Islam’s Interpreter – Bernard Lewis

By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
May 5, 2004


Bernard Lewis has his ardent fans, mostly conservatives, and sharpest critiques, liberals and many Muslims. However, most agree that he is "a genuine scholar of orientalism". For the last seven decades he has been involved in academic career, publishing in-depth books on Islam, Middle-East and related issues, highlighting historiography and "the nuances of language".

His harshest critique, the left regards “him as a servant of imperial power, prone to making demeaning generalizations about Middle Eastern society, and arrogant enough to consider himself an objective scholar.” And the conservatives “hail him as a priceless gem—the only scholar both erudite and honest enough to tell us the inflammatory truth about the condition of modern Islam.”

Regardless of this extreme labeling of Bernard Lewis, in the recent The Atlantic Monthly interview, readers are presented his usual sharp insights, even not surprising that he has shown respectable demeanor toward Islamic culture and societies when talking about Muslims, Islamic history, politics and other related issues.

However, there are a few instances in this interview that his comment on some issues seemed slightly biased. Here is one example:

"You mention that the reason that the Arab-Israeli conflict appears to be the central preoccupation in the Arab world is that it's the only local political grievance that people can discuss freely in the open forum.

It is the licensed grievance. In countries where people are becoming increasingly angry and frustrated at all the difficulties under which they live—the poverty, unemployment, oppression—having a grievance which they can express freely is an enormous psychological advantage.

Do you think that if freedom of speech were introduced in the region the popular preoccupation with Israel would fade?

It would become less exclusive and less important. Obviously, like everyone else in the world, these people are most concerned with their own immediate problems. For the Palestinians, of course, the main problem is the Arab-Israel thing, but people in other countries would, I think, be more concerned with their problems at home if they were allowed to discuss them, which they are not."

Bernard Lewis is correct to observe that in many Arab countries due to lack of freedom of expressions, strangled autocratic rule, stifling poverty and unemployment (in some cases, Western nations openly support some of these autocratic Arab governments -- example: Egypt and Saudi Arabia), let the anger of their populace channel toward Israeli-Palestinian or Iraqi issues so that their grievances toward their own government's brutality, human rights violations, suppressions of democratic voices are subdued into manageable manner.

However, Mr. Lewis didn't say that even if the people were allowed to express their views against their own government, as in North America, most European nations, Australia, and a few of the Asian, African and Latin American nations to a various degree, there would, in most likelihood, similar level of outrages toward Israeli oppressions in the Palestinian territory, or against the unlawful Iraq war purported by U.S.A. and its "coalition" partners if the fair and democratic institutions were in function. Millions of people who wants peace marched against the Iraq war in America, Europe and throughout the world even though many of their governments were pro-war.

Surely, the pro-war political leaders and their fat-wallet beneficiaries would do everything they could, exploiting the global reach of the media, to divert public's attentions from the war's brutality, from the disturbing images and videos of slaughtered Iraqi men, women and children or Palestinian babies with bullet holes in tender forehead by showing the pop singer Michael Jackson's alleged crime, or other inflated or fabricated issues like a college girl abduction story that ultimately proven to be false.

Similarly, the Arab media shows repeated images of oppressions and killings in Iraq and Palestine by the American and the Israeli occupied forces while toning down any positive developments or interactions between Muslims and the Westerners or gruesome murders and terrorism committed by fellow Arabs against Israeli pregnant mother and her four daughters or killings of innocent foreign engineers in Saudi desert.

Each condemns the violations committed by "others" in strongest term possible, while showing either indifference or muted or staged disgust toward brutality committed by their fellow nationals or co-religionists.

In this interview, Bernard Lewis also speculated on why the past efforts of uniting all the Arab nations into a single nation, similar to what is going with the European Union, failed. On the prospect of future Arab union he said, "I think it grows less and less likely, because many of these states were quite artificial when they were created. But they are now quite old, relatively speaking, and each of them has developed a strong group of interests, a sort of intersecting network of careers and interests. I mean, if you have twenty Arab states, you will have twenty embassies in Washington. If you have only one state, you will have only one embassy. Think of all those diplomats out of a job."

Bernard Lewis condemns the "bureaucratic imperatives" and other interests for the cause of failure of Arab union. "The result is that although many efforts have been made to bring Arab states together, they've all failed. There was the union between Egypt and Syria, which was proclaimed amid rejoicing as the first step toward Pan-Arabism. It fell apart. There was the union between Egypt and the Sudan; it fell apart. There was the attempt to create a united Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. All three of these states had even written in their constitutions that they were part of the greater Arab Maghreb. They all fell apart. Each time two or more Arab states tried to unify, they fell apart. So it seems to me that the prospects for a united Arab state are about as good as the prospect for a united Latin America."

However, he never mentioned on the possibility that other global powers, namely, United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia, France, India and a few others may or may not like to see a united Arab or a united Latin America, it could impede to their global or regional hegemony strategies; international oil market also could get quite a different picture, if it ever allowed to materialize.

One may disagree with Bernard Lewis' views on many issues, but his writings could provide good source of information or pointers in finding what is going on in the Middle-East and also Western interpretation or misinterpretation of Muslim world.


Reference

1. "Islam's Interpreter -- Interview", The Atlantic, April 29, 2004

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Mahbubul Karim (Sohel) is a freelance writer. His email address is: sohelkarim@yahoo.com.

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