Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  NOTES ON A CENTURY

  Reflections of a

  Middle East Historian

  Bernard Lewis

  with Buntzie Ellis Churchill

  Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  LONDON

  For Buntzie,

  without whose inspiration and guidance

  this book would not have been written or even started

  and without whose presence and participation

  this last and best part of my life

  could not have been lived.

  One grey hair appeared on my head

  I plucked it out with my hand.

  It answered me: “You have prevailed against me alone—

  What will you do when my army comes after me?”

  —Yehuda Halevi

  Lord, of your grace all that I hope is this—

  Keep the realm of my pleasure prosperous

  Avert from me the calamity of chastity

  And keep far from me the doom of repentance.

  —‘Ubayd-i Zakani

  Excerpts from Music of a Distant Drum

  Acknowledgments

  I thank my friends and colleagues whose encouragement, over many years and in many places, contributed so much to the life described in these pages.

  David Pryce-Jones was kind enough to let me quote extensively from his article “Enough Said,” and Adam Garfinkel graciously permitted me to reprint my article from The American Interest (spring 2006), with minor changes.

  A word of thanks to Mari Steed and Denise Bala for invaluable technical assistance.

  Finally, special thanks are due to my editor, Joy de Menil, whose rigorous scrutiny removed defects and added merits to the manuscript.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Early Days

  2. The War Years

  3. In the Ottoman Archives

  4. Cultural Diplomacy

  5. Why Study History?

  6. Episodes in an Academic Life

  7. Crossing the Atlantic

  8. The Neighborhood

  9. The Clash of Civilizations

  10. Orientalism and the Cult of Right Thinking

  11. Judgment in Paris

  12. Writing and Rewriting History

  13. Politics and the Iraq War

  In Sum

  Appendix I: The Dirge

  Appendix II: Honors and Publications

  Index

  The Typewriter

  Sometimes the machine stares back at me

  Somber, silent

  A hint of menace?

  Sometimes it works with me,

  Anxious, eager

  For reassurance.

  Sometimes it sits in judgment

  Hearing, condemning

  Pondering sentence.

  Introduction

  During my long life I have been principally concerned with the study of the Middle East. This interest began when I was still a schoolboy. It has grown ever since, becoming first a hobby, then an obsession, finally a profession. I have tried from the start to understand the society from within—by learning its languages, reading its writings, visiting its countries, talking—and listening—to its people.

  In accomplishing these purposes, I derived considerable advantage from the time, place and circumstances of my birth and therefore of my early education. In England in those days, history was an important part of education, and we were expected to have at least an outline knowledge not just of recent and current events, but of the whole sweep of recorded and remembered history of Western civilization, from classical antiquity to the present day. Not only that, but we were expected to study at least part of it in the original languages, notably French and Latin, to which some of us later added German and Greek. King Alfred, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades were a familiar part of everyday discourse. This did not prepare me for the study of Islamic history; indeed in a sense, by inculcating a Christian, European perception, it biased me against it. But it did give me a better understanding of the nature of the historical process, the purpose and manner of historical research and writing.

  In my early studies I was mainly interested in medieval history, in the period when the Islamic Middle East was most different from the West, least affected by the West, and in most respects far in advance of the West. I never lost my interest in medieval Islamic history, but it is no longer my primary concern. The opportunity to enter the hitherto sealed Ottoman archives in 1950 was too good to miss; it provided me with a chance to pursue a topic in which I was already deeply interested—the history of the Ottoman Empire. Most of my published work since then has been on the Ottoman and modern periods, or some combination of the two.

  But no specialist on the Middle East, not even an Assyriologist or an Egyptologist, can wholly ignore the contemporary scene. My war service gave me an intimate knowledge of some aspects of modern Middle Eastern life and politics. My travels in Middle Eastern countries, my discussions with Middle Eastern leaders, my meetings with Middle Eastern colleagues, and, perhaps most of all, my encounters with Middle Eastern students, and later with former students, kept me in touch with what was going on. From time to time, I ceded to the temptation to make some public pronouncement on Middle Eastern events, usually in the form of an interview or article in some review or magazine or, occasionally, newspaper. And I have occasionally written at greater length on recent and contemporary topics.

  For the study of Middle Eastern history, and at the present time one might even add of world history, some knowledge of Islam’s origins and of its scriptures is necessary. Already in my student years I was reading the Koran, the biography of the Prophet, and the extensive literature concerned with them. But at no time did I specialize in these topics. I am not an expert in theology or scripture, and I looked at these, if at all, only with a historian’s eye. I am, by vocation and profession, a historian, principally interested in the history of civilization.

