The Muslim Past

In the United States, a country saturated with instant punditry, serious scholars rarely attain celebrity as public intellectuals. Yet Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, has long radiated influence far beyond his specialization in Ottoman studies. A friend of Henry Kissinger and a mentor to subsequent cohorts of conservative policy makers, Lewis arguably has done more than any Mideast expert to mold American attitudes to the region.

His latest book, “Faith and Power,” a collection of essays, lectures and speeches from the past two decades loosely linked to the theme of relations between Islam and the state, reminds us why. Lewis is a fine writer, with a commanding authorial voice that sweeps magisterially across the ages. His linkage of diverting historical anecdotes to pressing current issues and his skill at contracting complex ideas into clever apothegms do much to explain his appeal to politicians in search of a punchy quote.

Here, for instance, is Lewis contrasting political structures at home and abroad: “In America one uses money to buy power, while in the Middle East one uses power to acquire money.” Even a subject as vexed as the search for Arab-Israeli peace boils down to this satisfyingly pithy formula: “If the conflict is about the size of Israel, then long and difficult negotiations can eventually resolve the problem. But if the conflict is about the existence of Israel, then serious negotiation is impossible.”

Such distillations can be salutary, but may also prove dangerously reductionist. Take Lewis’s remark that democracies do not make war, and dictatorships do not make peace. This glib elaboration of a neoconservative mantra is easily challenged. The strongmen who ran Grenada, Panama and Iraq may have been bad guys, but there is no disputing that it was the United States that attacked them, not the other way around. The Egyptian dictator Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel, not the democratically elected Hamas party.

Yet Lewis blithely hoists his rhetoric to even more contentious heights. Like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, he asserts, Middle Eastern dictators need war to justify their tyranny. This means peace will come only with their collapse or their defeat. In other words, democracies must clobber every dictator. And that’s not all. Giving a more specific nudge to policy makers, Lewis pretends to have discerned “deep roots” of democratic traditions in Iraq and Iran, of all places. Democracy might easily prevail there, he opines, and inspire others in the region, “given the chance.”

It might be argued that it is hardly Lewis’s fault if some in the Bush administration took such expert advice a little too literally. Yet Lewis himself makes his intentions pretty clear in another essay: “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.”