Signatures
Page 18
BERNARD LEWIS
Faith and Power
Religion and Politics in the Middle East
2010
IN THE LATTER PART of his life, Bernard Lewis may well have been the most influential intellectual in the world. He was on terms with Presidents and Popes, and his books, sold in huge numbers, told the public what to think about Islam. It was a historic fluke that the man and the moment matched so well.
Having lost the struggle for supremacy with the West, Islam had nevertheless been surviving and even strengthening underground. The Cold War in the Middle East was effectively the take-over of the whole region by non-Muslim powers, and as soon as it was over, Islam was free to burst into the open. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran and Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States in September 2001 are classic expressions of Muslim empire-building. The West, Christendom, has been here before, its rulers obliged to turn back invasions that might have left the continent of Europe in Muslim possession. Now, in what seems as sudden as a flash of lightning, the general public has to confront the world of Sunni and Shia, jihad and sharia, all terms unfamiliar hitherto and whose significance is therefore primarily in the hands of experts, most of whom are academics. An interview with a Dutch journalist left Bernard the memory of an exchange that was a shocking illustration of ignorance. Rotterdam will soon be a Muslim-majority city, said Bernard. “So what?” said the Dutchman. So you’ll have sharia, Bernard said, and the Dutchman repeated, “So what?”
To some extent, I suppose, my view of Bernard has been shaped by his generosity to me. In 1972, I published The Face of Defeat, a book about the Palestinians after the Six Day War. Bernard, then a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, wrote to me out of the blue to say that it had been his “unhappy fate, or rather duty, to read many books on the Arab-Israeli conflict” but he couldn’t recall “any that conveyed the sights and sounds and feelings and realities of the situation with such power, understanding and compassion.” And much more in this vein. Those who take up the issue of Palestine and make a cause of it are urging young men to risk their lives in acts of violence that they themselves steer well clear of, and Bernard even gave the page reference where I point out this moral humbug.
Before the war, Bernard studied with Sir Hamilton Gibb, Professor of Arabic at Oxford and an advocate of the nationalism that in fact has brought harm rather than relief to the Arabs. Another of his eminent teachers was Louis Massignon, a leading scholar of Islam at the Sorbonne. Much of Bernard’s work has been technical, to do with definition, language and linguistics, ethnicity and identity, issues of gender and race and slavery specific to Islam. I once received an original lecture when I asked him to explain how it came about that an Arab nominative often bears the Greek suffix of–id, as in Fatimid or Abbasid. As well as Arabic, Turkish, Farsi and Hebrew, he knew the major European languages. I once heard him discuss whether or not to deliver a lecture at Siena University in Italian. He traveled extensively in the Middle East and even had a tale to tell about how he had surreptitiously set foot in Saudi Arabia. In the Intelligence Service during the war, he had given propaganda broadcasts to the Arabs. At one point he was responsible for a hundred or so who spoke only Greek, most of them Cypriot waiters. If the officer in the field shows himself to be a coward or a traitor, one of them asked, is it all right to shoot him or is permission required?
A Zionist, every January Bernard liked to hold a seminar in Tel Aviv University. He had strong opinions and saw no reason to keep them to himself. He was the first to be able to say with authority that the old absolutism of the Islamic order is bankrupt and constitutional societies are not replacing it. The enforced imposition of European ideas and values has not put Muslims and non-Muslims on an equal footing but creates conditions for a clash of civilizations. Not a pacifist, he more than once in my hearing summarized current confusion in the Middle East with a good example of his slightly mischievous humor: “We should have dealt with Iraq and Iran in alphabetical order.” What was happening in the Gulf, he was highly pleased to say, was Kuweitus interruptus.
In September 2004, I was invited to a think tank in Washington, as my diary records: “Breakfast with Bernard Lewis in his hotel, the Jefferson. He’s aged but his head is very dignified, even noble. In 1940, he says, he and everyone he knew, was certain we would win the war. Today he feels anxiety, despair. People have not realised our predicament. The choice he foresees is between a Muslim Europe and fascism. Harold Rhode [a Pentagon specialist who habitually refers and defers to “Uncle Bernard”] arrives and brings along Qulat Talabani, son of Jalal Talabani [President of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq 2005–2014], a very young man who puts the secular and Kurdish case with just the right emphasis. He fears that Iraq is heading for a Shia Islamist regime, and the U.S. isn’t doing much to stop it.”
