Bernard Lewis: Apologist for Islam

Ironic that Bernard Lewis should be the one to call attention to August 22nd is ironic. Especially since Robert Spencer wrote  of August 22nd, Iran's day of terror, back on July 27 (I wrote of it back on July 9 as did Villagers with Torches.)

Lewis' work is full of half truths and apologies for Islam.  His conclusions are always ridiculous.  No common sense about these things. It is astounding.

Lewis describes the series of political, legal, financial, social, sumptuary, and other disablities placed on dhimmis in quite brisk terms, usually limiting himself to a word or two about the jizya and "other disabilities." He does not stop to really go into the whole monstrous system, or to quizzically ask what that phrase "protected peoples" might mean, or how it was that everywhere that Islam conquered, the treatment of dhimmis, whether they were Christians or Jews or Zoroastrians or even Hindus or Buddhists -- was remarkably the same, and in all cases the post-conquest (i.e. post-Jihad) institution of dhimmitude led to the enforced status of degradation, humiliation, and permanent insecurity (including intermittent massacres that Lewis hardly ever refers to) on all of these non-Muslim peoples.

Lewis himself must, more and more, have come to see -- especially as his beloved Turkey slides away from Kemalism -- that in certain essentials he got it wrong. He actually got Islam wrong. He underestimated its malevolence. He underestimated the difficulty of reform. He took as representative men the scholars, or the well-educated exiles, who came out of that world but were about as representative of it as Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Nabokov could have been said to represent Soviet Russia. He was wrong; he was wrong on the Oslo Accords; he was wrong in his political advertisement (written with James Woolsey) to promote Prince Hassan to be a new king for Iraq; he remains wrong if he thinks that the United States should continue to be preoccupied with Iraq, when there are so many other ways to expose the political, economic, moral, and intellectual failures of Islam -- which in the long run, is the only thing which will cause, from within, the engendering of lots of local Ataturks, who may work to constrain or limit Islam, as its sacred texts, including the authoritative recensions of hadith, are immutable.

Lewis was asked some years ago by the TLS to review Ibn Warraq's "Why I Am Not a Muslim." He dawdled and dithered; by the time he told them he just could not do it, it was too late, in the opinion of the TLS, to run any review. Contrast that with how the lefist, even Marxist French scholar of Islam, Maxine Rodinson, treated the same book. He was given it to review by Le Monde, which assumed that Rodinson, known for his tiersmondiste sympathies (which probably explains why Edward Said gave an enthusiastic blurb to Rodinson's quite crticial book on Muhammad -- but then Said was known to provide enthusastic blurbs for hundreds of books he never opened, but just guessed as to their general direction; his endorsements were spread around like confetti, and even cheaper). But Rodinson produced a favorable review, much to the chagrin of the editors at Le Monde -- and they, acting true to Stalinist form, simply refused to print the review (it can be found in Rodinson's other publications).

But how could Lewis, after all, praise Ibn Warraq publicly? And he could not publicly deny that the book had great merit, either. So best to finesse; delay like Kutuzov; the mere passage of time will solve the problem; solve it, Time did, and consequently that book, one of the most important in recent decades, never received a review in the TLS.

It is fascinating to compare the behavior of Lewis with two other scholars of roughly the same age and status. S. D. Goitein wrote his celebrated "A Mediterranean Society" based on his detailed study of the papers found in the Cairo Geniza -- a record of the Jewish community in Cairo, and not only in Cairo, that extended over many centuries. Goitein, who earlier had had a kind of sympathetic, almost sentimental interest in promoting the idea of the natural sympathies and similarities of Muslims and Jews, was severely chastened by his last decades of scholarship. If there was one thing, he wrote, about which he had to revise his opinion, it was about the severity of the jizyah. He now realized what a terrible burden it was, especially on the poor non-Muslims. Just before he died, Goitein was preparing a favorable review of Bat Ye'or.

Even at their advanced ages, both Rodinson and Goitein were willing to break, in pat, with their own pasts, to declare that new evidence, and final summings-up, had led them to conclusions that were not nearly as favorable to Islam as they might once have hoped.

Bat Ye'or managed both to create a work of scholarship and analysis, much of which was original to her, as well as a synthesis of a large amount of scholarly literature -- by French, German, Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, and other scholars -- scholarship which does not paint quite the picture of the Ottomans as that which Lewis has favored. Not that he has ever been an openm apologist for Islam, but he has failed to convey, in book after book, the real nature and horror of dhimmitude. To describe, for example, the forced levy of Christian children by the Turks, as a "recruitment" (which to the modern mind evokes mental images of college or army recruiters dangling inducements), which was often envied by the Muslim parents, is to ignore the scholarship, by scholars from parts of Europe once under Ottoman rule, detailing the fear and horror of such events as the devshirme levy. The subject of dhimmitude has not been part of Lewis' main bailiwick.Read it all at Campus Watch here

Over at Jihad Watch , Andrew Bostom outlines what is wrong with Lewis' argument. Read it all here.

Andrew Bostom contributes these considerations about some recent statements by the renowned Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis:

As noted earlier at Jihad Watch, Bernard Lewis in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal rehashes some of the same points Robert Spencer made on July 27th regarding the significance of August 22, 2006, which, as Lewis notes (again), marks “…27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427… when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq”.

Unfortunately, the essay epitomizes two tendencies that have become distressingly common from Lewis: omission and equivocation. Despite his elegant statement of some of the problems stemming from Muslim eschatology, his analysis is marred by the complete absence of any discussion of the Jew-hatred which is central to that eschatology. Given the raw Jew-hatred permeating the contemporary Muslim world, Lewis squanders this teachable moment.

In stark contrast, George Vajda’s landmark research demonstrated how Muslim eschatology emphasizes the Jews' supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl -— the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ -— and as per another tradition, the Dajjâl is in fact Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions state that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered -— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. Thus, according to a canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985, featured prominently in the Hamas Charter), if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!”

As Vajda observes,

Not only are the Jews vanquished in the eschatological war, but they will serve as ransom for the Muslims in the fires of hell. The sins of certain Muslims will weigh on them like mountains, but on the day of resurrection, these sins will be lifted and laid upon the Jews...

Lewis omits any discussion of these critically relevant anti-Jewish themes.

After an allusion to the modern cult of Islamic martyrdom, Lewis concludes:

How then can one confront such an enemy, with such a view of life and death? Some immediate precautions are obviously possible and necessary. In the long term, it would seem that the best, perhaps the only hope is to appeal to those Muslims, Iranians, Arabs and others who do not share these apocalyptic perceptions and aspirations, and feel as much threatened, indeed even more threatened, than we are. There must be many such, probably even a majority in the lands of Islam. Now is the time for them to save their countries, their societies and their religion from the madness of MAD (mutually assured destruction).

"Some immediate precautions"?

Why not just state: Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and this must be prevented by a pre-emptive strike at their nuclear facilities, if necessary?

"There must be many such, probably even a majority in the lands of Islam."

Even if this were true, what difference does it make if they, like the good Germans of Nazi Germany, do nothing -— a point Dr. Laurent Murawiec made without equivocation, here?

The omissions regarding eschatology fail to explain the Muslim masses’ crazed obsession with Jews. His wishful thinking about “many such peaceful Muslims” who supposedly abhor the jihadists, yet do nothing to stop them, could undermine the only viable short term solution: taking out Iran's nuclear facilities ala the Israeli attack on Osirak.

UPDATE: ANDREW BOSTOM IS ON THE MICHAEL GRAHAM SHOW AT 5:45PM EST TODAY, FRIDAY LISTEN LIVE, HERE'S THE LINK