may 4th
thanks to g. for the forward. i dont have the url.
i am beginning to like fouad ajami.
prof ajami had previously trashed amartya sen's pseudo-history.
here ajami talks with reverence about a true historian, bernard lewis. i
didnt know that huntington had attributed his theory to lewis.
there are plenty of arabists/mohammedanists in american academia,
though: for instance, karen armstrong. her stout defense of
mohammedanism is sometimes embarrassingly similar to the
ostrich-imitations of the "eminent historians" of india such as romila
thapar, irfan habib, et al.
it is a crying shame that the works of true historians of india, like
majumdar and sircar, have been in effect extinguished by the cabal of
marxists/mohammedanists in power.
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A Sage in Christendom
A personal tribute to Bernard Lewis.
*BY FOUAD AJAMI*
Bernard Lewis came to the New World in the nick of time.
Fate--or, more appropriately, history--decreed his American
journey and the direction it would take. The historian, who will
turn 90 in a handful of days, had come to Princeton from London,
at the age of 58, in 1974, to do the work of Orientalism which
had gained him scholarly renown. But there would be no academic
seclusion for him in the years after. The lands of Islam whose
languages and cultures he knew with such intimacy would soon be
set ablaze. And his adopted country, the bearer of the imperial
mantle shed by his own Britannia, would in time make an honored
place for him, and all but anoint him its guide into those
burning grounds of the Islamic world. He would become the oracle
of this new age of the Americans in the lands of the Arab and
Islamic worlds.
In the normal course of things, America is not a country given
to excessive deference to historians and to the claims of
history, for the past is truly a foreign country here. But the
past quarter century was no normal time, and Mr. Lewis no
typical historian. He knew and worked the archives, it is true;
and he mastered the languages of "the East," standing at the
peak of his academic guild. But there is more to him than that:
He is, through and through, a man of public affairs. He saw the
coming of a war, a great civilizational struggle, and was to
show no timidity about the facts of this war. "I'll teach you
differences," Kent says to Lear. And Mr. Lewis has been teaching
us differences. He knew Islam's splendor and its periods of
enlightenment; he had celebrated the "dignity and meaning" it
gave to "drab impoverished lives." He would not hesitate, then,
to look into--and to name--the darkness and the rage that have
overcome so many of its adherents in recent times.
We anoint sages when we need them; at times we let them say, on
our behalf, the sorts of things we know and intuit but don't
say, the sorts of things we glimpse through the darkness but
don't fully see. It was thus in the time of the great illusion,
in the lost decade of the 1990s, when history had presumably
"ended," that Bernard Lewis had come forth to tell us, in a
seminal essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (September 1990), that
our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom"
and Islam was gathering force. (Note the name given the Western
world; it is vintage Lewis, this naming of worlds and drawing of
borders--and differences.) It was the time of commerce and
globalism; the "modernists" had the run of the decade, and a
historian's dark premonitions about a thwarted civilization
wishing to avenge the slights and wounds of centuries would not
carry the day. Mr. Lewis was the voice of conservatives, a
brooding pessimist, in the time of a sublime faith in things new
and untried. It was he, in that 1990 article, who gave us the
notion of a "clash of civilizations" that Samuel Huntington
would popularize, with due attribution to Bernard Lewis.
The rage of Islam was no mystery to Mr. Lewis. To no great
surprise, it issued out of his respect for the Muslim logic of
things. For 14 centuries, he wrote, Islam and Christendom had
feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their
enmity a "series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and
crusades, conquests and reconquests." For nearly a millennium,
Islam had the upper hand. The new faith conquered Syria,
Palestine, Egypt and North Africa--old Christian lands, it
should be recalled. It struck into Europe, established dominions
in Sicily, Spain, Portugal and in parts of France. Before the
tide turned, there had been panic in Europe that Christendom was
doomed. In a series of letters written from Constantinople
between 1555 and 1560, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, imperial
ambassador to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent, anguished
over Europe's fate; he was sure that the Turks were about to
"fly at our throats, supported by the might of the whole East."