In 2006, Bernard went on one of the cruises that National Review organizes so that readers of the magazine have the opportunity to meet its writers and a celebrity or two thrown in to enliven proceedings. We set off from San Diego past Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas down the west coast of Mexico. My diary again: “We also spent a lot of time with Bernard Lewis. He’s very mellow now in his nineties, and much cared for by Buntzie Churchill – a very cheerful lady, well informed too. He quotes a recent article by Sadiq al-Azm [Marxist philosopher from a leading Syrian family] to the effect that either Islam is Europeanised or else Europe will be Islamised. The latter seems the more likely. He also believes that Ahmadinejad [President of Iran 2005–2013] will succumb to messianic end-of-days theology, and cannot be trusted to act rationally. Everyone seems to agree that in the hour Iran finally gets the nuclear weapon it will use it on Israel.”
Mongols, Ottoman Turks, the British or the French are often held responsible by Arabs and Muslims for the tragic disintegration into violence and war of Islamic civilization, once so great. In the light of his learning, Bernard took the view that the social structure of Islam had not allowed for change, preventing Muslims from finding their place in today’s world, or to put it another way, they had brought their fate upon themselves. Edward Said, a Palestinian American and a Professor of literature at Columbia University, had the intelligence and the authority to analyze how the Arabs have come to their present pass and what to do about it, in short to be the Edmund Burke of Islam. Instead he published Orientalism in 1978, a polemic fantasizing that Western contacts with Muslims were not what they might seem but the continuation of centuries of struggle for supremacy. He took every opportunity to accuse Bernard of bad faith. This slander has encouraged the anti-Western animus of enough academics and journalists in the next generation to ensure that ancient bigotry still makes a virtue out of war and violence. One of the last acts of Said’s career was to have himself photographed throwing a stone at the fence separating Israel from Lebanon. Corruptio optimi pessima – the corruption of the best is the worst of all. Bernard was at first taken by surprise that his scholarship should be so insulted, then shocked and finally angered. For him, there was such a thing as truth, and he took his stand on it.
ROSE MACAULAY
Going Abroad
1934
ROSE MACAULAY’S NOVEL The Towers of Trebizond had just been published in 1956 and was receiving rave reviews when Alan invited her to dinner. Plain, skeleton-boned, she was dressed as though on her way to an Edwardian feminist rally. Foolishly, I said how much I’d enjoyed her latest novel. Cross-questioning me, she soon saw I hadn’t read it, and the look on her face has been quite enough to save me from ever repeating a false claim like that. Full disclosure: Going Abroad is signed by her but out of guilt I bought it from a dealer.
KANAN MAKIYA
Republic of Fear
1989
KANAN MAKIYA PUBLISHED Republic of Fear under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil. It was a wise precaution for a native Iraqi who was informing the wide world about the tyranny that was destroying the life of the country. Why was there so much violence in Iraq, he asks, and
why did the intelligentsia collaborate so willingly in silencing themselves, and also where were dissenters? The book came out in the brief interlude between the end of Saddam Hussein’s eight-year war with Iran and his follow-on invasion of Kuwait, in other words, when Saddam Hussein was proving that violence was the medium in which he operated naturally. Shi’ite, but secular and worldly-wise, intellectual by inclination, Makiya first studied architecture at MIT. Saddam had erected in central Baghdad the so-called Victory Gate, actually casts of his forearms some forty yards high in the air and holding swords that cross 130 feet up in the air. Still under his pseudonym, Makiya published The Monument, a discussion of the relationship between art and politics in the mind of a dictator. He then lectured on contemporary issues at Brandeis, a university with Jewish associations. His mother was English, daughter of a schoolmaster, which explains his soft-spoken Oxford accent.
The cover of the pseudonym was soon blown. Here was an Iraqi with the courage to stand up to Saddam and to look to the United States to liberate Iraq. This was altogether too much for Edward Said, the American–Palestinian academic who accused Makiya on the basis of the printed word of being an agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. Said was not in the least troubled that this outburst placed him in the unwelcome position of defending Saddam and tyranny.
