Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2006, pages 74, 80

Books

Bernard Lewis: Historian or Lobbyist for War?

By Tahir Ali

“Treachery thy name is Bernard Lewis,” says Ahmed, a former acolyte who was forced to change his opinion of the noted American Jewish scholar after reading in the Oct. 31, 2005 issue of The New Yorker magazine that Professor Lewis had made the following statement to Vice President Dick Cheney: “I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do with Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power.”

Interestingly, no American Jewish organization rebuked Lewis for his racist remarks—while, during the same period, a number of Muslim organizations, notably the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), were denouncing “statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who questioned whether the Holocaust took place and suggested that the state of Israel be dismantled and moved to Europe.”

Nor, after his intolerant views designed to promote war against Iraq became public, has Professor Lewis himself apologized to the Arab community. Instead he sent a letter to the editor of The New Yorker reiterating, “Yes, I do think that Arabs respect power.”

Nor was that all. Using transparently puerile rhetoric, Lewis concluded his letter by quoting the 11th Century Arab thinker Ibn Hezm: “He who treats friend and foe alike will arouse only distaste for his friendship and contempt for his enmity.” Once again Lewis’ message was clear: The Arabs are the enemies, don’t treat them on a par with the world’s other nations.

“This exemplifies the prejudice of the learned,” commented Prof. Agha Saeed, author of the Encyclopedia of Capitalism essay on “Orientalism and Eurocentrism.” “We must distinguish the prejudices of the ignorant,” Saeed contended, “which is relatively much easier to remedy than the prejudices of the learned.”

The latter—enunciated by poets, novelists, philosophers, thinkers, historians and writers—are far harder to detect and much more difficult to correct because they are embedded in facts and couched in bona fide elements of truth, beauty and wisdom.

“Wars often produce coalitions of soldiers, scholars, politicians and clergymen,” Saeed noted. Such a coalition emerged during the recent war against Iraq, and includes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney, Lewis and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition.

Today, one can clearly see why the late eminent writer and theorist Edward Said took such strong exception to Lewis’s ideological penmanship and barely disguised anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim politics. Connecting a number of important theoretical dots in Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, Prof. Shahid Alam writes:

“Edward Said gets to the nub of Lewis’s Orientalist project when he writes that his ”˜work purports to be liberal objective scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material.’ Lewis’s work is ”˜aggressively ideological.’ He has dedicated his entire career, spanning more than five decades, to a ”˜project to debunk, to whittle down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam.’”

Historian-turned-lobbyist Lewis tops the list of Orientalists who have spent a lifetime weaving clever and competent patterns of hate and hostility against Muslims and Islam. Having appointed himself the chief interpreter of Islam and the Muslim world, he has used every critical occasion—change, confusion, conflict, terror, or war—to cleverly insinuate an emergent “Islamic threat” and to prod Western leaders—U.S. decisionmakers in particular—to take swift and strong action against the Muslim world. The substance of his policy recommendations—learned tone and informed commentary notwithstanding—are deeply racist both in conception and application. Like most other Orientalists, he thinks of Muslims and Arabs as beings of a lower order, whose increasing presence in the West constitutes a “third invasion.”

Lewis’s ideological role is shrouded in his role as interpreter of Islamic civilization. Let’s not forget that it was Bernard Lewis and not Samuel Huntington who pioneered the theory of clash of civilizations. He was able to do so because of his mastery of the politics of interpretation.

As E.D. Hirsh perceptively points out: “Who shall choose the cipher key? is the ultimate political question in interpretation.” For far too long Lewis was the one choosing the cipher key, the interpretive template, and the method of understanding Islam in the West. Since 1990, however, he has become too brazen, too obvious, and too reckless. Having been a cheerleader for both the first and the second Gulf wars, he stands exposed for what he is: A pro-Israel zealot lobbying for war against Muslims and Arabs.

Tahir Ali is the author of Muslim Vote: Counts and Recounts (Wyndham Hall, 2004).