Twenty years ago, Bernard Lewis and I were walking along the Thames. We’d just seen a dreary English take on naughty French theater, which provoked remembrances of Paris in the 1930s when Lewis was a student of Louis Massignon, the great Catholic orientalist born in 1883, 33 years before my friend and teacher. A thoroughly secular English Jew, Lewis wryly remembered Massignon, a serious antisemite for whom Lewis could nevertheless express considerable scholarly admiration.
Cataloging Massignon’s plusses and minuses provoked another question, omnipresent among Lewis’s students who couldn’t avoid comparing their intellectual inadequacy with their professor’s astounding erudition: “When you look back to when you were young, when you’d started studying Islam, what drove your curiosity?” Lewis’s opening surprised me: “My profound sense of inferiority.”
One of the greatest scholars of the 20th century, Lewis was in awe of the generation of orientalists who’d come before him, the accomplished men who drank deeply of 19th-century European progress, pride, and discovery before World War I blew it all to hell. Lewis became a greater scholar than his famous Scottish mentor, Hamilton A. R. Gibb, who asked Lewis to write The Arabs in History, a compendious little book, published in 1950, that first revealed Lewis’s gift for rendering wide swaths of Islamic history into elegant English prose. The work remains a classic. I asked my old teacher to assess Gibb, who is often exempted from the dubious orientalist list because of his Arabist pedigree, his anti-Zionist sympathies, and his enmity for certain Israel-friendly scholars who were Lewis’s friends. Lewis remained affectionate and respectful.
Anyone who has tried to tackle the great classical Islamic languages—Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish—and the European languages necessary for the proper study of Islamic scholarship knows that students don’t do this because of patriotism, the will to conquer, or even lust. They do it for knowledge, the deeply human yearning for truth, to explore unknown realms, and to see the “other” as he sees himself. Scholars of foreign lands who hate—and there certainly have been academics who’ve approached their subjects with enmity—rarely can sustain sufficient interest to do trailblazing work. If any great fault lies with the orientalists, it is that they were sometimes too sympathetic. The same can be said for their less-accomplished successors.
Lewis is ever conscious of the debt he owes others—the scholars before him and the contemporaries who helped him. I’ve always thought Lewis’s generosity—and there is an army of men and women, in a wide range of professions, to whom he has shown life-changing consideration—in part springs from his sense of place, that he is a link in a long line. He also is generous because he is just so sublimely inquisitive. Lewis wrote one novel, an expression of his love for a Danish woman. He wrote the published work in her native language—as one would expect from a romantic polyglot. Since he was unsure of the result, he wrote under a pseudonym. Lewis should have written many novels in many languages: He has the fiction writer’s eye for details and the fascination for people in all their glorious messiness. He is also considerably shy, which people who don’t know him often mistake for aloofness. But this shyness fuels his curiosity and kindness.
It is right that Lewis has lasted 100 years: He has taken in millennia. None of his former students would disagree: We will not see another like him. He grew up in the terrible storm of the 20th century—a child of a dying British Empire and a Europe coming apart. He knew firsthand a Middle East still living off the traditions of the Ottoman and Qajar empires, when the elites still spoke French and the secularizers had the upper hand on the religious. He also knew firsthand the other Middle East, the one falling apart under native tyrannies and a surging militant faith.
Lewis voyaged often and widely, from Morocco to Pakistan, and farther into Asia wherever Muslims were to be found. He is as likely to relay stories of Afghan peasants, aging, impoverished odalisques, and fundamentalist imams as he is of Arab princes, Turkish and Iranian generals, and Pakistani prime ministers. With all, Lewis looked for the unexpected, the little twist that might bring illumination. Not long after 9/11, Lewis and I spoke, wanting to compare notes about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. His opening line didn’t surprise: He thought bin Laden to be “a man of integrity and sincerity.” That wouldn’t have played well on American television. But for those of us who’ve had the incredible good fortune to be in Lewis’s company, it’s why we love him.
Happy birthday, Bernard.
