Bernard Lewis

British-born American historian

• Born: May 31, 1916
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 19, 2018
• Place of Death: Voorhees Township, New Jersey

Lewis’s long and distinguished academic career was notable both for his insights and elucidation of the Islamic world and for his prolific output of published work. He was considered one of the West’s preeminent Islamic scholars, though his ideas have also been criticized as Orientalist and his political influence proved highly controversial.

Early Life

Bernard Lewis was born in London to a middle-class family. He developed a love of languages at an early age, which continued throughout his life. Language would become an essential aspect of his extensive historical research. Lewis received his BA from the University of London and went on to do postgraduate studies with Louis Massignon, a noted scholar of Islam, at the University of Paris. He received the diplôme des études sémitiques at Paris and earned his doctorate, with a specialty in the history of Islam, at the University of London’s highly regarded School of Oriental and African Studies in 1939. During this period he considered the legal profession as a career and studied law for a short time, but he soon decided against law as a career and returned to his studies of Middle Eastern history. He began his academic career in 1938 as an assistant lecturer in Islamic history at his alma mater.

In 1940, Lewis enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps, transferring to the Foreign Office in 1941, where he remained until the end of World War II in 1945. He returned in 1945 to the University of London and in 1949 was appointed to the newly created chair in Near and Middle Eastern history. Lewis married Ruth Hélène Oppenhejm in 1947. The couple had two children before their marriage ended twenty-seven years later.

Life’s Work

Lewis’s professional life was largely devoted to scholarship and research. His works on Islam, its history, its nature, and on Islam’s relationship with the West became widely seen as standards in the field. His journal articles and opinion articles are often cited. He was especially an acknowledged authority on Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

Lewis, who described himself as a historian, published his first article in 1937. The article concerned the guilds of the medieval Islamic world, and it was hailed as the most significant work in the area in more than thirty years. His published doctoral dissertation, The Origins of Ismailism (1940), remains an authoritative source, even in Islamic documents and publications. His book The Arabs in History (1950) defines the term Arab in its introduction and does so in a style of writing that is lively, engaging, clear, and accessible.

Lewis’s ability to present the workings of the Islamic and Middle Eastern domain in a manner that tied it to political and cultural events and developments in a rapidly changing world transformed the field from one dominated by traditional Orientalists to one in which historians and researchers who lacked the required linguistic skills could still analyze the region and its peoples. Orientalists were generally defined by their study of the worlds of Africa and Asia through a prism of Western European culture. Though developing greater understanding and respect for their subjects, Orientalists tended to view the Middle East in isolation. It was Lewis, sometimes referred to as the last and "greatest" Orientalist, who brought these studies into the mainstream of history.

Lewis was later criticized by Edward Said, a Jerusalem-born professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York and the author of the now-classic book Orientalism (1978), as the epitome of an Orientalist scholar, a type of academic that Said both disagreed with and considered detrimental to the study of the Middle East and elsewhere. In a well-publicized debate between the two scholars, Lewis took issue with Said’s thesis that one had to be an Arab to truly understand the region.

In 1949, Lewis was invited by the Turkish government to examine the archives of the Ottoman Empire, the first time the archives were opened to a Western scholar. He soon turned his attention to the study of the Ottoman Empire and to modern Turkey, becoming the preeminent Western authority on the region and its history. In 1948, when Israel became a nation, the Arab states began denying entry to Jewish scholars. This lack of access made substantive research on the Middle East by non-Arab scholars significantly more difficult.

In 1974, Lewis accepted a position at Princeton University and relocated to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1982. His scholarly interest in what would become a politically important region of the world to Westerners also eventually (perhaps inevitably) embroiled him in controversy and criticism. One point of controversy was Lewis's statements about the Armenian genocide. The Armenian population of Turkey faced mass killings by Turkish forces in 1894–1896, 1909, and 1915, in a paroxysm of violence in which up to 1.5 million men, women, and children were slaughtered. Lewis described the mass murders as massacres and as the horrific result of war instead of as genocide, claiming that he had found no evidence of a conscious and preconceived decision by the Turkish government to destroy the Armenian minority in its entirety. His public position on the contentious issue subjected him, as well as other scholars who shared his viewpoint, to vitriolic responses that argue, among other things, that he was a tool or even a paid agent of the Turkish government.

Lewis also focused work on the dangers of a proliferating anti-Semitism hidden under a veil of criticism, alleged to be political, of Israel as a nation. In an article in American Scholar (2006), Lewis, after carefully separating anti-Semitism from what he sees as hatred and persecution, critically analyzes the situation and its inherent dangers but leaves further conclusions to the reader.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Lewis became increasingly well known and in demand as an expert on Middle Eastern history and the history and teachings of Islam. He was notoriously consulted by the administration of US president George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq, and was widely seen as stoking the argument for the invasion, despite later claiming he recommended supporting a local rebellion instead. Lewis's critics seized on the fact that he incorrectly predicted that the Iraqi people would enthusiastically welcome American forces as liberators.

Remaining active through his nineties, Lewis made numerous contributions to the scholarly discussion of the Middle East during the first decades of the twenty-first century. In 2012 he published his memoirs, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, cowritten with longtime companion Buntzie Ellis Churchill. Lewis died at a retirement home in New Jersey at the age of 101 on May 19, 2018.

Significance

Lewis surpassed most academics by having his ideas directly contribute to national policy. Despite the objections of critics like Said, Lewis's ideas on Islam proved hugely influential in American thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly in the neoconservative movement. While his later predictions did not always turn out to be accurate, his early sense of the rise of Islamic radicalism established him as a giant in his field.

Lewis achieved numerous honors throughout his career. On March 7, 2007, he accepted the 2007 Irving Kristol Award at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC. In his acceptance address, he discussed his vision of a return of a perception among Muslims that there exists a cosmic struggle between Christianity and Islam, complicated by a triumphalist attitude held by some that is responsible for the growth of Islamic militancy. The subtleties and nuances of the crisis, however, are manifold, and Lewis demanded a focus on the issues. Part of his legacy as a scholar and public intellectual was his insistence that one think things through in the process of learning and understanding.

Bibliography

Ahmad, Mumtaz, Zahid Bukhari, and Sulayman Nyang. Observing the Observer: The State of Islamic Studies in American Universities. Herndon: Intl. Inst. of Islamic Thought, 2013. Print.

Ajami, Fouad. "A Sage in Christendom: A Personal Tribute to Bernard Lewis." Wall Street Journal 1 May 2006. Print..

Humphreys, R. Stephen. "Bernard Lewis: An Appreciation." Humanities 11.3 (1990): 17–20. Print.

Huntington, Samuel P. "The Clash of Civilizations." Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): 22. Print.

Joffe, Lawrence. "Bernard Lewis Obituary." The Guardian, 6 June 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/06/bernard-lewis-obituary. Accessed 6 July 2018.

Lewis, Bernard. The Arabs in History. 6th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Lewis, Bernard, and Buntzie Ellis Churchill. Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian. New York: Viking, 2012. Print.

Martin, Douglas. "Bernard Lewis, Influential Scholar of Islam, Is Dead at 101." The New York Times, 21 May 2018,www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/obituaries/bernard-lewis-islam-scholar-dies.html. Accessed 6 July 2018.

Netton, Ian Richard, ed. Orientalism Revisited: Art, Land and Voyage. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.