Bernard Lewis is immensely informative and readable in his many books on
Islamic history and culture; he is not, however, as his academic career
might suggest he is, scrupulously detached and impartial. One begins to
realize this when one notices the topics and issues he does NOT focus upon
anywhere in his extensive opus: the life and character of Muhammad, the
precise status of the Christians and Jews under Islam, the oppression of
women under Islam, and the genocide of the Christian Armenians by the
Turks
in 1915. These topics he glosses over very briefly. A few examples will
illustrate his islamophile tendency:
Regarding the original revelation to Muhammad in the cave on Mount Hira
when
Muhammad was commanded to Recite! Lewis in "The Middle East" mentions that
Gabriel almost stifled him, but doesn't mention the further interesting
detail that the encounter with the angel made Muhammad suicidal.
In the same work (p57) Lewis mentions that Jews and Christians were
permitted to practise their religions by the conquering Arabs; regarding
the
rest he says coyly: "For those who were not monotheists and possessed no
recognized scriptures, the alternatives were harsher, but there were few
if
any such in the regions ruled by the early Arab conquerors." The harsher
penalty of course was death, and both Zoroastrians and Hindus were not
accepted as dhimmis, enjoying the limited freedoms of Jews and
Christians,
until later when the impracticality of slaughtering pagans became evident.
Lewis explains the spread of Arabic among the conquered peoples (but it
did
not spread among the Persians and the Hindus) in the following terms
(p58):
"The prestige of the idiom [Arabic] of an aristocracy of conquerors, the
practical value of the language of government and commerce, the richness
and
diversity of an imperial civilization, and perhaps most of all the immense
reverence accorded to the sacred language in which the new revelation was
written, all helped to further the assimilation by the Arabs of their
subject peoples." This is very flattering to the Arabs, and Lewis is so
anxious to flatter them that he does not notice that the Arabs at the
beginning of their imperial expansion did NOT possess "the richness and
diversity of an imperial civilization." In a well known phrase, as regards
culture, all the Arabs brought from Arabia was sand and lice.
In explaining the rise of a class of half-Arabs, who were in conflict with
full-blooded Arabs, Lewis remarks that "The exercise of the immemorial
rights of the victors over the vanquished rapidly increased the numbers of
these half-Arabs" (p60). Again he is coy, but he refers to the rights that
Muslim soldiers had to rape and enslave, and enslave in concubinage, women
captured in war. The Muslims exercised this right not because of
immemorial
tradition, but because the Koran explicitly accords them this right. It
has
been claimed by the insurrectionists in Chechnya and is taught in
Palestinian institutions to this day.
Why is it that Lewis does not write as an impartial academic, setting out
the whole truth without distortion? His many books have been translated
into
many Islamic languages, and he clearly wishes his work to be acceptable to
Muslims. Why is this? No doubt vanity plays a part and he values his
Muslim
reader****p, but Lewis has political ambitions.He was born British and
worked
for the British Foreign Office. It is said that he emigrated to the US
because he didn't have the influence in the FO that he thought he should
have. He obtained it under Bush and advised him, disastrously, on the
Iraqi
intervention. Lewis is an admirer of Turkey and Ataturk and believed that
a
secularizing, Westernizing elite could be brought to power in Iraq after
the
dislodgement of Saddam. It seems to me that Lewis's books aimed at a
Middle-Eastern reader****p are meant to help towards the creation of a
secularizing, Westernizing educated class in the Muslim countries.
Certainly
this is what is needed in the Islamic countries, and laudable though
Lewis's
aim is it does not make for completely honest historiography.
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