  Looking back, I see that by this choice I saved myself a lot of trouble. This was not my purpose at the time but I have become well aware of my narrow and fortunate escape from one of the most difficult and dangerous topics of our profession. Even for Muslims, and far more so for non-Muslims, the study of the sacred biography and the sacred text has become highly sensitive, not so much a field of research as a minefield.

  This has not prevented my critics from attacking me for my treatment of Muslim scripture and sacred biography. In this as in other matters, the attacks came from both sides. On the one side I am accused of traducing Islam and its sanctities, on the other of defending and even concealing its flaws. As long as the attacks continue to come from both sides, I shall remain confident of my scholarly objectivity.

  Once, many years ago when I was traveling in Syria, I had a long conversation one evening with a professional man of religion, discussing such matters as theology and law and other primary Islamic concerns. At one point he interrupted our conversation and exclaimed in astonishment, “I don’t understand! You know so much about Islam! Why didn’t you become a Muslim?”

  Both the question and its possible answers may reveal much about the Islamic world today.

  We live in a time when great energies are being devoted to the falsification of history—to flatter, to deceive or to serve some sectional purpose. No good can come of such distortions, even when they are inspired by unselfish motives. History is the collective memory and if we think of the social body in terms of the human body, no history means amnesia, distorted
history means neurosis.

  Those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future. A great responsibility, therefore, falls on historians, whose moral and professional duty it is to seek out the truth concerning the past, and to present and explain it as they see it. I have endeavored to fulfill this responsibility.

  1.

  Early Days

  When I look back over the ten decades of my life, I realize how extraordinarily fortunate I have been. I was a soldier in World War II and I wasn’t killed or even wounded. I was a Jew in twentieth-century Europe and I wasn’t murdered or even persecuted. The first I can only attribute to the fortunes of war. For the second, I must thank my forebears who chose to live in England. I was born in England and have lived most of my life in England and in the United States, that is to say in countries that enjoy liberty and have no need of liberation. I have always known that I may formulate my opinions as I choose, not regulated by government orders or judicial decisions, and that I may express them in a language unhampered by the rules and regulations of arrogant and fussy philologists. The openness and freedom of Anglo-American society and the glorious anarchy of the English language were privileges which I took for granted, until circumstances drew my attention to the absence of these freedoms elsewhere.

  I was born in 1916 in London and that, too, was fortunate, though I didn’t realize how fortunate until years later when I arrived in the United States. My parents, Harry and Jenny Lewis, were living at the time in a small town called Maidenhead, up the River Thames not far from London; within commuting distance, but nonetheless a separate town. When my mother was near her delivery time, she decided, as many young mothers did, that she wanted to go to her mother’s house. So she went to her mother’s home in London and for that reason I was born in London in the same place and, I am told, in the same bed where my mother was born twenty-one years earlier.

  Why a narrow escape? Maidenhead. In England people rarely if ever ask you where you were born and if they had asked me and I had said Maidenhead, most English people would know the name of the town. But in America you are asked where were you born all the time, in all sorts of different situations and circumstances, and the reply Maidenhead would have been greeted with open ridicule or with furtive and embarrassed laughter.

  My maternal grandmother, Anne Miller, came to England from a town called Grodno, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1895, when she was about eighteen years old. Her family sent her to America to marry her cousin, who had settled there some years previously, and who had written to the family, saying, “I am now established; send me a bride.” They chose my grandmother. She was so seasick crossing the North Sea, that having got as far as London, she refused to go any farther. The North Sea was bad enough and she was not going to cross the Atlantic. She argued back and forth with her family. They implored her. At some point her problem was solved. She met and married my grandfather, Joseph Levy, and stayed in England.

  It seems that when I arrived I slammed the door behind me, because a couple of years later my mother had a dangerous miscarriage which she narrowly survived. After that no more children were possible; so I grew up as an only child. This has certain obvious advantages and less obvious disadvantages. As I recall, it was sometimes a source of distress. Most of the people I knew had brothers and sisters. I had none. At times I felt lonely. That’s the only thing from childhood that I can recall with, shall we say, some pangs.

  For at least a year after this miscarriage my mother was seriously ill, most of the time in bed, and I was sent to be looked after by my grandmother. That was one of the reasons why I had a particularly close relationship with my maternal grandmother, who made the most superb yeast cake with cinnamon and raisins.

  My grandmother was thirty-nine when I was born and therefore quite young when I was growing up. The difference between my Eastern European grandmother and my English-born mother, at once geographical and generational, could be seen even in such domestic matters as cuisine. One of my vivid recollections of early childhood is of a discussion between my mother and my grandmother. My grandmother was trying to teach my mother how to prepare one of the family’s favorite dishes and explained the ingredients and the process in terms of taking a pinch of this, a whiff of that, a touch of the other, and letting the preparation simmer for a while. My grandmother was born in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. My mother, who started school in London in 1900, was a child of twentieth-century England and wanted precision, which my grandmother seemed unable to provide. I still remember the agonizing, unanswered questions, “How much is a pinch? How long is a while?”

