Bernard Lewis Turns 100

by Reuel Marc Gerecht

Reuel Marc Gerecht is an American writer and political analyst focused on the Middle East. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing primarily on the Middle East, Islamic militancy, counterterrorism, and intelligence. He is a former director of the Project for the New American Century's Middle East Initiative and a former resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Twenty years ago, Bernard Lewis and I were walking along the Thames. We’d just seen a dreary English take on naughty French theater, which provoked remembrances of Paris in the 1930s when Lewis was a student of Louis Massignon, the great Catholic orientalist born in 1883, 33 years before my friend and teacher. A thoroughly secular English Jew, Lewis wryly remembered Massignon, a serious antisemite for whom Lewis could nevertheless express considerable scholarly admiration.

Cataloging Massignon's plusses and minuses provoked another question, omnipresent among Lewis's students who couldn't avoid comparing their intellectual inadequacy with their professor's astounding erudition: "When you look back to when you were young, when you'd started studying Islam, what drove your curiosity?" Lewis's opening surprised me: "My profound sense of inferiority."

One of the greatest scholars of the 20th century, Lewis was in awe of the generation of orientalists who'd come before him, the accomplished men who drank deeply of 19th-century European progress, pride, and discovery before World War I blew it all to hell. Lewis became a greater scholar than his famous Scottish mentor, Hamilton A. R. Gibb, who asked Lewis to write The Arabs in History, a compendious little book, published in 1950, that first revealed Lewis's gift for rendering wide swaths of Islamic history into elegant English prose. The work remains a classic. I asked my old teacher to assess Gibb, who is often exempted from the dubious orientalist list because of his Arabist pedigree, his anti-Zionist sympathies, and his enmity for certain Israel-friendly scholars who were Lewis's friends. Lewis remained affectionate and respectful.

Anyone who has tried to tackle the great classical Islamic languages—Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish—and the European languages necessary for the proper study of Islamic scholarship knows that students don't do this because of patriotism, the will to conquer, or even lust. They do it for knowledge, the deeply human yearning for truth, to explore unknown realms, and to see the "other" as he sees himself. Scholars of foreign lands who hate—and there certainly have been academics who've approached their subjects with enmity—rarely can sustain sufficient interest to do trailblazing work. If any great fault lies with the orientalists, it is that they were sometimes too sympathetic. The same can be said for their less-accomplished successors. ...

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