For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  In 1950 he published The Arabs in History, a classic work of compressed synthesis, in which he put the golden age of the Arabs firmly back in the Abbasid era. In early editions of this book (for it has gone through many editions), he presented the semi-covert Isma‘ili Shi‘a movement of the ninth and tenth centuries as a kind of revolution manqué, which, had it succeeded, might have heralded a humanist Renaissance and freed Muslims from too literal an interpretation of the Qur’an. As for the future of the Arabworld, he maintained that the Arabs had the choice of coming to terms with the West and participating as equal partners in the political, social and scientific benefits or of retreating into some kind of medievalist, theocratic shell. He surely exaggerated the freedom of choice available to the Arabs, since he wrote as if America, Europe and Israel exercised no kind of military, diplomatic and economic sway in the Middle East. Still, it is an interesting book in that its first draft was written before the full impact of the existence of vast oil reserves in the Middle East had been felt and, of course, before the rise of fundamentalism and the revival of Shi‘ism. Although the future political importance of Shi‘ism was far from clear in the 1940s, nevertheless Lewis, presumably fired up by his original research topic, did in fact devote quite a lot of attention to various Shi‘a and other oppositional movements. In the decades to come, he was increasingly inclined to find parallels between such movements and both communism and Arab terrorist organizations.

  In 1949, aged only thirty-three, he became Professor of the History of the Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He was a fluent and popular lecturer. In 1961 he published what is almost certainly his most substantial book, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Anybody who wishes to determine Lewis’s merits as an Orientalist has to engage with this book and other works of the 1960s. It is not sufficient to pillory him only on the basis of later essays and pièces d’occasion. In The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis praised the Turks for having shed their decayed imperial past and moved towards nationhood and democracy, thanks in large part to the quality shown by the Turks – ‘a quality of calm self-reliance, of responsibility, above all of civic courage’. What was unusual at the time it was published was that Lewis had made more use of Turkish sources than of those produced by Western observers.

  His next book, The Assassins (1967), presented this medieval offshoot of the Isma‘ilis, with their penchant for political murder, as a precursor of modern terrorist organizations. (The PLO had been founded in 1964. In 1966 Israelis in the vicinity of Hebron were killed by a landmine planted by Palestinians, a harbinger of things to come.) Race and Color in Islam (1970) attacked the pious myth that there has been no such thing as racial prejudice in Islamic culture. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (1990) similarly explored the notion that the slave trade and the enslavement of black Africans was peculiarly the historical crime of the Christian West. One of the questions tackled in The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982) was why, until the nineteenth century at least, were Muslims so uninterested in Europe? On the other hand, thanks to his erudition and wide reading, he was able to produce more evidence for a limited interest in Europe on the part of Muslims than anyone had hitherto guessed. In The Jews of Islam (1984) Lewis repeatedly stressed that the Jews had been fairly well treated and tolerated in the pre-modern Muslim world. But he also drew attention to the limits of that tolerance and to the occasional anti-Jewish pogroms.

  In general, it must be clear that he has a knack of looking at awkward subjects – subjects that Muslim apologists and starry-eyed believers in an unalloyed golden age of the Arabs would rather not see discussed. Although his selection of topics might suggest an agenda, the identification of Bernard Lewis as both a friend of Israel and a supporter of American policies in the Middle East and the consequent polemics directed against his past scholarly achievements have obscured just how positive his portrayal of Arab and Islamic culture has been and how profound his knowledge of that culture is.

  In 1974, Lewis left SOAS for the United States. One factor behind his move was rumoured to be his growing disillusionment with the radicalization of the student body at SOAS. He became Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. Although he retired in 1986, he has continued to lecture and publish. Among other things, he has published some fine translations of poetry from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew. As for his prose, it is always elegant and cadenced. One never has any doubt about exactly what it is that he is trying to say (and that is something that is not always the case with most of his opponents). Among the later works, The Middle East: 2000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day (1995) summarized his views at some length. In its conclusion, he observed that ‘the larger problem that had been exercising Muslim minds for centuries [was] the problem of Western wealth and power contrasted with the relative poverty and powerlessness of the Muslim states and peoples.’ This echoes in a blunter form the conclusion of The Arabs in History, written so many decades earlier. The Arabs had their day in the Middle Ages. For Lewis, history in the longer term has been the story of the Triumph of the West. Islam just has to come to terms with a modernity shaped by the West. It is not the kind of message that most Muslims want to hear. On the other hand, it is hard to say that it is obviously wrong.

  Since his retirement, Lewis has tended to recycle ideas and evidence from other works in a series of general books and survey articles and it is these that his critics have tended to engage with. Inevitably, his broad surveys have relied to some extent on generalizations. One particularly controversial article, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, was published in Atlantic Monthly (September 1990) and it was in this article that the phrase ‘the clash of civilizations’ was first used – a phrase that was later picked up by Samuel Huntington and used as the title of a controversial book. Although most right-thinking liberals and believers in multiculturalism would reject the notion of a clash, it is clear that some Muslims believe in exactly that and it is a clash that they hope to win. On the other hand, Arabs with secular backgrounds have accused Lewis of having exaggerated both the centrality of Islam in Middle Eastern history and its role as a brake on the acceptance of science, democracy and women’s rights.

