Tweet
Muscat Daily, Sultanate of Oman
May 27, 2012 Sunday
Story of a historian
At 96, Bernard Lewis still commands the pen. In his autobiography
Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, Lewis
reflects not only on his painstaking commitment to the historical
truth and a hatred of what he calls 'the falsification of history' but
also on his passionate, at times obsessive curiosity about different
cultures and places.
As a historian his interests range widely, from the history of food to
the fall of dynasties. Learning to speak, read and write languages
helped him in his quest for truth. Lewis has met everyone from Golda
Meir to Moammar Gadhafi. On his journeys, Lewis has slept in obscure
Syrian villages and desert tents, as well as in sumptuous palaces.
Bernard Lewis, (born May 31, 1916) is a British-American historian,
scholar in Oriental studies and political commentator. Specialising in
the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West,
Lewis is especially well known in academic circles for his works on
the history of the Ottoman Empire.
Lewis served in the British Army during the Second World War before
being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war, he returned to
the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London
and was appointed to the new chair of Near and Middle Eastern History.
Lewis is a widely read expert and is regarded as one of the West's
leading scholars of that region. His advice has been frequently sought
by policymakers, including the George W Bush administration.
In the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Martin
Kramer, whose PhD thesis was directed by Lewis, considered that, over
a 60 year career, he has emerged as "the most influential postwar
historian of Islam and Middle East."
Consider one passage, chosen from The Emergence of Modern Turkey
(1961), his classic study based on pioneering research in the Ottoman
Imperial Archives. Describing the death of the Turkish ruler Kemal
Atatürk in 1938, he offers a summary of the man's character and
temperament:
'Kemal Atatürk was a man of swift and decisive action, of sudden and
often violent decision. A tough and brilliant soldier, a hard drinker
and wencher, he was in all things a man of immense will and abounding
vitality.
By his contemporaries he was often called a dictator, and in a sense
he certainly was. But in saying this one must remember that his rule
was very different from that of other men, in Europe and the Middle
East yesterday and today, to whom the same term is applied.
An autocrat by personal and professional bias, dominating and
imperious by temperament, he yet showed a respect for decency and
legality, for human and political standards, that is in astonishing
contrast with the behaviour of lesser and more pretentious men. His
was a dictatorship without the uneasy over the shoulder glance, the
terror of the door bell, the dark menace of the concentration camp.'
As a boy studying medieval European history, Lewis recalls, he always
'wanted to know the history of the other side'. This desire has led
him not only to view his subjects from unexpected angles but also to
explore controversial topics, such as the vexed issue of race in
Islamic culture or the unsavoury history of Muslim slave trading.
In Notes on a Century Lewis details the disputes he has weathered,
including distant ones. For instance, in the first edition of The
Emergence of Modern Turkey, he wrote of 'the terrible holocaust of
1916, when a million and a half Armenians perished'.
When the third edition of the book was published a year later (in
1962), he replaced the word 'holocaust' with 'slaughter'. As he
explains in his memoir, he made the substitution "not to minimise what
happened but to avoid a comparison with the destruction of six million
Jews in Nazi ruled Europe, for which 'holocaust' had by then become
almost a technical term."
Still, after giving an interview to Le Monde in which he discussed
this change of terms, he was faced with four lawsuits in France on the
charge of 'Holocaust denial'. In the end, he was required to pay a
mere single franc in damages to his accusers, as well as costs.
It is all too tempting to describe Bernard Lewis, the distinguished
historian of the Islamic world, as venerable. Lewis, who turns 96 on
May 31, seems to possess the aura of a sage.
Whether writing about the early history of the Arabs or the
development of the modern Turkish state, he has always been unusually
alert to nuance and ambiguity; he is wary of his sources and tests
them against other evidence.
In Notes on a Century, his lively new memoir, he writes that his work
in archives instilled in him 'a profound mistrust of written
documents'.
From: A. Papazian
May 27, 2012 Sunday
Story of a historian
At 96, Bernard Lewis still commands the pen. In his autobiography
Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, Lewis
reflects not only on his painstaking commitment to the historical
truth and a hatred of what he calls 'the falsification of history' but
also on his passionate, at times obsessive curiosity about different
cultures and places.
As a historian his interests range widely, from the history of food to
the fall of dynasties. Learning to speak, read and write languages
helped him in his quest for truth. Lewis has met everyone from Golda
Meir to Moammar Gadhafi. On his journeys, Lewis has slept in obscure
Syrian villages and desert tents, as well as in sumptuous palaces.
Bernard Lewis, (born May 31, 1916) is a British-American historian,
scholar in Oriental studies and political commentator. Specialising in
the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West,
Lewis is especially well known in academic circles for his works on
the history of the Ottoman Empire.
Lewis served in the British Army during the Second World War before
being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war, he returned to
the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London
and was appointed to the new chair of Near and Middle Eastern History.
Lewis is a widely read expert and is regarded as one of the West's
leading scholars of that region. His advice has been frequently sought
by policymakers, including the George W Bush administration.
In the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Martin
Kramer, whose PhD thesis was directed by Lewis, considered that, over
a 60 year career, he has emerged as "the most influential postwar
historian of Islam and Middle East."
Consider one passage, chosen from The Emergence of Modern Turkey
(1961), his classic study based on pioneering research in the Ottoman
Imperial Archives. Describing the death of the Turkish ruler Kemal
Atatürk in 1938, he offers a summary of the man's character and
temperament:
'Kemal Atatürk was a man of swift and decisive action, of sudden and
often violent decision. A tough and brilliant soldier, a hard drinker
and wencher, he was in all things a man of immense will and abounding
vitality.
By his contemporaries he was often called a dictator, and in a sense
he certainly was. But in saying this one must remember that his rule
was very different from that of other men, in Europe and the Middle
East yesterday and today, to whom the same term is applied.
An autocrat by personal and professional bias, dominating and
imperious by temperament, he yet showed a respect for decency and
legality, for human and political standards, that is in astonishing
contrast with the behaviour of lesser and more pretentious men. His
was a dictatorship without the uneasy over the shoulder glance, the
terror of the door bell, the dark menace of the concentration camp.'
As a boy studying medieval European history, Lewis recalls, he always
'wanted to know the history of the other side'. This desire has led
him not only to view his subjects from unexpected angles but also to
explore controversial topics, such as the vexed issue of race in
Islamic culture or the unsavoury history of Muslim slave trading.
In Notes on a Century Lewis details the disputes he has weathered,
including distant ones. For instance, in the first edition of The
Emergence of Modern Turkey, he wrote of 'the terrible holocaust of
1916, when a million and a half Armenians perished'.
When the third edition of the book was published a year later (in
1962), he replaced the word 'holocaust' with 'slaughter'. As he
explains in his memoir, he made the substitution "not to minimise what
happened but to avoid a comparison with the destruction of six million
Jews in Nazi ruled Europe, for which 'holocaust' had by then become
almost a technical term."
Still, after giving an interview to Le Monde in which he discussed
this change of terms, he was faced with four lawsuits in France on the
charge of 'Holocaust denial'. In the end, he was required to pay a
mere single franc in damages to his accusers, as well as costs.
It is all too tempting to describe Bernard Lewis, the distinguished
historian of the Islamic world, as venerable. Lewis, who turns 96 on
May 31, seems to possess the aura of a sage.
Whether writing about the early history of the Arabs or the
development of the modern Turkish state, he has always been unusually
alert to nuance and ambiguity; he is wary of his sources and tests
them against other evidence.
In Notes on a Century, his lively new memoir, he writes that his work
in archives instilled in him 'a profound mistrust of written
documents'.
From: A. Papazian