Europe, he worried, was squandering its wealth, "seeking the
Indies and the Antipodes across vast fields of ocean, in search
of gold."
But Busbecq, we know, had it wrong. The threat of Islam was
turned back. The wealth brought back from the New World helped
turn the terms of trade against Islam. Europe's confidence
soared. The great turning point came in 1683, when a Turkish
siege of Vienna ended in failure and defeat. With the Turks on
the run, the terms of engagement between Europe and Islam were
transformed. Russia overthrew the Tatar yoke; there was the
/Reconquista/ in the Iberian Peninsula. Instead of winning every
war, Mr. Lewis observes, the Muslims were /losing/ every war.
Britain, France, the Netherlands and Russia all soon spilled
into Islamic lands. "Europe and her daughters" now disposed of
the fate of Muslim domains. Americans and Europeans may regard
this new arrangement of power as natural. But Mr. Lewis has been
relentless in his admonition that Muslims were under no
obligation to accept the new order of things.
A pain afflicts modern Islam--the loss of power. And Mr. Lewis
has a keen sense of the Muslim redeemers and would-be avengers
who promise to alter Islam's place in the world. This pain, the
historian tells us, derives from Islam's early success, from the
very triumph of the prophet Muhammad. Moses was not allowed to
enter the promised land; he had led his people through
wilderness. Jesus had been crucified. But Muhammad had prevailed
and had governed. The faith he would bequeath his followers
would forever insist on the oneness of religion and politics.
Where Christians are enjoined in their scripture to "render unto
Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things
which are God's," no such demarcation would be drawn in the
theory and practice of Islam.
It was vintage Lewis--reading the sources, in this case a
marginal Arabic newspaper published out of London, Al-Quds
Al-Arabi, in February of 1998--to come across a declaration of
war on the United States by a self-designated holy warrior he
had "never heard of," Osama bin Laden. In one of those essays
that reveal the historian's eye for things that matter, "A
License to Kill," Mr. Lewis would render into sublime English
prose the declaration of bin Laden and would give it its
exegesis. The historian might have never heard of bin Laden, but
the terrorist from Arabia practically walks out of the pages of
Mr. Lewis's own histories. Consider this passage from the
Arabian plotter: "Since God laid down the Arabian Peninsula,
created its desert, and surrounded it with seas, no calamity has
ever befallen it like these crusader hosts that have spread in
it like locusts, eating its fruits and destroying its verdure;
and this at a time when the nations contend against Muslims like
diners jostling around a bowl of food. . . . By God's leave, we
call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to
obey God's command to kill the Americans and plunder their
possessions whenever he finds them and whenever he can."
Three years later, the furies of bin Laden, and the cadence and
content of his language--straight out of the annals of older
wars of faith--would remake our world. There would come Mr.
Lewis's way now waves of people willing to believe. They would
read into his works the bewildering ways and furies of preachers
and plotters and foot soldiers hurling themselves against the
order of the West. Timing was cruel--and exquisite. The
historian's book "What Went Wrong?" was already in galleys by
9/11. He had not written it for the storm. He had all but
anticipated what was to come. This diagnosis of Islam's malady
would become a best seller. In a different setting, Mr. Lewis
had written of history's power. "Make no mistake, those who are
unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the
present and unfit to face the future." We were witnessing an
epic jumbling of past and present. It was no fault of this
historian that we had placed our bet on the death of the past.
Mr. Lewis has lived a long and engaged life, caught up in the
great issues of war and diplomacy--and may he be with us as far
as the eye can see, as long as life and good health permit. Some
of his detractors, with an excessive belief in his talismans,
have attributed to the historian all sorts of large historical
deeds. For some, he is the godfather of the accommodation of
years past between Turkey and Israel. For others, he inspired
the Iraq war, transmitting to Vice President Dick Cheney his
faith in the Iraq campaign as the spearhead of an effort to
reform the Arab world. (It will, of course, help confirm this
view that Mr. Cheney is set to speak to a conference today,
hosted by the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, in honor of
Mr. Lewis.) In more recent writings on the historian, George W.
Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" in Arab-Muslim lands is laid at
Mr. Lewis's doorstep. The president was seen, in one account,
with a marked-up copy of a Lewis article. We have come to a
great irony: the conservative Orientalist holding out democratic
hope for Iraq and its Arab neighbors, while his liberal critics
assert the built-in authoritarianism of the Arab political
tradition.
For Bernard Lewis, there is something now of the closing of a
circle. As a young man, he had been on His Majesty's service
during the Second World War, working for British intelligence
between 1940 and 1945. The young medievalist had been pressed
into modern government work, and that experience had given him
his taste for contemporary political affairs. This new war is
something of a return to his beginnings. For an immensely
gregarious man of unfailing wit and personal optimism, a
darkness runs through his view of the future of the Western
democracies. "In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the
enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues," he told me when
I pressed him for a reading of the struggle against Islamic
radicalism. "In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the
Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today.
We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still
do not understand the nature of the enemy."
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which once translated one of
Mr. Lewis's books into Arabic, said that his book was "the work
of a candid friend or an honest enemy." Either way, the
Brotherhood said, it was the work of "someone who disdains
falsification." And this, to me and to his countless readers,
runs to the core of this historian's craft--the aversion to
falsification. He has been, always, a man of his own
civilization and convictions--a fact that accounts for the deep
reservoirs of reverence felt for him in many Muslim and Arab
lands. In the American academy, he may be swimming against the
currents of postmodernism and postcolonial history; he has given
up his membership in the Middle East Studies Association, of
which he had been a founding member. But countless Arab and
Iranian and Turkish readers recognize their tormented
civilization in what he has written. They know that he has not
come to the material of their history driven by bad faith, or by
a desire for dominion. They take him at his word, a man of the
Anglo-Saxon world, convinced that the ways of the West today
carry with them the hopes of other civilizations. In one of his
many splendid books, "Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims,
and Jews in the Age of Discovery," he gave voice to both his
fears and to his faith. "It may be that Western culture will
indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be
its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may
well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the
men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished
and endangered."
Edward Gibbon once called the historian's "I" the "most
disgusting of pronouns." In the main we see very little of that
pronoun in Mr. Lewis's work. But in the academy he belongs to
the ages. He is the peer, and inheritor, of the great Western
scholars of Islam--the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921),
the Dutchman Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), the
Frenchman Louis Massignon (1883-1962), the British Thomas Arnold
(1864-1930), and Mr. Lewis's own teacher, Sir Hamilton Gibb
(1895-1971). Mr. Lewis took to the East to understand his own
world, because, as he tells us, Western civilization "did not
spring like Aphrodite from the sea foam." He wanted to get to
the mainsprings of Western civilization.
I shall set aside the ban on that "most disgusting of pronouns."
I came to know Bernard Lewis the year he made his passage to
America, on the Princeton campus. I was then at the beginning of
my academic career, justifiably obscure and anxious. Mr. Lewis
was one of the academic gods. I approached him with awe. But his
grace was our bridge. I was of the old world he studied; he was
keen to know the name of my ancestral village in southern
Lebanon. I told him it was an obscure place without history, and
gave him its name. He offered me an invitation to examine his
archives, and said that he had the land deeds of that remote
hamlet. It has been like this with Bernard Lewis: We travel by
the light of his work. He weaves for us a web between past and
present, and he can pick out, over distant horizons, storms sure
to reach us before long.
/Mr. Ajami, Majid Khadduri Professor at Johns Hopkins
University's School of Advanced International Studies, is author
of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the
Iraqis in Iraq," forthcoming from the Free Press in July. /
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