Shortly before the campaign in 1991 to reverse the invasion of Kuwait, I had an exchange with Douglas Hurd, then the British Foreign Secretary. Arabs, I said, well understand overthrowing and then hanging an oppressor like Saddam. It has been almost customary that the one taking power in Iraq makes sure to kill the one losing it. Grimacing, Hurd replied, “There is no question of that.” Then call the whole thing off right now, I went on, because Saddam’s survival would be seen as evidence of a conspiracy so deep-laid that ordinary people are unable to fathom it and so are left resenting the British and the West even more bitterly than before. I parodied the hymn of the old-time Church Militant:
Backward Christian soldiers
Slinking from the war,
So that the great tyrant
May slay thousands more.
In the event, the Allied coalition took no special steps to lay hands on Saddam and bring him to justice. Their policy was instead to encourage Shi’ites and Kurds to rise in rebellion. These two communities amounted to approximately three-quarters of the population. A minority but accustomed to power, Saddam and his fellow Sunnis subjected the whole country to terror, torture, the use of poison gas and mass murder. Mass graves are still being discovered. Anfal is the Arabic term for this atrocious campaign akin to civil war and Makiya documented it in another book, Cruelty and Silence, published in 1993 under his own name. He familiarized Anfal the way that Solzhenitsyn had familiarized the Gulag.
Operating mostly in exile, the formal opposition to Saddam was Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. He came from a prominent Shi’ite family, some of whom had held high office under the old Iraqi monarchy. Articulate and very well informed, he was a skillful political operator. Too skilful in the eyes of the State Department where they thought Chalabi was bouncing the United States into a war the Department didn’t want to fight. Washington floated rumors about supposed misdeeds of his, especially concerning a small bank in Jordan that his private money had launched. The rights and wrongs of it are obscure, but when we met I questioned him and ended up believing his side of the story. It has been a lasting pity that he was denied the role of a de Gaulle in the liberation of his country.
In 2003 the Allies (with the exception of France) were determined to overthrow and capture Saddam. Combat in this case was more like tourism. Instead of Iraqis, American officials were appointed to administer the country although they had little or no relevant experience or knowledge, not even of the language. Chalabi had called on Makiya to draft a constitution with the clear goal of sharing power equitably between Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis. Instead, one Shi’ite strongman after another has kept hold of power at the expense of everyone else. The United States lost out completely in Iraq, Chalabi was thwarted and Makiya became one of the best Prime Ministers that poor country never had.
OLIVIA MANNING
The Great Fortune
1960
OLIVIA MANNING lived in a hard-core circle of writers and actors, editors, critics and reviewers and BBC producers, up-to-the-minute in artistic matters, assiduously keeping their names before the public and fretting about royalties and contracts. She rather encouraged all such folk to drop in for a drink in the evening, and it was as well to be sure whom you were talking to. Her husband, Reggie Smith, all over the place physically as well as intellectually, was often away. Guy and Harriet Pringle, the protagonists in Olivia’s sequence of six novels set in the war, are plainly and even comically drawn from married life as Olivia lived it. On one level, she was pleased that Reggie’s career with the British Council had brought her to the edge of events that were to settle the destiny of nations, and on another level she had a grudge that the world had treated her unfairly. Guy’s part is more reportage than fiction, and Harriet’s part is more autobiography than fiction.
First in the sequence of six, The Great Fortune is set in Romania where Reggie was posted and amid much circumstantial detail of Bucharest is Dragomir’s food store, “where a gentleman might sample cheese unchallenged and steal a biscuit or two.” Lionel Bloch, my lawyer and a forceful character, had been born and brought up in Bucharest, and Olivia took it amiss when he teased her with not understanding how the unaffordable luxury of Dragomir’s had impressed a child like him. At one dinner in our house, Clarissa accidently spilled some water in Olivia’s lap, and she got up at once and left without a word.
In October 1940 the Germans occupied Romania. Reggie and Olivia fled to Athens, “just one step ahead of the Nazis,” as Neville and Jane Braybrooke put it in their biography of Olivia. Clarissa, then a two-year-old, was in Athens because her father Harold Caccia was at the British Legation. In April 1941 it was the turn of Greece to be occupied by the Germans. The official boat taking off from the Piraeus was too small to accommodate more than some of the Legation staff, a party of commandos under Peter Fleming and the Caccia family including Clarissa. According to the Braybrookes, Reggie and Olivia left on the Erebus “which had been commandeered for the British” including the rest of the Legation staff. Lord Granard is said to have rescued all the remaining British on his yacht, but the Braybrookes don’t say if Erebus was that yacht. At any rate, Olivia felt that through their British Council connection she and Reggie should have had a place on the Legation boat. The implication was that Harold – and Clarissa by association – had been prepared on behalf of officialdom to leave her and Reggie to the Germans. As it turned out, the Legation boat was dive-bombed and sank with some loss of life, and survivors remained on an uninhabited island in the Aegean until another boat rescued them. Olivia reached safety faster and in less danger than Clarissa.
