Lewis of Arabia
A visit with America's greatest Middle East sage.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Tuesday, September 23, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
PRINCETON, N.J.--The professor leaned forward, his face, briefly, a picture of fun: "Pay attention to the joke," he said. "The joke is the only form of political comment that is authentic in the Middle East--and for the most part uncensored." He then told a joke now doing the rounds in that part of the world: "Two Iranians lament the state of their country. Finally, one says to the other, 'What we need here is a bin Laden.' 'Are you crazy?' his friend gasps. 'No!' the first Iranian says. 'That way the Americans would come and rescue us.'"
The professor, on a roll, then told another joke: "What is the real slogan in the Middle East?" he asked, then paused. "It's 'Yankee go home . . . and take me with you!'"
There you have it--a pithy lesson, worth hours of CNN, in modern Middle Eastern truths.
Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, is an utterly predictable man. I mean this, naturally, as a compliment.
Mr. Lewis is a person of whom the following can be said with certainty: If you have a meeting with him, he will be on time, with clockwork precision; if you are the tiniest bit late, he will start to get anxious almost at once; if he is in a discussion with someone who is talking nonsense, or peddling cant, he will make his weariness plain to his interlocutor (albeit politely); and if you ask him for his thoughts in his areas of expertise--the Middle East, Turkey, the culture and politics of the Muslim world, the relation between Islam and modernity--he will always be encyclopedic, original and as near to irrefutable as a man can get in a field that is so combustible.
In our age of posturers and instant experts, it's refreshing--and, of course, depressing, for one is made aware of how few there are--to meet a proper public intellectual. By that I mean a man who thinks for a living, but who does not let the living get in the way of the thinking. Mr. Lewis is an old-fashioned, assiduous scholar, now retired from formal academic tenure. He's 87, and could so easily have slumped into comfortable retirement in his spacious Princeton home--purchased, he informs me, when academic salaries and property prices could be plotted on the same graph. But he's busier, in the sense of meeting public demands on his time--"oh, conferences, dinners, interviews, op-eds," plus calls from the White House and calls from Baghdad--than he's ever been in his career, which began in 1938 with an assistant lectureship in Islamic history at London's School of Oriental and African Studies.
Sept. 11 gave rise to a public hunger for comprehension of the Islamic Other, and although numerous men and women now hold forth on the subject, Mr. Lewis was the one to whom everyone turned first, the only one who was ready--two years ago--not merely with answers but with a philosophy. And he spoke not just of the present--of bin Laden, of al Qaeda--but of the Muslim past. He was the first to explain 9/11, and the conflict between the West and the Islamic world, in terms of a historically discernible (and, since the fall of the Moors in Spain, continual) Muslim decline. This wasn't solely explicable in terms of contemporary "humiliations"--such as the perceived injustices in Palestine, the sanctions against Iraq, the income disparities between the Christian world and the Muslim, and so forth. Blame for these differences in civilization lay with the Muslim world, and its failure to modernize. "If they can abandon grievance and victimhood," he wrote in "What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East"--a zestful, short book published after 9/11, and required reading for everyone but the most wilfully ignorant--". . . they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization. For the time being, the choice is their own." Note the words, unsentimental, unyielding, yet redemptive. There's hope. They can fix their state(s) if they want to. The choice is their own. (The book was in galleys on 9/11: it wasn't a response to 9/11, but a work of prescience.)
Of all the scholars of Islam, Mr. Lewis is the one whom Muslims would do best to heed. So I asked him recently if "What Went Wrong?" had been translated into Arabic. Not yet, apparently, though there's a version on the way. But "nine or 10" of his other books have been translated into Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Of one, "The Middle East and the West," published in 1968, he shares a charming story. "It was promptly translated into Hebrew by Israel's Defense Ministry, and into Arabic--by Egypt's Muslim Brothers!" The latter, a fundamentalist group, published it in two versions, a full-length one, and as a shortened pamphlet to be sold outside mosques. The pamphlet's editor, in his introduction, paid Mr. Lewis an austere compliment, one he considers among the finest he has received. He wrote this of the professor: "I don't know who this man is. He is either a candid friend or an honest enemy, but in either case, one who refuses to deal in falsehoods."
In other words, he is frank without being transparent, a man of shades. Speaking of Iraq, he says, "I have different moods on different days. But overall, I'm cautiously optimistic. Some days there's more caution than optimism." U.S. troops had come under fire again on the day we met, and he was impatient to stress that it's time that "we put into effect an Iraqi government in Baghdad." He doesn't, emphatically, mean elections; those "should be the culmination of a political process, not its beginning." Instead, he'd like to see in place an administration of Iraqi "notables," responsible for overseeing the rule of law and freedom of expression. These last concepts, he says, "are not alien notions" in the Middle East. "What is alien is the idea of representation, and the notion of corporate or majority decision." Instead, there is a "tradition of consensus and consultation," one which was, in Iraq, devastated by Saddam's tyrannical rule. (The tradition of consensus, more generally, was destroyed in the Middle East by material changes: "Any tinpot ruler today has more resources at his disposal, and less need to consult his people, than Suleyman the Magnificent, or Haroun-al-Rashid.")
Lest you misunderstand, Mr. Lewis isn't a man who believes that democracy--however alien--cannot work in the Middle East. He believes it can. But he's a crusty realist: "Democracy is a strong medicine, which you have to give to the patient in small, gradually increasing doses. If you give too much too quickly, you kill the patient." But give you must. After all, "we've given the administration in Afghanistan, a place far more backward--and Iraq is not, by the region's standards, backward--an Afghan face. Why not the same for Iraq?" Of course the more complex devices of democracy--such as federalism, with its centrifugal pulls--must wait. "I'm not sure a federal constitution will work in Iraq. It's too sophisticated at this stage. Relaxation of authority has to come gradually. You can't create a functioning democracy overnight."
To his critics, this will confirm that Mr. Lewis is paternalist, a Western--and they say this with distaste--orientalist. But Mr. Lewis offers a refreshing contrast to the doom-mongers who extrapolate feverishly from every shootout in Fallujah, every dustup in which an American soldier is shot, or an Iraqi killed. Mr. Lewis has high hopes for Iraq. Why? Their "cultural and intellectual standards"--set high in the years before Saddam--have "miraculously, if precariously, survived his ravages." Also, the status of women is high in Iraq. As Mr. Lewis puts it--perhaps paraphrasing a desert proverb--"women are half the population and mothers of the other half." In the early formative years, it makes "a great deal of difference to have an educated mother." But his main reason for optimism is that "Iraqis have gone through everything, and are much less likely to be taken in by the fanatical groups in the region."
Although we "keep voicing fears that democracy won't work in Iraq, that's not what they're saying in the Middle East." There's a real terror there among the despots "that democracy in Iraq will work." Here, Mr. Lewis rests his case, as if to ask, Is there anything more to be said?
And here, one might well ask the same question, in echo of his conviction: Is there?
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal |
