Lewiss legacy of intellectual and moral confusion has greatly hindered the ability of sincere American policymakers to think clearly about Islams living imperial legacy, driven by unreformed and unrepentant mainstream Islamic doctrine. Reillys highly selective and celebratory presentation of Lewiss understandingsthe man Reilly dubs the foremost historian of the Middle East is pathognomonic of the dangerous influence Lewis continues to wield over his uncritical acolytes and supporters. xiii
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Despite President Bushs uplifting rhetoric and ebullient appraisal of these eventswhich epitomized American hopes and values at their quintessential bestthere was a profound, deeply troubling flaw in hisand his advisersanalysis which simply ignored the vast gulf between Western and Islamic conceptions of freedom itself. 5 How did that happen?
Journalist David Warren, writing in March, 2006, questioned the advice given President Bush on the nature of Islam at that crucial time by not only the paid operatives of Washingtons Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, but most significantly, one eminence grise, in particular: the profoundly learned Bernard Lewis. 6 All these advisers, despite their otherwise divergent viewpoints, as Warren noted, 7 assured him (President Bush) that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible. None more vehementlyor with such authoritythan the so-called Last Orientalist, 8 nonagenarian Professor Bernard Lewis. Arguably the most striking example of Lewis fervor was a lecture he delivered July 16, 2006 (on board the ship Crystal Serenity during a Hillsdale College cruise in the British Isles) about the transferability of Western democracy to despotic Muslim societies, such as Iraq. 9 He concluded with the statement, Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us. This stunning claim was published with that concluding remark as the title, Bring Them Freedom Or They Destroy Us, and disseminated widely. 10
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Hurriyya freedom is as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the lionized Greatest Sufi Master, 15 expressed it perfect slavery. 16 And this conception is not merely confined to the Sufis perhaps metaphorical understanding of the relationship between Allah the master and his human slaves. Following Islamic law slavishly throughout ones life was paramount to hurriyya freedom. This earlier more concrete characterization of hurriyyas metaphysical meaning, whose essence Ibn Arabi reiterated, was pronounced by the Sufi scholar al-Qushayri (d. 1072/74). 17
Let it be known to you that the real meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of slavery. If the slavery of a human being in relation to God is a true one, his freedom is relieved from the yoke of changes. Anyone who imagines that it may be granted to a human being to give up his slavery for a moment and disregard the commands and prohibitions of the religious law while possessing discretion and responsibility, has divested himself of Islam. God said to his Prophet: Worship until certainty comes to you. (Koran 15:99). As agreed upon by the [Koranic] commentators, certainty here means the end (of life).
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And Lewis concludes his entry by observing that Islamic societies forsook even their inchoate democratic experiments, 21
In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.
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Lewiss analogy between Islamic and Communist totalitarianism also includes this candid observation: 29d
A community brought up on such doctrines will not be shocked by (Communist) disregard of political liberty or human rights; it may even be attracted by a regime which offers ruthless strength and efficiency in the service of a causeanyway in appearancein place of the ineptitude, corruption, and cynicism which in their mind, one may even say in their experience, are inseparable from parliamentary government
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Lewis opens his subsequent 1955 essay about the Pakistani experiment with a self-proclaimed Islamic Republic by asking whether or not such a title is indeed a contradiction in terms, given 34
the political experience and political traditions of Islam are after all almost exclusively monarchical and authoritarianexpressed in regimes of the kind associated in the minds of most people with the familiar terms Caliph and Sultan.
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Along the way, Lewis dismisses hagiographic notions about the principle of elected Muslim sovereigns, ostensibly dating from Islams initial four Rightly Guided Caliphs, who ruled between 632-661, beginning in the immediate aftermath of Muhammads death. 38
If we look at the history of Islam, we find that the elective principle remained purely theoretical. The first Caliph after the death of Muhammad, Abu Bakr, was chosen by a process which we may call acclamation or coup detat, according to our point of view. The second, Omar, simply assumed power de facto, probably after having been designated by his predecessor. The third, Othman, was nominated by a committee of six, appointed by Omar on his deathbed to choose one from among themselves as Caliph. The fourth, Ali, succeeded after a process of revolt, murder, and civil war, which thereafter became the all too frequent methods of determining the succession. Of the first four Caliphs, all but one died by violence. Thereafter a dubious solution to the problem of preserving continuity and stability was found when the Caliphate became in effect hereditary in two successive dynastiesthough the fiction of an election was maintained on each accession
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Six decades after Lewis made his then cautiously hopeful observations about Turkey and Pakistan, there is an historical record to judgea clear, irrefragable legacy of failed secularization efforts, accompanied by steady grassroots and institutional re-Islamization in both countries.