  Lewis was one of the main targets of Orientalism and later publications by Said, though Said tended to concentrate on Lewis’s later essays of popularization and failed to engage with the early major works. In some ways Said’s criticisms are surprisingly obtuse. He failed to notice how much Lewis in his early works owed to Massignon (whom Said admired) and how he sympathized with the revolutionary and the underdog. On the other hand, Said and Lewis share quite a lot of common ground and Said may have taken more from Lewis than he realized. Lewis has placed great stress on the French expedition to Egypt as a pivotal moment in the history of the Arabworld and as the harbinger of the Triumph of the West. Lewis, like Said, stresses the lamentable lack of a civil society in the Islamic world. Lewis, like Said, regards Orientalism as important. Lewis was not really attacked by Said for being a bad scholar (which he is not), but for being a supporter of Zionism (which he is).

  Elie Kedourie (1926–92) was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Baghdad.33 (Until the 1950s at least there was a thriving Jewish community in Iraq that was then more or less wiped out by successive purges.) Though he was to write superbly in English, it was his third language after Arabic and French. He went to study at the London School of Economics and then to do historical research at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Hamilton Gibb, who was one of Kedourie’s thesis examiners, disliked Kedourie’s fierce criticisms both of British policy in Iraq and of Arabnationalism. The two men clashed bitterly and Kedourie withdrew his thesis. Despite this setback, the famous conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott saved Kedourie’s academic career by securing him a teaching post at the London School of Economics.

  Kedourie went on to produce a series of important books and articles, most of them based on detailed
research in archives and all of them argued with incisive eloquence. In an essay entitled ‘The Chatham House Version’, he dissected the kind of well-meaning but misconceived Arabism represented by Gibb. Martin Kramer (on whom see below) has characterized the essay as follows: ‘It was an exacting refutation of an entire school of error, one rested on a nihilistic philosophy of Western guilt, articulated by a self-appointed priesthood of expertise.’34 Kedourie lamented the destruction of the Ottoman empire and the collapse after it of the British empire. He was cynical about the projects and boasts of contemporary Arab politicians. He described the Middle East as ‘a wilderness of tigers’. Like Massignon, he was influenced by that extraordinary political thinker, Joseph de Maistre, though his reading of de Maistre’s grim teachings was quite different from that of Massignon.

  Chatham House was a particular target of Kedourie’s, as he was contemptuous of those who were attached to that institute of international studies and their penchant for apologizing for the evils of British colonialism and their readiness to fudge unpleasant realities about modern Arab history. In Chatham House he discovered ‘the shrill and clamant voice of English radicalism, thirsting with self-accusatory and joyful lamentation’. Kedourie did not subscribe to Hourani’s vision of an Arabic liberal age and he wrote debunking studies of some of the key figures associated with that supposed phenomenon. He took a consistently hard-nosed approach to political and economic issues and he maintained that ‘the possession of political and military power determines who will enjoy the fruits of labour’. Kedourie’s hostility to Arabnationalism made him favoured reading among supporters of Israel and, for example, the following passage from Kedourie’s Nationalism in Asia and Africa on the accursed export of Western political theory, especially nationalism, to other continents was quoted in Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back: ‘A rash, a malady, an infection spreading from Western Europe through the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, India, the Far East, and Africa, eating up the fabric of settled society to leave it weakened and defenceless before ignorant and unscrupulous adventurers for further horror and atrocity: such are the terms to describe what the West has done to the rest of the world, not wilfully or knowingly, but mostly out of excellent intentions and by example of its prestige and prosperity.’35

  Like Kedourie, Panayiotis J. Vatikiotis (1928–97) grew up in a multiracial, multi-confessional Levantine environment that has now all but vanished.36 He was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Haifa to a Palestinian Greek family and later taught in Egypt and the United States before moving to London. From 1965 onwards he taught Middle Eastern politics at SOAS where he was a friend and ally of Bernard Lewis. He fiercely criticized the despotisms of the Arabworld. He was sceptical about the aims and capacity of the Palestine Liberation Organization and cynical about Nasser. The Egyptian Army in Politics (1961) was one of Vatikiotis’s most important books.

  It was inevitable that he should be selected as a leading target by Said in Orientalism. Said chose to focus on an essay Vatikiotis had written as an introduction to a volume of collected studies on revolutions in the Middle East. In that introduction, he had argued that though there were frequent coups in the Middle East, the region lacked the political categories that are essential to a revolution in the full sense of the word. Said read the introduction as ‘saying nothing less than that revolution is a bad kind of sexuality’.37 It is most unlikely that this eroticized reading of Vatikiotis would have occurred to anyone other than Said. But it is fair to criticize Vatikiotis’s writings for their occasional tendency to slip into an opaque sociological jargon. Unlike Hourani, Lewis and Kedourie, he was not an elegant writer. Towards the end of his career at SOAS, he became increasingly depressed by the cuts in the college’s funding imposed by the Conservative government: ‘Beginning with ad hoc rationalization policies, as new funding schemes for higher education were being brought in, we suddenly lost most of our star quality colleagues, either through early or premature retirement, resignation, or relocation across the Atlantic. Their departure impoverished the academic, scholarly standard of the institution as well as its intellectual quality…’ He thought that SOAS’s reputation thereafter rested on nothing more than past achievements.

