Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  The beginnings of this book date back to my academic year in Istanbul. My main purpose in being there was to work in the Turkish State Archives, but living in Turkey at that time, I could not but be aware of the momentous events that were taking place around me, and be deeply impressed, even inspired, by their rapid development. The invitation from Chatham House and Oxford University Press gave me an opportunity to pursue this new interest in modern and recent history.

  In the course of the 1950s I made a number of trips to Turkey of varying duration—partly to read books, periodicals, and newspapers in Turkish libraries not readily available elsewhere, and partly to observe at first hand the continuing process of change. I attended a dinner party in Ankara in 1952 shortly after Turkey was accepted as a member of NATO. In Turkey this was a cause for celebration and most people were very happy and proud to have been accepted as a full member. At this dinner party, one of the guests, a Turkish general, made a memorable remark. Someone asked him what he thought of Turkey’s joining NATO and the Turkish general replied, “The real problem with having the Americans as your allies is you never know when they will turn around and stab themselves in the back.”

  My typescript was completed in 1960 and The Emergence of Modern Turkey was published in 1961 by the Oxford University Press. Neither the author nor the publisher had expected a large sale for a book of almost five hundred heavily footnoted pages, dealing with a single, no longer major, country. It was with surprise as well as pleasure that we saw it go through four printings in hard cover. This unexpected success stirred the publisher’s generosity to the point of allowing me to make fairly extensive, though still minor, revisions in the second, paperback edition, published in 1968.

  The preparation of the second edition confronted me with an important question. Writing in the middle and late fifties, I had chosen, as the cutoff point for my book, the Turkish general election of 1950—the first that was conducted in complete freedom and fairness, and resulted in the transfer of power from the ruling to the opposition party. Since my book was one of history, reaching back to the Middle Ages, and not of current affairs, it seemed right to end it at that point. Trying to cope with the rapidly changing scene in present-day Turkey would have required a different approach.

  I remained of the same opinion while preparing the revised second edition. The events at the time of the revision, like those at the time of the original composition, must certainly have colored my perception of earlier periods, but I decided to keep to the 1950 cutoff point, and to use the opportunity of revision to take account of the considerable body of new evidence and new studies that had appeared in the meantime. Reprints of the English text have been based on the 1968 edition, with only minor corrections of a few obstinate misprints that had somehow escaped all previous revisions. The same text served as the basis of three translations which were published in the immediately following years—into Turkish, by the Turkish Historical Society in Ankara; into Polish, by the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw; into Hebrew, by the Hebrew University Press in Jerusalem.

  The publication of a French edition in 1988 provided an occasion for another look, both at the book and at the subject with which it deals. Reading my own work, more than thirty years after I started writing it, almost twenty years since I last revised it, was in some ways a chastening, in other ways a reassuring, experience. Inevitably, there were things which I would have arranged or presented differently if I were writing the book now, but these are mainly matters of emphasis and presentation rather than of structure. In a few places, I made small changes to take account of new evidence, of new thinking—both my own and other people’s—and of the insights afforded by subsequent events. But the major presentation and interpretation remained as they were, and, despite the passage of time and the increase of knowledge and experience, I was content to leave them so.

  Curiously, the French publishers reduced my title to a subtitle and gave the book a new title: Islam et Laicité: la naissance de la Turquie moderne (“Islam and Secularism: the birth of modern Turkey”). When I asked a representative of the publishing house the reason for this, he replied drily, “L’Islam se vend; la Turquie ne se vend pas” (“Islam sells; Turkey doesn’t”). The new French title, despite the change of emphasis, is not inaccurate, since one of the major themes of the book is indeed the emergence of a secular, democratic republic from an Islamic empire. It was thus all the more remarkable that in the year 1994 a complete Persian translation appeared in Tehran. This was of course published without contract or consent. I heard of it and procured a copy, thanks to the good offices of an Iranian friend. One can only speculate why the Persian publisher and translator thought it worthwhile to translate and publish a lengthy, detailed book on a neighboring country, originally published in 1961, which ended its story in 1950. Was it offered as a model to be followed or as a terrible example to be avoided?

  Several factors, it seems in retrospect, determined the basic approach, the dominant conception, and the final conclusions of the book. The first, if I may be excused for putting it in that place, was my own intellectual formation. My academic training had been as a historian and an Orientalist, specializing in classical Islamic civilization. I had studied Arabic and Persian before I approached Turkish. In my historical studies I began with medieval Islam, from which I proceeded to the Ottoman Empire, and then, later, to the Turkish Republic. Certainly, in considering the sustained endeavor to create a secular, modern, and democratic nation-state, I was more keenly aware of the immensity of the task that they were undertaking, the difficulties that they confronted, and, in consequence, more able to appreciate the quality and magnitude of their achievements.

