, the “celebrated,” the “distinguished,” the “great,” the “most celebrated,” the “most distinguished” Islam scholar in the history of the world. In fact, judging by the central aspects of Islam that Lewis has assiduously ignored in the course of his long career, and by his hugely mistaken views on key issues ranging from the treatment of non-Muslims in the Middle Ages, to the Oslo “peace” process, to the prospects for the easy and effortless democratization of Muslim countries, Lewis could more appropriately be thought of as the most overrated Islam scholar in the history of the world.
In the interests of making Fitzgerald’s arguments more accessible to readers, I’ve taken the liberty to abridge the piece, eliminate many of the parenthetical digressions, and introduce paragraph breaks (of which there is only one in the original version). I hope the author will not mind.
Bernard Lewis is busy chipping away at his own monument, so that posterity will be left with far less than if he had been silent these past few years, or at least had owned up to a few mistakes—including his scandalous refusal to admit not only to the mistake of supporting the Oslo Accords, but to the fact that his enthusiasm for those “Accords” made no sense if he took seriously the principles of Islamic law and the model of Al-Hudaibiyya.
Years ago he wrote about the incompatibility of Islam and Democracy. But lately, in his initial enthusiasm for the fantasy-land plan of Iraq the Light Unto the Muslim Nations, he more recently assured us that a kind of democracy was always to be found in the Islamic tradition, that in the Islamic world there has even been great “social mobility,” greater than anywhere else, in Lewis’ formulation, than save possibly in late nineteenth-century America.
As with the great enthusiasm for the transparently-awful Oslo Accords, Lewis apparently does not feel, at a time of great and growing peril, when one should nothing extenuate about Islam, whether out of a desire to keep old friends or patrons, or out of jealousies of others and what they went off and managed to study on their own, or out of an unwillingness to declare a mea-culpa or two, that he might consider admitting, here and there, to some mistakes.
How about an article on the folly from the get-go of the idea of Iraq the Model, and the series of assumptions, all proven to be false, from which that idea, like Topsy, just grew?
Lewis has never yet acknowledged his behind-the-scenes belittling of Bat Ye’or and his own refusal to recognize that the history of dhimmitude—a word he likes to mock as “dhimmi-tude,” as if it is a preposterous, rather than useful, addition to the lexicon—matters, is relevant, is center-stage. Instead we are supposed to believe the word itself is illegitimate—no one, apparently, can add to the wordhoard’s store, even when the word turns out to be most apt and most useful. He has never engaged sympathetically with what is presented in The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam. He has never reviewed the book, never written about it. Instead he just goes around, ignoring or denigrating in various sly ways (that “dhimmi-tude”)the work of Bat Ye’or.
This blind spot has led him to focus almost entirely on what happened to Jews under Islam. He cannot get out of his head the matter of comparative mistreatment (i.e. the greater mistreatment of Jews in Western Christendom than in the world of Islam) and exhibits an unwillingness to treat deeply, or treat at all, the mistreatment of others—including Christians and Zoroastrians in the Middle East.
And since he carefully circumscribes his work geographically, and stays within that Middle East, never wishing to find out just what happened to all those Hindus over 250 years of Muslim rule.
Yet even as Lewis foresees (in a German newspaper) the “Islamization of Europe” by the end of the century, he does not tell us what he thinks should, could, or ought to be done about it. Instead, he contents himself with simply and calmly predicting, as if it were something merely to be noted, not to be horrified by.
Lewis’s comparisons between Europe in the Middle Ages with a supposedly superior “Islamic” civilization are simply insensate. Lewis does not let readers know that high Islamic civilization existed for a few hundred years, at most, on what remained, or had been left, materially and spiritually, by the conquered Jews and Christians. It was those conquered peoples who continued to fructify what is now misleadingly called “Islamic” civilization, after the name of the conquerors. Many of the outstanding figures of that “high Islamic civilization” were either non-Muslims (as the translators) or recent converts, or the children of converts, and still still just a generation away from non-Islamic influences and other, freer ways of thought.
Does anyone think that if Europeans lose control of their own civilization, and through Da’wa and demographic conquest become subject to Muslim rule, that all non-Islamic influences will suddenly end? They will live on, for a while, just as they must have in the Middle East and North Africa, ever-dwindling, but still twitching, still alive, for a while. Lewis doesn’t mention any of that. He doesn’t see it.
Lewis, in fact, gave all this matter of the treatment of non-Muslims under Muslim rule just three short paragraphs, two of them exculpatory, out of 400 pages in his popular survey, “The Middle East.” He continues to ignore the subject of what happened to all those non-Muslims—all those Jews, those Christians, those Zoroastrians, conquered by Islam. Under what conditions did they live? What led some to convert, slowly, over time? What were the effects, for example, of the jizyah? How onerous was it?
See, on this, the remarkable admission of S.D. Goitein, in his late-in-life introduction to “A Mediterranean Society,” that he had completely re-thought his view of the jizya, and had come to understand its full effect as he never had before, after a lifetime of work, some of it devoted to “Arab-and-Jew-convivencia” studies.
Lewis never forgets to pay formulaic treatment to the greatness of Islamic civilization, particularly in his lectures. He compares that civilization to that which existed at the time in Europe, and has the Europeans suffer by his comparison. But his “Middle Ages” are always the Dark Ages, and a caricature to boot.
Bernard Lewis appears to be one of those in whom what he learned in the 1930s as a schoolboy about those European Middle Ages remains fixed forever in amber.
[Bat Ye’or] is free to follow the evidence and be critical, while Lewis has always carefully left his colleagues the out of a glorious past, and to stay away from subjects—the treatment of non-Muslims—that would perhaps have required from him a different conclusion.
And posterity will judge him by what, at this point, he has to tell us of value that will help to prevent, rather than merely to predict, the Islamization of Europe.
His great learning, his linguistic gifts and training, his fluent style, could help that shared, imperilled posterity—his own, and ours.