In "On Occidentalism and Orientalism" (one of two previously unpublished pieces in this jumbled collection), Lewis defends his craft as Orientalist, a term of academic opprobrium since Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978. Answering Said's charges, he writes, "We may first look at this curious word, 'orientalist.' The word was created, as are so many, by analogy, after the model of such earlier terms as Latinist, Hellenist or Hebraist. A Latinist was one who studied Latin texts, a Hellenist one who studied Greek texts and so on. I am not aware that there has been any objection on the part of the Latins or the Hellenes to being studied in this way nor to having the studies so designated." Lewis came to history as a linguist, having learned ancient Hebrew in England in preparation for his bar mitzvah before graduating to the modern Hebrew then taking root in Palestine's Zionist colonies. Next came Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish, Greek and Latin. As philologist, he does not distinguish between dead and living languages--between biblical and contemporary Hebrew, or between Homeric Greek and modern Greek. If the Latins and Hellenes do not object to his investigations, and to the generalizations he bases on them, the reason is that they no longer exist. Arabs, Turks and Israelis do. Using the pathologist's scalpel to diagnose the living, he is surprised when the patient screams.

Lewis's contribution to general knowledge comes from his pointillist and endearing discoveries in the study of Islamic and Ottoman history--like the relative unimportance Muslim chroniclers attached to their defeat by the French at Tours in AD 732, called by Christians a "turning point in the struggle between Christendom and Islam," and the reminiscences of an Iraqi priest on a tour of Spanish America in the seventeenth century. A scholar has to dig to find these gems, and Lewis is fortunate to read them in the languages of their authors. The civilian ideologues in the Pentagon who sit at his feet, however, are less interested in his thoughts on Fatimids and Safavids than in the name he gave to their view of the world. For the new guardians of Manifest Destiny, his "clash of civilizations" has a twofold appeal. First, it is simple, like Fukuyama's "end of history," an advertising slogan that obscures the product it's selling. Second, it provides the powerful with academic legitimacy for wars they would pursue anyway. By setting contemporary conflicts, like those between the United States and Middle Eastern actors, within an age-old contest rooted in primordial hatred, it prescribes as much as it describes. The public is encouraged to view war as inevitable, if not desirable. If Lewis had challenged the assumptions on which Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz waged war, they would have invited some other court academic to articulate their prejudices. There are countless takers in academe willing to assume that role. When Ahmad Chalabi passed on to the Washington junta Iraqi defectors with Arabian Nights tales of Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, their ears were open. When Chalabi later accused Washington's hawks of misgoverning Iraq, they raided his house and threatened him with arrest. It is a fair bet that Lewis would be dropped from the White House guest list if he counseled nonintervention in Middle East affairs, although that is exactly what he was recommending in 1957, when he stumbled across the clash-of-civilizations talisman.

It was in 1957 that Lewis first declared, to a Middle East conference at Johns Hopkins University, "We shall be better able to understand this situation if we view the present discontents of the Middle East not as a conflict between states or nations, but as a clash between civilizations." Then, his view did not imply open warfare. "What action should the Western states take in the present Middle East situation?" he asked. "My own answer would be: as little as possible." Even then, there were more obvious clashes in the Middle East, as elsewhere, than any between civilizations. The world from which imperial Europe was gradually and reluctantly withdrawing pitted rich against poor, modernizers against traditionalists, socialists against royalists, imperialists against anticolonialists, and Western oil companies against hungry indigènes. In 1957 the United States, in particular, was more popular in the Arab world than it is today. It had just forced the British, French and Israelis to withdraw from Egypt. It had yet to invade any Arab state. Although it had overthrown a popular Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, for the crime of nationalizing his country's oil resources, it had yet to arouse the hostility of Muslim zealots. In fact, the United States was fundamentalist Islam's greatest benefactor. It used the mosque to offset the secularizing appeal of the "godless" Soviet Union and local socialists. Lewis's clash was undetectable to Washington's foreign policy elite in 1957, except as it applied to monolithic Communism. The Christendom-Islam split found an audience among American cold warriors only when they lost their Soviet nemesis and Lewis resuscitated the notion in The Atlantic Monthly in 1990. What better opiate than an enemy in the form of another civilization that had always resisted the West? Lewis wrote, repeating his theme of thirty-three years before, "This is no less than a clash of civilizations--the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both." This was no new enemy, it was an adversary culled from antiquity.

Still, Lewis remained cautious about launching a violent crusade: "It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival." By December 2001, in the aftermath of the apocalyptic September 11 atrocities, he was urging war: "A military action carefully designed so as neither to suffer casualties nor to inflict them on the enemy may be seen as a noble example of civilized compassion. It does not, however, carry much conviction among regimes where such qualms are not shared or even understood. They would attribute such restraint to reasons other than compassion, and draw the appropriate inference...of fear and irresolution." Within a year, in the Wall Street Journal, Lewis was calling for an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein: "The crucial question here is not how or by whom Saddam is removed, but what comes in his place." What came in his place were chaos, a costly American occupation and insecurity on a scale the Iraqis had never before experienced. Plus more than 10,000 dead and counting.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.