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Unlike Vatikiotis, Bernard Lewis, has ignored these obvious setbacksand any self-critical re-appraisal of his earlier guarded optimism. Remarkably, Lewis has become a far more dogmatic evangelist for so-called Islamic democratization, 44 despite such failures!
Lewiss volte-face on the merits of experiments in Islamic democracy, has been accompanied by his equally troubling intellectual legacy regarding three other critical subject areas: the institution of jihad, the chronic impact of the Sharia (Islamic law) on non-Muslims vanquished by jihad, and sacralized Islamic Jew-hatred.
When discussing key doctrinal aspects of jihad, for example, the concepts of harbi, from Dar al Harb, 45 or jihad martyrdom, 46 Lewiss analyses are incomplete, or frankly apologetic.
Classical Islamic jurists such as Abu Hanifa (d. 767; founder of the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence) 47 formulated the concepts Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb (Arabic for, The House of Islam and the House of War). 48 The great Muslim polymath Al-Tabaris 49 early 10th century Book of Jihad 50 includes extracts from Abu Hanifa (and his acolytes) affirming the impunity with which non-combatant harbiswomen, children, the elderly, the mentally or physically disabledmay be killed. 51
Abu Hanifa and his companions said: There is no harm in [having] night raids and incursions. They said: There is no harm if Muslims enter the Territory of War (ard al-harb) to assemble the mangonel [catapults] towards the polytheists fortresses and to shoot them musing mangonels, even if there are among them a woman, child, elder, idiot (matuh), blind, crippled, or someone with a permanent disability (zamin). There is no harm in shooting polytheists in their fortresses using mangonels even if there are among those whom we have named.
This discussion debunks Lewiss (repeated) fatuous contention that Islamic Law proscribed the slaying of such persons during jihad. 52
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Abels lucid, detailed, and evocative description of Dar al Harb contrasts starkly with Lewiss truncated presentation. The latter, which follows, is woefully inadequate to convey proper understanding of the doctrinally sanctioned threat posed to infidel non-belligerents: 54
The unsubjugated unbeliever is by definition an enemy. He is part of the Dar al Harb, the House of War, and is designated as a harbi, an attributive form of the word for war.
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the widely revered contemporary Muslim cleric, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and popular Al-Jazeera television personality, reiterated Abels formulation of Dar al Harb almost exactly in July, 2003, both in conceptual terms, and with regard to Israel, specifically: 55
It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb [the Domain of Disbelief where the battle for the domination of Islam should be waged] is not protected
in modern war, all of society, with all its classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in the war, to aid its continuation, and to provide it with the material and human fuel required for it to assure the victory of the state fighting its enemies. Every citizen in society must take upon himself a role in the effort to provide for the battle. The entire domestic front, including professionals, laborers, and industrialists, stands behind the fighting army, even if it does not bear arms.
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Finally, the Muslim prophet Muhammad is idealized as the eternal model for behaviors that all Muslims should emulate. 71 Nearly six decades ago (in 1956), Arthur Jeffery, a great modern scholar of Islam, reviewed Guillaumes magisterial English translation of Ibn Ishaqs Sirat Rasul Allah, 72 the oldest and most important Muslim biography of Muhammad. Jefferys review included this trenchant observation: 73
Years ago the late Canon Gairdner in Cairo said that the best answer to the numerous apologetic Lives of Muhammad published in the interests of Muslim propaganda in the West would be an unvarnished translation of the earliest Arabic biography of the prophet.
