Prophet and Laws

Veteran US-born UK Asia hand Jonathan Mirsky reviews Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian by Bernard Lewis - who turns 96 on May 31 - with Buntzie Ellis Churchill, Lewis's leading lady these last c. 15 years and a pillar of the Philadelphia foreign-affairs gentry:*

*Via Amazon.com, School Library Journal on Lewis's and Churchill's 2008 work Islam: The Religion and the People: "... the authors humanize Islam by including insets on 'Islamic humor' in every chapter", yet another aspect of Lewis's donning of khaki and pith helmet in arenas of Near East scholarship all but hitherto unknown in the West (that's what he ... Said)

He has some well-developed hatreds, notably of the late Edward Said,


Postcolonial Rock ("Intimuddah, Intifada", &c.), Saturday mornings on ABC (Arabic Brickcasting Collective)

the main exponent of the notion of ‘Orientalism’, which Said condemned as a condescending attitude, born of imperialism, towards the Islamic world. ‘Edward Said’s thesis is just plain wrong,’ states Lewis in his always confident way. The exchange of letters between Said and Lewis in the New York Review of Books. 12 August 1982. is a model of personal and scholarly venom. ‘His linking European Orientalist scholarship to European imperial expansion in the Islamic world is an absurdity. ’ ‘Orientalism’— the study of Arabic and Islam in Europe — occurred at a time not of European imperialism among the Muslims, but of Muslim imperial expansion in Europe’, beginning in the eighth century and lasting for many more. Nonetheless, Said’s formulation, contends Lewis, has so infected his field that many young scholars do not dare to speak or write honestly about the Middle East. (I can understand this from my own area of interest — China — about which some scholars, not to say businessmen and politicians, avoid controversy, fearful of being banned from travel or study there.)

Lewis had an interesting war, serving various agencies in duties he claims he still may not describe — but says revealingly that he analysed enough hacked telephone transcripts that he still feels uneasy when speaking on the phone. After serving as professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies he was called to Princeton, and eventually divided his time there with the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study. He learned to abandon British academic irony when lecturing, he says, because it baffled his American audiences.

... I was fascinated by Lewis’s account of slavery in the Muslim world, a subject he argues that is also unmentioned, out of fear of giving offence. He observes that the study of slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds and the Americas amounts to thousands of titles, while in the Muslim world, ‘despite slavery’s importance in virtually every area and period,’ the list might take up a mere couple of pages. The subject is so sensitive that ‘it is difficult, and sometimes professionally hazardous for a young scholar to turn his attention in this direction.’

He recalls a conference where an African-American was asked why so many African-Americans who were not themselves Muslims gave their children Muslim names, such as Ali and Fatima. The man replied that people like him disliked ‘carrying the names of the people who bought us’. A colleague of Lewis’s asked: ‘But what do you gain by adopting the names of the people who sold you?’ Lewis writes: ‘The identity of those [West African] slave merchants is well known but rarely mentioned.’