Beware,
It’s Bernard Lewis
By Anjum Niaz
The anti-Islam venom spewed out
by some ill-informed westerners won’t take
them anywhere. It would do them a world of good
if they see things in their correct perspective.
The octogenarian is a one-man demolition army against
Islam. He’s been in the business since the
last 50 years, but none has embraced him so fondly
as the Bush White House. He’s revered as a
sage, and among his disciples of neo-cons are Vice-President
Dick Cheney and Richard Perle, Pentagon’s
former policy adviser and an anti-Palestinian Zionist
warrior.
Bernard Lewis is the man who first coined the term,
a ‘clash of civilizations’ in his essay
The Roots of Muslim Rage, later done to death by
Samuel Huntington who borrowed Lewis’s skewed
thesis that the western civilization comprising
a Judeo-Christian bloc forever faced a “hostile
Islamic world hell-bent on the conquest and conversion
of the West.”
Hailed by intellectuals here in America as the “doyen
of Middle Eastern studies,” the “father”
of Islamic studies, “arguably the West’s
most distinguished scholar on the Middle East,”
Lewis’s most recent weapon of mass destruction
against the Muslims exploded over Turkey, when in
an interview to a German newspaper Lewis predicted
that Europe would be Islamic by the end of this
century, thereby putting up red flags all over the
European Union to keep Turkey out of the EU.
Frits Bolkestein of the Netherlands, the outgoing
European Union Commissioner, picked up the Princeton
professor’s remark and warned that the EU
would “implode” if it expands too quickly.
In a hand-wringing dirge, the Dutch keened the fate
of the people of Europe being irrevocably yoked
to the Islamic world.
Having morphed into a journalist, Lewis’s
polemics now religiously appear in The Wall Street
Journal and The Washington Post. He’s more
a sophist than a scholar, observes M. Shahid Alam
in Counterpunch, America’s respected political
newsletter. “This Orientalist tiger has not
changed his stripes over the fifty-odd years that
he has been honing his skills. Now at the end of
his long career - only coincidentally, also the
peak - he presents the summation, the quintessence
of his scholarship and wisdom on Islam and the Middle
East.”
Boasts the right-wing Wall Street Journal: “The
Lewis doctrine in effect has become US policy.”
Indeed, he has persisted in persuading the Bush
administration to topple and invade “unappealing
regimes” arguing that the only languages “they”
understand is brute force. The Muslim world, according
to him, scoffs America when it does not use force,
“that the Americans have gone soft.”
In his blinkered view, the Muslims hate the US,
not because of its foreign policy or support of
Israel, but because of “envy” and “rage”
against Christians: “A feeling of humiliation
- a growing awareness among the heirs of an old,
proud, and long dominant civilization, of having
been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those
whom they regarded as their inferiors.”
For a thousand years, Bernard Lewis says, Islam
was superior to Christendom and dominated its Christian
neighbors. But since the failure of the Ottoman
siege of Vienna in 1683, the Muslims were eclipsed
militarily, economically and scientifically and
have thus never forgiven the West.
The voice that constantly exposed Lewis and his
virulence against Islam fell silent last year. Edward
Said hit back at him in Orientalism that Lewis’s
work “purports to be liberal objective scholarship
but is in reality very close to being propaganda
against his subject”.
Edward Said, professor at Columbia, succumbed to
cancer, leaving the field vast open to Bernard Lewis,
professor at Princeton, to distort facts, gain currency
with Bush and become the ultimate Christian fundo!
Younger by several decades, but with a pretence
of understanding Islam is a woman called Irshad
Manji. Claiming distant Pakistani roots, the 35-year-old,
now settled in Canada, has become quite the rage
among the westerners who would love to see her beat
up Islam, the religion, Manji professes to believe.
And guess who
her buddies are? Yup, they are none other than Lewis’s
gang - Daniel Pipes (who hailed Manji as a bespectacled
Lesbian Muslim Feminist Martin Luther) and Bill
O’Reilly of Fox TV (the holier than thou talk-show
czar who forced his senior producer to have phone
sex and got slapped with a sexual harassment case
that Fox had to clean up after him with a hefty
out-of-court settlement).
Jordy Cummings, a Toronto-based editor of Pure Polemics,
calls Manji’s book The Trouble With Islam,
“fraudulent, confused and contradictory”.
