly-invisible treatment of
non-Muslims under Muslim rule (a total of three paragraphs, two of
them exculpatory, in his 400-page "The Middle East: The Last 2000
Years." No one has asked him why, after 80 years of Kemalism, Islam is
back with a vengeance in Turkey, about which he once had such high
hopes, and whether the example of Turkey might not hold lessons for
non-Muslims about the persistence of Islam. No one has asked him if
his friendship with Ahmed Chalabi, or Prince Hassan, or others might
not have confused him, led him as others have, because of the personal
charms and even munificence of certain semi-potentates, to take
unrepresentative men for representative men, and what is dangerous, to
base not sober policy but hopes and dreams on those cheats and
charmers. And one wonders what Lewis, the celebrated student of modern
Turkey (who left so much out — see Speros Vryonis, see Vahakn
Dadrian, see even a few younger and braver Turkish historians in the
West) now thinks are the lessons, if any (or would he say that
"historians are not in the habit of drawing lessons. Historians are
engaged in something quite different." Coming from Lewis, who always
resented not being listened to by the Foreign Office, and for the last
quarter-century has loved being listened to by the powerful, such a
remark must be taken as pure blague) that non-Muslims might have to
draw from the example of Turkey. No one, above all, has asked him for
some practical advice for the Western world, in attempting to halt the
islamization of Western Europe, advice that goes beyond the vague, and
disturbing, "either we bring them freedom or they will destroy us."
What a remark. An astounding admission, that second part – "they will
destroy us" coupled to a completely unhinged remark – [unless] "we
bring them freedom." That simply will not do.
Here is what Lewis must tell us, rather than simply assume that he,
Bernard Lewis, can get away with offering up such a statement, and it
is for the rest of us, having heard the oracle, to make sense of it,
to fill in the mere details. No, that will not do, and the fact that
Lewis is rich in years (90) and the recipient of honors should cut no
ice, not in this case. Automatic respect for age is one of those
"respects’ – like that which some accord any belief-system called a
"religion" or that kind of automatic loyalty too many are too eager to
offer this or that object of loyalty, even when it is not, or no
longer, deserved.
He has to tell us what he means by "either we bring them freedom or
they will destroy us." How does that phrase adequately meet the case
of the islamization of Western Europe? What guide to policy is that?
And what does it mean to "bring them freedom"? Bring them freedom with
"boots on the ground" that will ensure head-counting elections, or is
there some other kind of "freedom" that Lewis has in mind? Is he
willing to concede, at all, that the "freedom" or, in this case, the
"democracy" which is brought by the West is inimical to the spirit and
letter of Islam, or will he — like Bush muttering darkly that those
who would :"deny" that "Arabs" are not capable of democracy are
"racists" (a misleading way to characterize those who point out the
unremarkable and obvious truth that the belief-system of Islam
emphasizes the collective and not the individual, has no place for
individual rights and has no place for the rights to free speech,
freedom of conscience, and free exercise, and equality for non-Muslims
and women. But Lewis wants to have us all play a game of Let’s-Pretend
so that somehow, in some way, we will manage to get through – and
meanwhile the Muslim population of the Netherlands climbs from 15,000
to one million in little more than thirty years, and the Muslim
colonies deep within the Lands of the Infidels expand relentlessly, as
do the demands from those colonies for changes in the legal and
political and social institutions of the Infidels.
And how do we "bring them freedom"? Apparently Lewis thinks that the
way to "bring them freedom" is the same way it was brought in Iraq –
by invasion, by boots on the ground. Does he still? Does he still
think that Ahmed Chalabi, his friend, is "representative" of much more
than…Ahmad Chalabi? How "representative" is Kanan Makiya? Or Rend
al-Rahim? What about that good man, Mithal al-Alusi? Could Lewis
possibly have confused his admiration and friendship for certain
people, westernized, secularized, the members of a very special elite
(whether Shi’a or Sunni) with the real Iraq, of the tens of millions?
Could he? And could he have confused Prince Hassan (who isn’t all that
great) with the real views of the people in Jordan, and the malevolent
mischief that Abdullah as before him his father the "plucky little
king" Hussein, are able to cause by confusing Western governments into
thinking that these seemingly rational or at least semi-sensible
people in any way "represent" Jordan, or "represent" the Arabs?
Lewis tells us "either we bring them freedom, or they will destroy
us."
And then he falls silent, briefly, and goes briskly on, to the next
big topic given a few bright paragraphs, in his fatally flippant tour
d’horizon.
A while back I wrote that Lewis was "chipping away at his own
monument." With the rediscovery of the texts by specialists on Jews
under Islamic rule, even his treatment of that subject, one which it
was assumed Lewis certainly must know all about, must have read and
taken intelligently into account everything, will be shown to have
been completely insufficient and misguided.
He has been, for some, taken as the final authority, the "greatest
living scholar" blah blah blah. Well, if "final authority" at all —
then in brief final authority. His writ no longer runs quite as it
once did — as the only apparent alternative to the espositos and
mesanostrans. There are others, to be found in the library, and
elsewhere — such as the largely unheralded but acute Bat Ye’or — who
are there, not to take his place as "world’s greatest authority" but
to do something even better — to offer studies, and advice, that is
neither flippant, nor unduly influenced by considerations of personal
vanity.
And not a moment too soon.