  My mother was undoubtedly more modern and more accurate, but my grandmother’s cooking tasted better.

  My mother may not have been the best cook but I most certainly benefited from the fact that she was quite fussy about the use of English and was determined that I should speak correctly. I remember asking her, “Can I go out and play with the boys?” to which she replied, “You can, but you may not.”

  My relations with my paternal grandparents were cool and distant. My father’s mother died when he was only five years old, leaving two children, my father and his elder brother, Nat. My grandfather remarried, and in due course begat two more sons and a daughter. When I was a child, relations between the two branches of my grandfather’s family were already cool, and at some point a quarrel provided the pretext to break them off entirely. My father remained in close touch with his full brother, Nat, and with his children, Basil and Lily.

  My grandfather Lewis had a brother, Samuel, who fell off the roof of the building in which his office was situated, and died. He left a widow, Rose, and six children, four sons and two daughters. The youngest son was almost the same age as I was and was also named Bernard, presumably after the same ancestor. In England my name is pronounced BURR-nerd (no comments, please) and I can tolerate the American Brrr-NAAARD. But, I detest, and am the most unlikely “Bernie.”

  During the Depression we lived near Aunt Rose and her family and got to know them well. I developed a very close friendship with my cousin Bernard. As luck would have it, we went to the same school and having two Bernard Lewises, roughly the same age, was a source of endless confusion. Fortunately, we were not in the same class.

  My earliest political recollection is from the early 1920s, when I was just starting school and there was a general election in England. At that time the two main parties were the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Between them there was still a vestigial Liberal Party—a remnant of what had once been the only serious alternative to the Conservatives. I remember the boys at school asked me, and each other, for which party our parents were voting. I asked my father and he said, “We vote Liberal.” I then went back and told the other boys that we were voting Liberal. This caused some puzzlement, as the overwhelming majority were by then either Conservative or Labour. “Why are you Liberal?” they asked, and I went home and put the question to my father. “Why are we Liberal?” My father, without a moment’s hesitation, replied, “Because we have too much money to be Labour and not enough to be Conservative.”

  My mother was born in 1895, the eldest of four children and the only one who survived—two died in infancy and the third, Auntie Betty, died in her late twenties. When I was a child my mother and her sister Betty would often go on holiday, together with their husbands, and me, somewhere on the English coast. One evening I complained of a very bad bellyache. Children often have bellyaches and normally one wouldn’t make too much fuss about that, but since Betty’s husband was a doctor, my parents asked him to take a look at me. He did, immediately diagnosed appendicitis, and summoned a surgeon of his acquaintance to deal with it. It turned out the appendicitis was acute and would certainly have killed me if it had not been dealt with expeditiously. The fortunate chance that my uncle was a doctor and holidaying with us saved my life.

  My mother’s childhood had been a hard one as her parents
were very poor and she had to leave school and go to work as soon as she reached the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen. After she died I went through her papers and found she had been very active in her school’s activities, especially in sports. She had various certificates indicating her excellence in swimming, one in particular, dated 1908, which I gave, exactly one hundred years later, to my granddaughter, Rachel, who received it with delight.

  My mother did not pass along the sports gene to me as I was a miserable failure in every one of the few sports that I dared, or was compelled, to attempt. This is the more remarkable in that my father was also active in sports and was an excellent tennis player. Both my parents were regular readers, but in different ways. My mother read novels, and more especially detective stories, but rarely troubled to read the newspapers. My father read newspapers, sometimes several a day, meticulously, but rarely bothered to read a book.

  One morning, shortly after the war when I was again, briefly, living with my parents, I got up earlier than my father and was reading the paper when he came in for breakfast. “What are you reading?” he asked. “An article about UNESCO,” I replied. That was just after UNESCO was created, and neither my father nor I nor anyone else had any idea what it was. My father responded, “Oh, who is he? Some corrupt Romanian politician, I suppose.” A reasonable response as UNESCO does sound Romanian and a Romanian as the subject of an article in the English newspapers would almost certainly be a politician and therefore probably corrupt.

  Even on his deathbed, when I went to see him and we spoke, literally a few minutes before he died, he was talking very angrily—but in agreement—about an article he had just read in The Daily Telegraph.

  Each of my parents had hobbies and concerns. My mother spent a great deal of her time knitting and crocheting, producing all kinds of garments, both for us and for the furniture. I particularly recall the antimacassars—Macassar was then a popular, very greasy hair oil, and people sitting back in armchairs often left rather disgusting oily stains. The antimacassar, a doily often with lace edging, became very common. It was placed protectively over the back of the chair and was considered quite decorative.