  A second determining factor, of at least equal importance, was the world situation during my formative years and during the period when the book was written. For the men and women of that generation, their every thought, their whole lives were dominated and indeed shaped by the titanic struggles in which they had participated or witnessed: the defeat and destruction of fascism by an alliance of democrats and communists, followed by a struggle between these ill-assorted allies which would shape the future of the world. In the fifties, these issues loomed large, and the choices before us still retained something of the clarity, even the starkness, which they had through the war years and which they have subsequently lost.

  This clarity of choice gave a special significance to the already dramatic development of events in Turkey at the time when The Emergence of Modern Turkey was conceived and written. What could be more illuminating, more in accord with the mood of optimism which victory had brought and which the Cold War had not yet dissipated, than the spectacle of a nation liberating itself from ancient bonds—a country of age-old authoritarian habits and traditions turning to democracy; a regime which had for decades enjoyed a virtual monopoly of power setting to work, systematically, to prepare, organize, and preside over its own electoral defeat?

  The Birth of My Children

  My daughter Melanie was born in 1952 and two years later my son Michael was born. He arrived rather late and unfortunately it was not possible for me to be in London on the actual day that he arrived. I was one of the hosts of a big international conference in Cambridge and I had to be there. I did however leave instructions that I should be informed immediately. That morning I left the college where I was staying; no news had arrived, but by the time I got to the college where the meeting was being held, news had come, and since I was en route and the conference organizers couldn’t reach me, they announced the birth over the loudspeakers. When I arrived at the meeting one of my colleagues came up to me and said: “Congratulations, Father Lewis.” Another, standing nearby, said in astonishment: “I didn’t know that Lewis was in holy orders.”

  4.

  Cultural Diplomacy

  Growing up as a child in London in the 1920s I was proudly aware of the fact that I was part of what was probably the greatest empire in history, certainly the largest at that time, exercising di
rect or indirect sovereignty over one-third of the globe, and bringing, in different parts of the world, civilization in place of barbarism, and in different parts of the empire, freedom and justice in place of tyrannical or at best authoritarian rule.

  This mood of self-satisfaction was not universal or unchallenged. I remember one day when I was fifteen, when our history master came into the classroom and began the class by saying, “Our subject today is British imperial administration. The administration of the empire rests on two principles—the boot and the whip; but to help you pass your examinations I will provide you with some corroborative details.”

  In the years that followed, belief in the empire and in our positive role in it was attacked from many sides, both at home and abroad. By the end of World War II it had become clear that Britain’s imperial age had come to an end. The major change was the withdrawal from India in 1947. With the end of the Indian Empire, the most important single reason for Britain’s imperial interest in the Middle East was gone, and the winding down of British imperial rule in that region followed rapidly. This was helped and accelerated by the rise of nationalism in these countries. In England too there was a growing reluctance, even unwillingness, to continue the imperial role—a feeling that we had no right, still more, no duty, to rule other countries and to confront their problems.

  In evaluating the impact and effects of European imperialism in Asia and Africa one might begin by comparing the records and achievements, positive and negative, of the major European imperial powers—Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy. But an even more dramatic comparison, and a more instructive one, can be made by comparing the impacts of the same imperial power on different subject peoples. Hong Kong, Singapore and Aden were all British Crown Colonies. All were liberated from the imperial yoke, and now look very different. An even more dramatic example is the liberation of India from British imperial rule. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh all had much the same experience, but with very different results. Similar comparisons may be made in different parts of the Middle East.

  In the immediate postwar years militant terrorist movements attacked British troops and installations in three areas—Cyprus, Palestine and Aden. Their shared purpose was to accelerate the departure of their imperial rulers and thus hasten the achievement of independence. Of the three movements, one was Christian, one Jewish and one Muslim. Although all three were called “terrorist” at the time, if one compares their activities with those of present-day terrorist movements, all three were remarkably gentlemanly. With rare exceptions they confined their attacks to military targets, even sometimes taking care to avoid “collateral damage.”

  In the absence of any viable regime or organization to which power could be transferred, imperial rule continued for some time longer in most of the African colonies, but even there significant steps were taken to develop political, social and cultural institutions, and to prepare these countries for eventual independence. Part of this process was educational.

  Although my career in England covered the last years of the breakup of the British Empire, I was never part of the imperial service and even my wartime role in British intelligence was concerned with preventing Axis penetration rather than preserving British domination. I did, however, later play some role in quite a different respect. In the British Empire, unlike some others, the imperial authorities devoted great attention to education, and more remarkably, to higher education. The aim was that in every one of the British colonies there should be at least one university and in that university some time and effort should be devoted to teaching the people history, principally the history of their own country. This is in marked contrast with French Africa, for example, where the only university was the French university in Algiers, attended principally by the colons, and where the history taught was French history. In the schools for the West Africans the history books would begin with “Our ancestors, the Gauls . . .”