  From the 1960s onwards and for the first time ever, English-speaking Arabists had a decent dictionary of modern Arabic, though it was one based in the first instance on German scholarship. Milton Cowan’s A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1961) was an expanded English version of Hans Wehr’s Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952), which was actually the result of a collaborative effort by German Orientalists during the early 1940s. It was chiefly based on combing modern works of Arabic literature for lexical items, rather than culling them from medieval Arabdictionaries, which was what Lane had done in the nineteenth century.

  The publication of the Hayter Report in 1961 gave only a brief fillip to Arabstudies and Orientalism more generally.38 As we have seen, the Scarborough Report had recommended that significant sums be allocated to the teaching of exotic subjects, but, after only a few years, the funding that had been promised was whittled away. The Hayter Commission was set up by the University Grants Commission as a follow-up to Scarborough and to remedy the failure to implement the previous report’s recommendations in a sustained way. Sir William Hayter, the chairman of the new commission, recommended the extension of social studies and modern studies relating to Africa and Asia. The kind of expansion his report had recommended was funded for a while, but in the 1970s almost all departments in all British universities began to suffer from the sort of retrenchment that had so dismayed Vatikiotis. Exotic subjects were especially badly hit. What, after all, was the point in lavishly funding Arabic studies? During the 1950s and 1960s Britain’s position in the Middle East was eroded with surprising speed. Besides, in the post-war period, the Arabs with whom the British were dealing almost all spoke English or French anyway. Occasionally one might surprise and delight an Arab host by addressing him in his language, but this was a limited gain for such heavy expenditure on teaching facilities in London and elsewhere. As far as the study of Islam was concerned, Western academics and associated pundits had tended to regard the religion as a post-medieval survival, doomed to wither away in the face of Western-style secularism. It took the Iranian revolution of 1978–9 to change perceptions.

  Outside London, the study and teaching of Arabic was less tied to contemporary agendas. Alfred Felix Landon Beeston (1911–95), long-haired, pot-bellied, chain-smoking and convivial, was one of Oxford’s great eccentrics.39 When I was a student in Oxford in the 1960s I remember hearing how on a previous evening Beeston had cycled naked through Oxford pursued by the police, but successfully eluded his pursuers by abandoning his bicycle and swimming across the Cherwell. Beeston had originally done research under Margoliouth. His great passion was the study of ancient South Arabian inscriptions. When Gibb left for America, Beeston replaced him as the Laudian Professor. Besides publishing copiously on the old Arabian scripts and on medieval Arabic poetry, he also wrote an incisive handbook on the contemporary Arabic language and it was he who got modern Arabic on to the Oxford syllabus. Making heavy weather at conversation with him at a college dinner table, I asked him if he had read anything good in Arabic recently. Yes, he replied. He had found a copy of an Arabic translation of Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever in his hotel room in Cairo and thought the novel terribly good.

  In Cambridge, Malcolm Lyons, who held the Thomas Adams Chair from 1985 to 1996, was primarily interested in medieval literature and popular story-telling, though he co-wrote an important biography of Saladin.40 Like his Cambridge predecessors, Lyons was steeped in Latin and Greek literature and he had been awarded a first in the Cambridge Classical Tripos before he turned his attention to Arabic. The young Lyons decided that classical studies was far too heavily covered and that the study of classical Arabic, which offered some of the same charms as the study of ancient Greek and Latin, would offer far greater oppor
tunities for doing pioneering work and making independent discoveries.

  William Mongomery Watt’s life of the Prophet Muhammad had been studied by Maxime Rodinson, who then decided that it was not sufficiently Marxist and proceeded to write his own version. However, for several decades Watt’s two-volume biography was effectively the authorized version for non-Muslims. William Montgomery Watt (b. 1909) had studied at Oxford and Jena.41 He taught moral philosophy at Edinburgh before being ordained an Anglican minister. He became interested in Islam while working for the Bishop of Jerusalem in the 1940s. From 1947 onwards he taught Arabic at Edinburgh University and in 1964 became Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies there, a post that he held until his retirement in 1979. Although he published copiously on Islamic matters, his most important books were his life of Muhammad, published as Muhammad at Mecca (1953) and Muhammad at Medina (1956). Watt placed a great deal of stress upon what he supposed was the economic background to the Prophet’s preaching. He presented Mecca as the centre of a trading empire in which the Quraysh tribe (to which Muhammad belonged) grew wealthy on the profits of the transit trade in spices, as well as their custodianship of a pagan shrine crowded with idols. (Later this pseudo-historical construct was efficiently demolished by Patricia Crone.42) According to Watt, the transition in the seventh century to a mercantile economy in Mecca produced social tensions. Islam was in a sense a product of those tensions and a solution to them.