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Not surprisingly then, unlike scholars who specialized in the history of the jihad conquests across Asia, Africa, and Europesuch as Moshe Gil, 76 Speros Vryonis, 77 Dimitar Angelov, 78 Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq, 79 and K.S. Lal 80Lewiss rather superficial surveys 81 avoid any details of the devastation these brutal campaigns wrought. As copiously documented by both triumphal Muslim historians, and the laments of non-Muslim chroniclers representing the victims perspective, jihad depredations resulted in: vast numbers of infidels mercilessly slaughteredincluding non-combatant women and childrenor enslaved, and deported; countless cities, villages, and infidel religious and cultural sites that were sacked and pillaged, often accompanied by the burning of harvest crops and massive uprooting of agricultural production systems, causing famine; enormous quantities of treasure and movable goods seized as booty. 82
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Lewiss bowdlerized 1974 summary portrayal of the system of governance imposed upon those indigenous non-Muslims conquered by jihad is a distressing, ahistorical example of this apologetic genre. 85
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Collectively, these obligations formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-MuslimsJews, Christians, as well as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhistssubjugated by jihad. Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the vanquished dhimmis, and of church bells; restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples; inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law; the refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; a requirement that Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes; and the overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims.
It is important to note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred Islamic law, or Sharia. 91
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The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized in A.S. Trittons 1930 The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects, a pioneering treatise on the status of the dhimmis: 93
[C]aliphs destroyed churches to obtain materials for their buildings, and the mob was always ready to pillage churches and monasteries
dhimmis
always lived on sufferance, exposed to the caprices of the ruler and the passions of the mob
in later times..[t]hey were much more liable to suffer from the violence of the crowd, and the popular fanaticism was accompanied by an increasing strictness among the educated. The spiritual isolation of Islam was accomplished. The world was divided into two classes, Muslims and others, and only Islam counted
Indeed the general feeling was that the leavings of the Muslims were good enough for the dhimmis.
Yet over four decades after Tritton published this apt characterization, here is what Lewis opined on the subject (in 1974): 94
The dhimma on the whole worked well. [emphasis added] The non-Muslims managed to thrive under Muslim rule, and even to make significant contributions to Islamic civilization. The restrictions were not onerous, and were usually less severe in practice than in theory. As long as the non-Muslim communities accepted and conformed to the status of tolerated subordination assigned to them, they were not troubled.
The assessments of two other highly esteemed Western scholarsProfessors Ann Lambton and S.D. Goiteinwho were Lewiss contemporaries (and colleagues), make plain that his flimsy apologetic on the dhimma does not represent a consensus viewpoint.
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The Koran, of course became a mine of anti-Jewish passages. The hadith did not lag behind. Popular preachers used and embellished such material.
Notwithstanding Bernard Lewiss hollow claims, salient examples of Jew-hatred illustrating Perlmanns remarkably compendious assessment of these foundational Islamic sources, and their tragic application across space and time, through the present, are summarized in the discussion that follows.
