Saint Bernard

Where would we be without Bernard Lewis? The 85-year-old Princeton professor is our greatest interpreter of Islam and the Middle East, and his many books — such as The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years and The Muslim Discovery of Europe — were well worth reading long before September 11. Now they're essential.

They will be joined in January by a new volume, with the timely title What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. NRO has obtained an advance copy of this important book, which will be published by Oxford University Press.

What Went Wrong? is not specifically about September 11, but it does provide a penetrating analysis of the historical forces behind it. In short, Lewis asks how the Muslim world went from being one of the most advanced civilizations on the planet a few centuries ago to one of the most retrograde right now. There are no simple answers to this complex question, but Lewis does believe too many Arab leaders have blamed their plight on external factors.

"'Who did this to us?' is of course a common human response when things are going badly, and there have been indeed many in the Middle East, past and present, who have asked this question," writes Lewis. "The period of French and British paramountcy in much of the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a new and more plausible scapegoat — Western imperialism. . . . But the Anglo-French interlude was comparatively brief and ended half a century ago; the change for the worse began long before their arrival and continued unabated after their departure. Inevitably, their role as villains was taken over by the United States, along with other aspects of the leadership of the West. The attempt to transfer the guilt to America has won considerable support, but for similar reasons remains unconvincing. Anglo-French rule and American influence, like the Mongol invasions, were a consequence, not a cause, of the inner weakness of Middle-Eastern states and societies."

I can highly recommend anything Lewis writes. While an intellectually dishonest apologist for muslim extremism like Edward Said is lionized by the NY Times, Lewis is a man who truly understands the middle east and is under no illusions about it. Said wrote "Orientalism" in the 1970s, picking up on Foucault (knowledge is power) and suggested that those who were not themselves muslim could not have anything useful to say about the middle east, and that the Western study of it was merely an attempt to gain illegitimate power over it. Lewis was one of the "orientalists" of the sort decried by Said. He will be remembered long after Said is forgotten. More recently, Commentary Magazine in an article by Justin Reid Wiener showed that Said's "My Beautiful Old House" (about how the jews drove him out of his home in Palestine) was complete fiction. Said was seen a few years ago at the border throwing rocks at Israelis. Needless to say, he is the kind of person idolized by the self - hating liberal jews who run the NY Times, and Lewis is not.

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