Bernard Lewis’s latest evidence that Muslims yearn for democracy

In 2002 and 2003, Bernard Lewis, universally considered the world’s top Islam scholar, argued not only that Muslims were ready for democracy, but that they actively desired that the U.S. invade dictatorial Muslim countries to impose democracy on them. As he indicated in interviews at the time, including a compelling appearance on the Charlie Rose program in 2003 which I saw, he based this view on what his extensive contacts in the Muslim world had told him. Who these contacts were did not become apparent to me until later, when I learned that Lewis is something of a celebrity in Turkey and is very popular among the secular Westernized elite of Istanbul and a few other Muslim capitals. When he said that his Muslim contacts wanted the U.S. to intervene, it was the opinions of this highly unrepresentative and secularized Muslim elite, with whom he socializes, to which he was referring.

Well, by now we all know the results of Lewis’s “expert” knowledge of “Muslims’” desires: Lewis had meetings with Vice President Cheney, who passed on Lewis’s information to Condi’s Twin Brain, and the rest is history.

But that’s not the end of the story. In an intellectual establishment consisting of the neocons, led by the neocons, and run for the neocons, Lewis has never been asked a single critical question about his disastrously off-base judgments in the past, and so he is free to go on repeating them—not only his nonsense about Muslims wanting democracy (which he couches with various qualifications but still insists on), but his related fantasy about Islamic extremism being a “perversion” (and a Western-inspired perversion at that) of true, traditional Islam.

Last week he was interviewed in the Jerusalem Post by Ruthie Blum, daughter of Midge Decter and step-daughter of Norman Podhoretz.

Blum writes:

… Lewis’s passion for medieval Arabic texts and respect for what he calls “one of the great religions” has not prevented him from being a caustic critic of radicalization among modern Muslims. On the contrary, if anything, his erudition has led him to assert unequivocally that the extremists have perverted their own traditions beyond recognition.

Still, says Lewis, “there are hopeful signs” indicating movement toward change. He cites, for example, his Jordanian friends’ reaction to watching Israeli television and seeing Arab Knesset members openly attack the government with impunity. They are at once shocked and envious. Freedom tends to have that effect on those who do not enjoy it. Which is why, Lewis explains, “one of the things that even the most oppressive regimes cannot cope with today is modern communications—the Internet and so on. People know things now in a way and to an extent that were inconceivable in earlier times. They know, for example, how bad things are in their societies, because they see the contrast with the West. And there are more and more people interested in creating open societies.” [Emphasis added.]

Conceive of the layers of vanity and illusion piled one on another here. Lewis’s highly educated, secularized Jordanian friends, on the basis of watching Israeli tv, tell Lewis that they think Israeli freedom is cool, and, this, to Lewis, is a “hopeful sign” of a general Muslim movement toward Western democracy!

Another of Lewis’s off-base notions seems to be derived from Thomas Friedman’s years of promoting the Oslo “peace” process. As Friedman effused in column after column between 1993 and 2000, modern communications, tv, laptops, globalization, were leading Muslims beyond their Muslim identity to a new global consciousness, in which, among other things, they would accept peace with the Jews and no longer be opposed to the existence of Israel—because they would be too busy playing with their laptops to worry about ancient blood feuds and the commands of Allah. In the above quote from his interview, Lewis has simply translated Friedman’s argument that “laptops make Muslims ready to accept Israel” into “the Internet makes Muslims ready to accept democracy.” And let us remember that Lewis, the world’s most “distinguished” Islam scholar, was, along with Friedman, a strong supporter of the disastrous Oslo process.

When someone has repeatedly been as fatally wrong as Lewis, about Muslim democratization, about Oslo, why doesn’t his reputation suffer, even a little? It’s because the neocons inhabit their own world, and Lewis is one of its gods. But how odd it is, that a group so parochial, so self-interested, so locked up its own fat (Ps. 17:10), should profess to know the single universal truth for all mankind!

—end of initial entry—

A reader writes:

This makes me so mad I can’t frame an answer—the hopeful sign is that his Jordanian friends envy the freedom Arabs have in Israel? That shows how freedom spreads? Does that make them think well of Israel and grateful to it and accepting of it?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 10, 2008 10:36 PM | Send