A
Historian or a Lobbyist for War?
By Tahir Ali
Boston
“Treachery thy name
is Bernard Lewis”, says Ahmed, a former
acolyte who was forced to change his opinion of
noted American Jewish scholar, after reading in
The New Yorker magazine (October 31, 2005, P.
57) that Prof. Lewis had made the following statement
to Vice President Dick Cheney:
I believe that one of the things you’ve
got to do Arabs is hit them between the eyes with
a big stick. They respect power.
Interestingly, no American Jewish organization
has rebuked Bernard Lewis for his racist remarks
designed to incite hate, hostility and war against
Arabs and Muslims, while during the same period
a number of Muslim organizations, notably The
Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), have denounced
“statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who questioned whether the Holocaust
took place and suggested that the state of Israel
be dismantled and moved to Europe.”
Nor has Prof. Lewis apologized to the Arab community
after his intolerant views designed to promote
war against Iraq became public. Instead he sent
a letter to the editor of The New Yorker reiterating,
“Yes, I do think that Arabs respect power
…”
Th at’s not all. In a transparently puerile
rhetorical act, Lewis concluded his letter by
quoting the 11th Century Arab thinker Ibn Hezm:
“He who treats friend and foe alike will
arouse only distaste for his friendship and contempt
for his enmity.” Once again his message
was clear: The Arabs are the enemies, don’t
treat them at par with other nations of the world.
“This exemplifies the prejudice of the learned”,
says Prof. Agha Saeed, author of the Encyclopedia
of Capitalism essay on “Orientalism a nd
Eurocentrism”. Saeed contends, “We
must distinguish the prejudices of the ignorant,
which is relatively much easier to remedy, than
the prejudices of the learned.”
Prejudices enunciated by poets, novelists, philosophers,
thinkers, historians and writers are far harder
to detect and much more difficult to correct because
they are embedded in facts and couched in bona
fide elements of truth, beauty and wisdom.
“Wars often produce coalitions of soldiers,
scholars, politicians and clergymen”, says
Agha Saeed. Such a coalition that emerged during
the recent war against Iraq includes Don Rumsfeld,
Dick Cheney, Bernard Lewis and Pat Robertson.
Today, one can clearly see why eminent writer
and theorist Edward Said had taken such a strong
exception to Bernard Lewis’s ideological
penmanship and barely disguised anti-Arab and
Anti-Muslim politics. Connecting a number of important
theoretical dots in Edwards Said’s seminal
work Orientalism, Prof. Shahid Alam writes:
Edward Said gets to the nub of Lewis’s Orientalist
project when he writes that his “work purports
to be liberal objective scholarship but is in
reality very close to being propaganda against
his subject material.” Lewis’s work
is “aggressively ideological.” He
has dedicated his entire career, spanning more
than five decades, to a project to debunk, to
whittle down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam.”
A critical understanding of Bernard Lewis presupposes
a clear understanding of Orientalism. “Orientalism”,
writes political theorist Samir Amin, “is
not the sum of the works of the Western specialists
and scholars who have studied non-European societies.”
For Amin, “this term refers to the ideological
construction of a mythical ‘orient’
whose characteristics are treated as immutable
traits defined in simple opposition to the characteristics
of the ‘Occidental’ world.”
German political thinker Karl Kautsky further
elucidates the essence of Orientalism that “rests
on the assumption that only the peoples of European
civilization are capable of independent development.
The men of other races are regarded as children,
idiots or beasts of burden, to be treated with
more or less mercy – at any rate beings
of lower kind, which can be controlled according
to our whim.”
Equating Third World peoples with animals makes
it easier to argue that the only language they
understand is force and only thing they respect
is power.
“Orientalism”, writes Edward Said,
the most perceptive critic of this genre, is “a
style of thought based upon on ontological and
epistemological distinctions” between ‘the
Orient’ and ‘the Occident’.
It perceives Oriental or Third World men and women
in direct and permanent opposition to Occidental
or European and North American men and women.
Bernard Lewis, a historian-turned-lobbyist, tops
the list of orientalists who have spent a lifetime
weaving clever and competent patterns of hate
and hostility against Muslims and Islam. Having
appointed himself the chief interpreter of Islam
and the Muslim world, Lewis has used every critical
occasion – change, confusion, conflict,
terror, or war – to cleverly insinuate an
emergent “Islamic threat” and to prod
Western leaders, the US decision-makers in particular,
to take swift and strong action against the Muslim
world. The substance of his policy recommendations,
the learned tone and informed commentary notwithstanding,
are deeply racist both in conception and application.
Like most other Orientalists, he thinks of Muslims
and Arabs as beings of a lower order, whose increasing
presence in the West constitutes a ‘third
invasion”.
There is “an organized attempt to demonize
Islam and Muslim,” observed political scientist
Eqbal Ahmed. This campaign, he said, includes
Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Howard Bloom,
“who wrote the Lucifer Principle. The book’s
argument is that Islam is a satanic, barbarian
civilization.”
Lewis’s ideological role is shrouded in
his role as interpreter of the Islamic civilization.
Let’s not forget that it was Bernard Lewis
and not Samuel Huntington who had pioneered the
theory of clash of civilizations. He was able
to do so because of his mastery of the politics
of interpretation. E. D. Hirsh perceptively points
out: “Who shall choose the cipher key is
the ultimate political question in interpretation.”
For far too long Lewis was the one choosing the
cipher key, the interpretive template, and the
method of understanding Islam in the West. But
since 1990 he has been too brazen, too obvious,
and too reckless. Having been a cheerleader for
both the first and the second Gulf Wars, he stands
exposed for what he is: A pro-Israeli zealot lobbying
for war against Muslims and Arabs.
• Tahir Ali is the author of the book,”MuslimVoteCounts&Recounts”
published 2004 by Wyndham Hall
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