When she was awarded the CBE, I played on her sense that she had not been properly recognized by writing her a letter to say that the initials stood for a cultural policy of Cash Benefits Excluded. Her lengthy and spirited answer showed that I had touched a soft spot. On the flyleaf of The Great Fortune and several of its successors she wrote in a big generous hand, “To David and Clarissa, with love from Olivia.”
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Don Fernando
collected edition, 1950
AS A BOY, I was under the impression that Maugham was the greatest living writer, and if not the greatest, surely the most famous. An appreciative public fostered an image of him as the ultimate cosmopolitan, living the stories he was writing up. Somehow he’d been caught up in the Russian Revolution, and that was glamorous. Somehow he’d collected the best modern art and quarreled over ownership with his daughter, an only child, and that was sensational. Besides, members of my family basked in the reflected glory of knowing him. Known either as Mitzi or Mary, to Maugham she was uniquely Maria. I found a lette
r he’d written from the Hotel Vendôme in Paris that shows how he could trifle with her. “Dear sweet good and kind Maria, You asked me what I wanted for a birthday present and I told you a handkerchief and you have given me a number. I shall think of you every time I put one in my pocket and how can one think of you without loving you?”
Early in his own literary career, my father had got to know him and in 1953 took me to stay with Maugham at Cap Ferrat in the South of France. I was impressed. You went into what appeared an endless vista of black and white flags on the floor. Then there was a very large drawing room. Martinis were mixed at half past twelve; there were two or three before lunch and the same again at six o’clock. I was very conscious of the Master upstairs in his study, at work. He would come down for a walk and this would be the central part of the day. I was taken around the garden by him, very slowly, with Alan Searle, who’d been his secretary before becoming his partner. Maugham was particularly friendly to me and anxious to know if I’d read his books and what the young thought of them. The movements of his mouth as he overcame his stammering gave him the look of a Galapagos tortoise. It was night and I was in my room about to go to sleep when he came in and sat on the bed. I was slightly apprehensive, but all he did was to give me this copy of Don Fernando carefully inscribed, “For David, when he goes to Spain from his ancient friend W. Somerset Maugham.”
JESSICA MITFORD
Fine Old Conflict
1977
TO DAVID PRYCE-JONES, Pillar of the Industry (Mitford, that is) with love, Decca.” My engagement in this industry was entirely accidental. On the grapevine I heard that Decca and her husband, Bob Treuhaft, were coming to London and were looking for somewhere to live. Their dates corresponded exactly to the date of the semester I would be teaching at Berkeley. For the summer of 1972, we swapped my house in Kensington for Decca’s house in Oakland, California, a very short drive from the university. They had left their Communist Party membership cards on a table in the hall where I was bound to see them. In the garage was a new Mercedes-Benz, far more classy than the old Morris we’d left for them in London. Clarissa discovered in Decca’s library the stack of books in which her sister Unity had penciled her name and made marginal annotations. A reference to the Polish Corridor, for instance, had prompted her to jot beside it, What’s he supposed to do with it, run up and down? Decca was to give me nine of Unity’s letters from her Nazi period in the Thirties, and I thought I had the material for an essay reconstructing the mind-set of a fanatic. Decca encouraged this project and we stayed in touch. She introduced me to friends and relations who had known Unity. Something in the loud crisp pitch of her voice indicated that she thought well of herself, expecting to have her own way and to be applauded for it. Slang in her vocabulary helped to narrow the line between her inherited persona as a bright young aristocrat of the Thirties and her adopted persona as a progressive rebel who had thrown privilege away far behind her. Much practiced in the United States and Britain, this posturing was the basis of Communist identification wherever there was no real punishment for disobeying the line of the Soviet Party. Decca’s letters, published in a volume of hundreds of pages, document the unworthiness of her praise and blame. I understood she wouldn’t approve of the argument in my book that her Communism and the Nazism of Unity were two sides of the same coin, not rival ideologies but interchangeable. As I was completing the book, she told me that if I’d lived through the Thirties,