The appalling Bernard Lewis

(Be sure not to miss this addition to the discussion, where Lewis reveals his and the neocons’ true insanity.)

Anyone who thinks that the criticisms of Bernard Lewis that have repeatedly been made at this site are overstated should read Lewis’s lecture, “Freedom and Justice in Islam,” printed in the September issue of Imprimis. It is an appalling whitewash of Islam consisting of false arguments, bad analogies, vague definitions, historical ignorance, intellectual laziness, and blank avoidance of core truths about Islam (he does not mention a single Islamic doctrine in the entire article) worthy of Condoleezza Rice and her twin brain, the mahdi from west Texas. Indeed, Lewis actually echoes Rice’s favorite idiotic argument (or could he be the source of it?) that we will realize that things are not going so terribly in Iraq when we remember that our own democracy was never that great either, because women in the 19th century were “disenfranchised.” I thought Lewis was bad; I never thought he was this bad.

Lewis, universally and ritualistically praised as the world’s most distinguished Islam scholar, is, I now realize, an intellectual phony. But he is worse than that. Considering the enormous respect, the almost godlike stature that he enjoys among conservatives (that he still enjoys, notwithstanding the total discrediting of his expectations of Islamic democracy over the last three years), he is nothing less than a menace.

But, as I’ve said a hundred times before, Bush and his specious advisors are saved by their opponents. The total absence of rational and responsible arguments on the left assures that the likes of Bush, Rice, and Lewis remain the only plausible “mainstream” game in town.

- end of initial entry—

A reader knowledgeable in Islam writes:

I had come across this drivel earlier and was equally appalled. And he’s almost bionic, with no signs of gracefully fading away, despite his intellectual dotage. Should I ask my mom in Florida to go to one the local malls and get him a pair of plaid paints, white socks, and white shoes with 100 coupons for the early bird special at Denny’s and see if he’ll slink off into retirement there?

KE writes from Turkey:

I’ve just read your comments on Bernard Lewis’s lecture. Now I didn’t read the whole thing, and I most certainly don’t consider Lewis as one of my mentors or anything, but the things he says about the Ottoman reality is very close to the historical truth. Modernization had terrible effects on the traditional structures on this part of the world. Had they been maintained, the Middle East could have been a much more stable, law-abiding, peaceful place.

And yet, you have nothing to spare for the man other than piling opprobrium. You seem to expect comments on Islamic “doctrine,” as if history is a Hegelian play-out of geists of this or that variety when in fact it’s a messy, intricate web of actual events that defy being reduced to ideological categorization. It seems that from your perspective, the world only functions via doctrines.

I remember you being “staggered” when I mentioned women in Istanbul dressing half naked. Now was that also due to the fact that what I related contained no references to the Islamic doctrine?

LA replies:

Lewis says, inter alia, that the traditional world of Islam was “democratic” simply because the Ottoman sultan “consulted” with various parties before making a decision. Thus either a system is an absolute one-man dictatorship (the straw man he has set up), or it is a “democracy.” Such Muslim “democracy,” he then says, was undercut by the rise of modern Arab despotisms. This is the caricature to which he reduces the Muslim world, a caricature in which the actual structure of sharia-based Muslim society is entirely absent. Then he goes on to imply that because traditional Islam had “consultation,” while 19th century American women were “disenfranchised,” traditional Islam may have been at least as democratic as imperfectly democratic America! And throughout this discussion, as I mentioned, he does not have one reference to sharia or jihad or dhimmitude or any other aspect of actual Islam and the way it deals with non-Muslims. It is a whitewash worthy of Karen Armstrong. Lewis has become the Karen Armstrong of the neocons.

Carl Simpson writes:

I wonder what the esteemed Dr. Lewis would have to say about this story about a Muslim cab driver in London who refused to take a blind passenger and her dog because of the Muslim shia rule that dogs are unclean. The more I read and learn, the more I am forced the realize that Islam and liberalism are very similar insofar that there is no bottom, no point at which the ideology is held in check by a transcendent morality. Leftists, whether of the Marxist or National Socialist flavor, slaughtered untold millions in their attempts to achieve utopia from Lenin’s USSR to Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Muslims are similarly “inspired,” so to speak. Whether it’s firing AK-47s at the backs of fleeing children in Beslan, indiscriminate slaughter via suicide bombs in Israel, or refusing a blind woman’s guide dog to ride in a cab in dhimmified Britain, there is no level too low for these folks. They will stop at nothing, literally.

LA replies:

One of the staggering falsehoods in Lewis’s lecture was that he presents a handful of Arab despotisms as representative of the “bad” modern Islam while he ignores, e.g., Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini brought back the traditional shia regime. How does Iran fit into his scheme of “good” trad Islam supplanted by “bad” mod Islam? It doesn’t, so he ignores it.

KE replies:

I think I’m beginning to see what you mean. Still, this deserves a bit further pondering.

The Ottomans did use that “consulting” system a lot—the palace always required that the elders, the “natural aristocracy” of all groups, were consulted. And it wasn’t just something on the appearance. It was deeply ingrained in all social, commercial, military, governmental practices. I know this for fact.

(Yes, you’ll say “dhimmitude”, etc., but you have to put this in perspective. Dhimmitude didn’t mean non-Muslims were treated like slaves in the American South. How else would our Jewish citizens, for instance, have so much commercial privileges and success, and influence in the governmental and among the intelligentsia so as to be an integral part of our republican revolution, otherwise?)

I’m not sure but my hunch is, by appearing to claim that that was a “democratic” practice, Lewis is playing some kinda diplomacy here—a type of back-patting. He knows that he has an audience—at least among the Turks—and he’s trying to say, “Democratic principles are not necessarily an entirely alien Western import to you. You had your governmental traditions which contained its core principles.”

I may be wrong, but knowing his intended audience, that is my impression.

I’ll read on and think about this more.

LA replies:

“Consulting” does not mean democracy. All government and regimes, short of some absolute tyranny, consult with the different elements of the society. Lewis says that traditional Islamic regimes consulted, therefore Islam was at least quasi-democratic, therefore Islam can be democratized now. This is empty verbiage—a false, abstract syllogism divorced from the reality of Islam.

Andrew Bostom writes in reply to KE:

Would the kind of “Ottoman reality” described below, which took place four years after the first iteration of the (clearly failed) Tanzimat reforms in 1839, be considered more or less “traumatic” than the modernization that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? Is an “intricate historical web” on display in this hideous event, or standard Shari’a punishment for apostasy, as applied in Islamic societies over a millennium, including under the “progressive” Ottoman Empire for almost its entire duration ?

Sir Henry Layard, the British archeologist, writer, and diplomat (including postings in Turkey), described this abhorrent spectacle which he witnessed in the heart of Istanbul, during the autumn of 1843:

“An Armenian who had embraced Islamism [i.e., common 19th century usage for Islam] had returned to his former faith. For his apostasy he was condemned to death according to the Mohammedan law. His execution took place, accompanied by details of studied insult and indignity directed against Christianity and Europeans in general. The corpse was exposed in one of the most public and frequented places in Stamboul, and the head, which had been severed from the body, was placed upon it, covered by a European hat.” Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia, London, 1887, pp. 454-55.

KE replies to Andrew Bostom:

Mr. Bostom,

I’ve just read your reply to my comments. Thank you for straightening me out on this. Obviously I’m living in a dreamland, whereas you, after studying “Islamism/Islam” for the last couple of years, obviously know many times more, and better, about my country than I do.

Who knows, I might even be a crypto-“liberal,” or maybe I’m putting white-wash on the Islamic reality, or I’m creating “moral equivalence” etc. etc. I’m sure even the way we relieve ourselves is Islamic and thoroughly politicized.

Also, apparently there is no “intricate [historical] web” here in this part of the world: since an “apostate” was executed due to sharia law in 1843 (and who knows whether that’s the only reason why he was executed), that shows that life here has always been some sort of a Hegelian video game with Muzzies-the-irredeemably-bad-ass-mofos against everything-good-and-decent (most-likely-Judeo-Christian) in the world. Each and every one of us is a monster, a robot-like creature enacting every obscure surah of the Koran every minute of our lives.

That’s very enlightening. I’m sold.

Your should be awarded another PhD due to his scintillating anthropological accuracy.