  In the British colonies some British and imperial history was taught but the main emphasis was on their own history. In some colonies this created a need to discover and write previously unrecorded and unwritten history. In some of the African colonies a considerable effort was made to find or create a historical record, where possible from internal, usually orally transmitted sources, and otherwise from sometimes conflicting foreign narratives. A committee in London concerned with higher education in the colonies brought together a number of scholars, principally from the University of London, who undertook these tasks. I was one of them, and I must say that I found it both enlightening and rewarding. My principle concern was with Sudan, the one Arabic-speaking, predominantly Muslim, country which was still more or less under colonial administration.

  Sudan

  When the Arabs, after conquering Egypt in the seventh century, invaded or explored the lands to the south, they adopted a general term for the region between Egypt and Ethiopia, Bilād al-Sūdān, literally the Lands of the Blacks. The name survived through the centuries, and became the official designation of a sovereign, independent state, which in 2011 divided into two. To the Western observer, the name Sudan may seem inappropriate, but not inaccurate, since all the inhabitants, from north to south, are indeed black. Black, that is, from a white perspective. But, as I discovered when I went to Sudan as guest of the University of Khartoum, their own perspective is somewhat more complex. To start with, colors are seen differently. The northerners, whom a Westerner might call brown, are known as “reds” while the southerners, who really are intensely black, are known as “blues.”

  What one might call a classical Arabic view of the question of color was vividly expressed by an Arabic writer, Ibn al-Faqīh, at the beginning of the tenth century C.E. The ideal color, he wrote, was that of the people of Iraq, “a pale brown color, which is the most apt and proper color. They are the ones who are done to a turn in the womb. They do not come out with something between blond, buff, bleached, and leprous coloring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slavs and others of similar light complexion; nor are they overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking and crinkly-haired such as the Ethiopians and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust, but between the two.” Needless to say, Ibn al-Faqīh was an Iraqi.

  I made use of this and other texts in my little book, Race and Color in Islam, published in 1971, and in the expanded version, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, published in 1990. As they used to say in Moscow, “It is no accident, comrades,” that these two are among the least reprinted and least translated of all my books. The subject is too sensitive to appeal to publishers.

  The difference in Sudan is not limited to color. The inhabitants of the northern and central parts of the country are, overwhelmingly, Arabic-speaking Muslims, while the peoples of the deep south speak either English or African languages, and profess either Christianity or African religions. For a long time there have been tensions and occasional conflicts between the two groups of Sudanese, at the personal as well as at the public level. I remember a conversation with a University of Khartoum student who was from the south. The official language of instruction at that time was still English, but the overwhelming majority of the students were Arabic-speaking northerners. The student, a black, or should I say blue, Christian from the south, was one of the very few such students in the university. One of the visitors asked him what sort of problems he had in his associations with the Arabic-speaking Muslim majority of the student population. His answer was striking. His relations with them were difficult, but not because they were Arabic-speaking or Muslims. He soon learned enough Arabic to communicate with them and their Islam was not a problem for him. “The real problem,” he said, “is that these people are Orientals.” Some clarification is needed here. In American usage the term “Oriental” is usually limited to the Far East. In European, including British, usage which at that
time was dominant in Sudan, the Orient begins on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. What he meant of course was that they were part not just of a different religion, but of a different civilization. By this observation he had put his finger on the essential problem in relations between the north and the south of Sudan. Over the decades that followed, relations between north and south became ever more tense, leading eventually to separation.

  In Sudan, the principal institution of higher learning was the University of Khartoum which began as a high school, Gordon Memorial College, and gradually blossomed into a university. My connection with the university lasted for a number of years in the 1960s. Several generations of students came from Khartoum to London to take degrees and in some cases Ph.D.’s in history. Most of these went back and taught at what became the University of Khartoum. We at the University of London had a very close relationship with the University of Khartoum and in particular we had trained a number of Sudanese students who were now professors of Middle Eastern and related history.

  I assisted in the examinations every year and one year I was asked to go to Khartoum to participate on the spot. These were for the B.A. degree examinations in the university. Three or four of my former students, then teaching at the University of Khartoum, welcomed me at the Faculty Club and we spent a very pleasant time together. One of them asked if I would like to meet the students. I readily agreed. This had obviously been prearranged; we walked along the Nile bank a short distance and came to the Students’ Club. Inside was a gathering of students waiting to receive us. My host turned to them and said, “This is Professor Lewis from the University of London,” and then he turned to me and pointed to the students and said, “Your grandchildren.” That was a really delicious moment.