According to her, Manji combines the rationalist
critique of the Muslim leftists with the racist
critique of Zionists: “What intrigued me was
her (Manji’s) bibliography and footnotes -
which revealed it to be the most contradictory of
all books, equally indebted to Eqbal Ahmed and Bernard
Lewis, Paul Wolfowitz and Tariq Ali, neo-cons and
Pakistani socialists.”
Remember Taslima Nasrin? She fled Bangladesh and
today lives in grand exile pampered by the West
because she attacked Islam. Manji’s ambitions
are similar. As host of “Queer Television”
on Toronto’s Citytv, which according to her
is the “world’s first program on commercial
airwaves to explore the lives of gay and lesbian
people,” she has attained a celebrity status.
Oprah Winfrey, impressed by the Muslim lesbian,
has awarded her the first annual Chutzpah Award
for “audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction,”
while Ms magazine named her a “Feminist for
the 21st century.”
Calling herself
‘Muslim Refusenik’, Manji, who sports
spikes sticking out on her head and lives in a bulletproof
glass window apartment in Toronto says, “That
doesn’t mean I refuse to be a Muslim; it means
that I refuse to join an army of automatons in the
name of God.”
She blames the madressah that she attended in Canada
for challenging Islam and says that when she began
asking awkward questions of the Imam she got “booted
out”.
“At this
point, I had a choice to make: I could walk away
from my Muslim faith and get on with being my ‘emancipated’
North American self, or I could give Islam another
chance. Out of fairness to the faith, I gave Islam
another chance. And another. And another. For the
past 20 years, I’ve been educating myself
about Islam. As a result, I’ve discovered
a progressive side of my religion - in theory,”
she says.
The Salman Rushdie wannabe debates why the Muslims
hate the Jews, gays and treat their women bad. While
I have no issue with some of her talking points,
for example the shabby treatment meted out to our
women or an ingrained hatred against the Jews by
the Muslims, the trouble I have with Manji is that
she comes across as a lightweight, a mere chatterbox,
full of herself and an opportunist to boot.
Fellow Torontonian Jordy Cummings perhaps sums her
best in her article, Hey, Irshad, your 15 minutes
are up: “The fact is that Manji is a fraudulent
opportunist, not a feminist or a secularist, but
a confused little bourgeois with an axe to grind,
who has been used by the Israel lobby against the
very beliefs she professes to have.”
Contempt for Islam by outsiders is no new phenomenon.
Islamic Spain’s contribution to the West has
studiously been wiped out by scholars like Lewis.
William Dalrymple in The truth about Muslims reminds
us that the “basic facets of western civilization
as paper, ideas of courtly love, algebra and the
abacus passed on into Europe”, as did the
Unani medicine. Read George Makdisi of Harvard University
and discover that terms like “fellows”,
holding a “chair” or practices such
as inaugural lectures and academic robes can be
traced back to the mediaeval Islam.
Admits the great mediaevalist Sir Steven Runciman
in his 3-volume history of the Crusades, “Our
civilization has grown out of the long sequence
of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident,”
underscoring that the Crusades were in effect barbarian
invasions against the Muslims.
Who were the real heirs of the Roman civilization?
In Runciman’s view, they were not the knights
of Christendom, but the “sophisticated Byzantines
of Constantinople and the cultivated Arab caliphate
of Damascus.”
Islam today has lost its glory. It is much more
misunderstood since Al Qaeda arrived. The mullahs
have hijacked it to make it appear anti-West, anti-women,
anti-liberal. Many mosques decidedly incite cruelty,
killing and hatred.
As far as hating the Christians and Jews is concerned,
says historian Richard Fletcher, Prophet Muhammad
(PBUH) didn’t think he was “founding
a new religion as much as bringing the fullness
of divine revelation, partially granted to earlier
prophets such as Abraham, Moses or Jesus.”
Fletcher quotes Surah 29 of the Quran that says:
“Dispute not with the People of the Book save
in the most courteous manner except those of them
who act unjustly, and say, ‘we believe in
what has been sent down to us and what has been
sent down to you: Our God and your God is one, and
to him we have surrendered.”
Touche Bernard Lewis and Irshad Manji!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