Now that 9/11 happened and that unhealing wound has been cut open in the bosom of America’s pride, there seems to be no way to see the world through genuinely conservative (i.e. paleoconservative) eyes, and accept that different societies come through different historical and anthropological realities, that making comparisons based on ideological orientation (which includes “religious” views, as well) is misleading. That the only way of sanity is DISENGAGEMENT and ISOLATION, not endless finger-pointing and mutual blame-shifting. (Ah, but what I’ve just said also shows that I’m an evil “relativist,” right?)

Anyway, do keep up the good work of ripping everything under the sun in the Islamic geography from their socio-historical context, and bundling them all together to create one massive of “evil directed against civilization” bloc picture. Obviously, the West, which has now sunk so deep into a comfort-zone and its self-inflicted decadence, will not be able to pull itself together unless that sorta gargantuan picture of threat is created.

William A. writes:

One point particularly struck me in Bernard Lewis’s Hillsdale address. He made the following statement:

“In the mountains of Afghanistan, which the Soviets had conquered and had been trying to rule, the Taliban were able to inflict one defeat after another on the Soviet forces, eventually driving the Red Army out of the country to defeat and collapse.”

That is an astonishing statment.

The Red Army left Afghanistan in 1989.

The Taliban was founded in 1993 or 1994 and did not control Afghanistan until 1996.

The Taliban, as such, had nothing to do with the defeat of the Soviet Red Army. It is amazing that a scholar of Lewis’s reputation could make such a blunder.

Incidentally, it is a blunder which very much adds to the prestige of the Taliban.

LA replies:

You are right. I pointed the same out to the friend to whom I was reading the article aloud (which took quite a while, as I kept interrupting myself to express my astonished indignation at Lewis’s statements).

I mean, my gosh, the most casual reader about Afghanistan (e.g., me) knows that the Taliban came into existence from certain mujahadeen elements AFTER the Soviets had been driven out.

Ok, one could say (I’m not saying it, but one could say it) that the mistake is no big deal in itself. Lewis is 90 after all. But the mistake is not by itself, and the fact remains that the mainstream conservative world remains at this man’s feet.

It’s no comfort to say that Lewis is old and losing his touch, given the fact that the world is still heeding him despite his losing his touch!

A reader adds:

And he or Imprimis was so lazy, or maybe Imprimis so ga-ga over him, that they didn’t even suggest he correct it, or correct it themselves. Or perhaps they don’t even realize the mistake yet!

Dean E. writes:

Lewis’s last line sums it up:

“Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.”

It’s the neocon mindset in a thimble.

LA replies:

Thank you for pointing out that quote to me. I knew I had read that in the last couple of days but I couldn’t remember who had said it.

The statement is almost literally insane. Lewis can imagine no other means of national self-defense than that which is impossible. Even he admits that success in bringing freedom to Muslims is highly unlikely. Nevertheless he bases our prospects of national and civilizational survival on that unlikely event, rather than on something that is achievable, such as the isolation and containment of the Islamic world.

This explains the amazing desperateness of the Bush/democratization supporters that we’ve seen over the last three years, why the neocons keep insisting against all evidence that democratization is possible and is succeeding, why they call an election (an election conducted under foreign occupation and with the whole country shut down under martial law) “democracy,” why they keep saying every six weeks that “this” is now the turning point toward democracy, why “this” is now the light at the end of the tunnel, why even a sharia constitution is compatible with democracy. Since a single universal democratic world including all peoples and cultures is the only possible political organization for the neocons, therefore there is no other way to achieve security than to integrate all peoples into that single democratic system. The neocons’ false premise, that only a single uniform democratic world is acceptable, leads to their utopian project, that we must “bring” freedom to the Muslims—as though you can “bring” freedom to someone who doesn’t want it!

In the last sentence of my two-part article, “The Search for Moderate Islam,” I pointed out the madness of pinning our hopes for safety on the Muslims’ turning out to be moderates rather than on our own actions to defend ourselves. Lewis has now confirmed that such madness is indeed his position: Either the Muslims embrace and put into practice the freedom we are offering them, or they will destroy us. Our survival depends 100 percent on what the Muslims do.

The neocons are such total ideologues that for them only the neocon utopia can save us from destruction. But since a utopia by definition does not and cannot exist, we are doomed, yet, since this utopia is our only hope of survival, we must still strive to reach it, in the slight chance that it can somehow exist.

