Bernard Lewis: May 31, 1916 – May 19, 2018

Inspection of the New Arrivals

Historian Bernard Lewis died yesterday at 102. 

Martin Kramer on Lewis in Mosaic two years ago:

As the year 1976 opened, the Middle East hardly seemed poised for a great transformation. The shah of Iran remained firmly seated on his peacock throne. Off in Iraqi exile, an elderly Iranian cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini nursed his grievances in obscurity. Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s confident president, had the country under his thumb; the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots languished in ineffectual opposition. 

In Saudi Arabia, a young man named Osama bin Laden finished his education in an elite high school, where he had worn a tie and blazer. Since the previous summer, Lebanon had been roiled by battles, according to Western reportage, between “leftists” and “rightists.” A key player there was the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasir Arafat, darling of the international left and champion of a “democratic, secular state” in Palestine.

The role of Islam in politics? There wasn’t any to speak of.

Imagine, then, the surprise of the readers of Commentary magazine when the January issue landed in their mailboxes bearing these words on the bright yellow cover: “The Return of Islam.” The byline beneath that sensational headline did not belong to a roving journalist or a think-tank pundit but to Bernard Lewis, the eminent British historian of the Middle East, just recently transplanted to America. 

Thus did the West receive its very first warning that a new era was beginning in the Middle East—one that would produce a tide of revolution, assassination, and terrorism, conceived and executed explicitly in the name of Islam... 

For Lewis, the author of some 30 books and 200 articles, that essay has always stood out as a landmark in his own career. This is evident in the following passage in a brief résumé written by him in the early 2000s for Princeton University’s department of Near Eastern Studies, where he spent the latter part of his academic career:

During the last twenty years or so, I have become more and more concerned with the rise and spread of various extremist versions of militant Islam. My first publication on the subject was an article on “The Return of Islam,” published in Commentary magazine in January 1976. This was years before the Iranian revolution. I have since given many lectures and published many articles as well as several books on various aspects of this topic.

In this note, Lewis didn’t name those “many articles” and “several books,” although they had catapulted him from academic fame to genuine celebrity. Two of them bore gripping titles also identified with him: What Went Wrong? and The Crisis of Islam, two post-9/11 bestsellers. But it is by the early prophetic phrase “The Return of Islam” that he wished to be recognized, and it provides an essential entryway to any proper understanding of his immense achievements as a scholar, a writer for audiences both specialized and general, and a public intellectual of unmatched authority and influence...