Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Conflicted Legacy of Bernard Lewis: A Clash of Interpretations
The Conflicted Legacy of Bernard Lewis: A Clash of Interpretations
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.
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.
111111111111111111111
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
11111111111111111111111
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