I now understand better than before the florid irrationality of the neocons that I have commented about so much during these last few years.

Jeff in England writes:

I too got partially carried away in the insanity of neoconservatism. I now see clearly that American neo-conservatism is insane and that mass Islamic democratisation is impossible and even undesirable, as “democracies” like HAMAS and LEBANON are proving. So my anti-war friends are welcoming me back despite our “bigger picture” differences. Yes, Lewis is beyond appalling and just plain stupid as are all the Bushites.

A reader writes:

With that closing line, Lewis is reaching for an argument that he has not really developed. He’s been trying to convince people that democracy is possible, but then he almost demagogically says that you don’t do this, they will destroy you! As if he knows his arguments have not been convincing and then resorts to fear and alarm in order to put the seal to his proposal.

Andrew Bostom reminds us that Lewis is a hypocrite on the issue of freedom (“hurriyya”), since Lewis himself had previously stated in definitive terms that Muslims have consistently rejected the idea of self-government as something alien to Islam. As Dr. Bostom wrote at FrontPage Magazine:

Bernard Lewis, in his analysis of hurriyya for the venerated Encyclopedia of Islam, discusses this concept in the latter phases of the Ottoman Empire, through the contemporary era. After highlighting a few “cautious” or “conservative” (Lewis’ characterization) reformers and their writings, Lewis maintains,

… there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or conduct of government—to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of political thought in the West. While conservative reformers talked of freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even experimented with councils and assemblies, government was in fact becoming more and not less arbitrary …

Lewis also makes the important point that Western colonialism ameliorated this chronic situation:

During the period of British and French domination, individual freedom was never much of an issue. Though often limited and sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and better protected than either before or after.

And Lewis concludes with a stunning observation, when viewed in light of the present travails in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, President Bush’s hagiographic assessment notwithstanding:

In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.

Igor R. writes:

In KE’s response to Bostom, he has demonstrated that even an atheist and “pro-Western” Muslim is, unless he disassociates himself completely from Islam by converting to another religion, emotionally bound to Islam (in KE’s case, Turkish Islam).

Bostom merely dissents from Lewis’s romanticized view of a progressive Ottoman Empire, and KE responds with a string of ad hominems. KE’s reply is a mix of Ralph Peters (e.g. “Muzzies-the-irredeemably-bad-ass-mofos against everything-good-and-decent (most-likely-Judeo-Christian) in the world”) and the typical Muslim charge of infidel ignorance. KE’s claim that he knows more about the Ottoman Empire than Bostom because he is Turkish is similar to a Muslim claiming that he knows more about Islam because he is Muslim. Scholarship matters. What Bostom has published in the “few years” he has studied Islam is nothing short of amazing. If KE has issues with Bostom’s scholarship, it would behoove him to cite specific examples instead of acting like an irrational rightwing Turkish nationalist every time someone “insults” Turkishness.

But I have to give KE some credit, the Ottoman Empire did not follow Islam to the letter of the law and neither did all of its citizens. The Empire did build churches and synagogues when it was needed and not every Ottoman Muslim had jihad on his mind since religious fervency varies from person to person. Although the Ottoman Empire was pragmatic in many respects, we shouldn’t elevate that pragmatism over its Islamic identity, which it did take very seriously. Jihad, sharia, and dhimmitude are central to Islam and they were central to the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans did wage an unprovoked jihad against European nations, capital punishment for apostasy was enforced, and despite what Bernard Lewis says about the devshirme, it was an institution greatly feared by the Balkan Christians and Jews. The Ottomans didn’t follow the Qur’an like robots (they drank after all), but Islam was already a part of their historical and anthropological reality.

Bostom is merely bringing to light the pervasiveness of the institutions of jihad, sharia, and dhimmitude. If certain aspects of each institution were untenable, then they weren’t followed much like how the Mughals didn’t kill every polytheistic Hindu because there were just too damn numerous. But if the ruling elites were aware of the laws and theology and if they could enforce them, then they would.

LA replies:

I agree with Igor, and I personally was surprised and disappointed at KE’s inordinate and ad hominem attack on Andrew Bostom. It was a dramatic departure from the tone of KE’s previous e-mails, many of which I have posted at VFR.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 07, 2006 01:37 AM | Send