A front page New York Times story published Saturday January 10, 2009, 103 included extracts from the Friday sermon (of the day before) at Al Azhar mosque pronounced by Egyptian-government appointed cleric Sheik Eid Abdel Hamid Youssef. Referencing well-established Antisemitic motifs from the Koran (citations provided, below), Sheikh Youssef intoned, 104
Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers [Koran 2:61 / 3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth. [Koran 5:33 / 5:64] They are the most evil on Earth. [5:62 /63]
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Here is but a very incomplete sampling of pogroms and mass murderous violence against Jews living under Islamic rule, across space and time, all resulting from the combined effects of jihadism, general anti-dhimmi, and/or specifically Antisemitic motifs in Islam:
6,000 Jews massacred in Fez in 1033;
hundreds of Jews slaughtered in Muslim Cordoba between 1010 and 1015;
4,000 Jews killed in Muslim riots in Grenada in 1066, wiping out the entire community;
the Berber Muslim Almohad depredations of Jews (and Christians) in Spain and North Africa between 1130 and 1232, which killed tens of thousands, while forcibly converting thousands more, and subjecting the forced Jewish converts to Islam to a Muslim Inquisition;
the 1291 pogroms in Baghdad and its environs, which killed (at least) hundreds of Jews;
the 1465 pogrom against the Jews of Fez;
the late 15th century pogrom against the Jews of the Southern Moroccan oasis town of Touat;
the 1679 pogroms against, and then expulsion of 10,000 Jews from Sanaa, Yemen to the unlivable, hot and dry Plain of Tihama, from which only 1,000 returned alive, in 1680, 90% having died from exposure;
recurring Muslim anti-Jewish violenceincluding pogroms and forced conversionsthroughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, which rendered areas of Iran (for example, Tabriz) Judenrein;
the 1834 pogrom in Safed where raging Muslim mobs killed and grievously wounded hundreds of Jews;
the 1888 massacres of Jews in Isfahan and Shiraz, Iran;
the 1910 pogrom in Shiraz;
the pillage and destruction of the Casablanca, Morocco ghetto in 1907;
the pillage of the ghetto of Fez Morocco in 1912;
the government sanctioned anti-Jewish pogroms by Muslims in Turkish Eastern Thrace during June-July, 1934 which ethnically cleansed at least 3000 Jews;
and the series of pogroms, expropriations, and finally mass expulsions of some 900,000 Jews from Arab Muslim nations, beginning in 1941 in Baghdad (the murderous Farhud, during which 600 Jews were murdered, and at least 12,000 pillaged)eventually involving cities and towns in Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Syria, Aden, Bahrain,
and culminating in 1967 in Tunisiathat accompanied the planning and creation of a Jewish state, Israel, on a portion of the Jews ancestral homeland. 133
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Bernard Lewiss brief characterization of these events is selective to the point of absurdity.
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Thus when Lewis first wrote his authoritative history of modern Turkey, he understood, and made explicit, that the Armenians had been massacred under successive Ottoman governments in 1894-96, and 1909. Moreover, he maintains that the Armenians were subjected in 1915 to a holocaust, during which 1.5 million perished.
By 1985, however, Lewis was the most prominent signatory on a petition to the US Congress protesting the effort to make April 24 the date the Armenians commemorate the victims of the genocide a nationwide Armenian-American memorial day, which would include the mention of mans inhumanity to man.
Both this petition drive and a simultaneous high profile media advertisement campaign were financed by the Committee of the Turkish Association. 171 Speros Vryonis has raised, unabashedly, the appropriate historical questions and accompanying moral concerns regarding Lewiss actions: 172
When was Professor Lewis expressing an objective opinion: when he wrote the book [i.e., The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 1962/68 versions], or when he signed the political ad? To phrase it more bluntly, what shall we believe? Certainly, the data available to him in the writing of the book were sufficiently clear and convincing for him to proceed to these three clear and unequivocal statements [i.e., describing the 1894-96, and 1909 events as massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, and the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks as a holocaust]. What had changed? The subject had entered the sphere of politics, and Prof. Lewis, along with so many other signers of the ad, had decided to take sides where their economic, professional, personal, and emotional interests lay: with the Turkish government, and not with history.
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The ironies aboundconsider only Lewiss former uncompromising descriptions of both Communism and Islam as totalitarian ideologies, 182 or the World War I era Armenian massacres as a terrible holocaust, i.e., a genocide 183now summarily redacted. It is apparent Lewis has fallen quite short of the standard set by his own rhetoric.
This discussion began with Bernard Lewiss July, 2006 admonition, Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us. 184 Consistent with his admonition, the US military, at an enormous cost of blood and treasure, 185 liberated Afghanistan and Iraq from despotic regimes.
However, as facilitated by the Sharia-based Afghan and Iraqi constitutions the US military occupation helped midwifewhich have negated freedom of conscience, and promoted the persecution of non-Muslim religious minoritiesthey, i.e., the Muslim denizens of Afghanistan and Iraq have chosen to reject the opportunity for Western freedom we provided them, and transmogrified it into hurriyya. 186 Far more important than mere hypocrisya ubiquitous human traitis the deleterious legacy of his own Islamic confusion Bernard Lewis has bequeathed to Western policymaking elites, both academic and non-academic.
