Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  Not long after that the minister of education gave a reception to which he invited members of the foreign community in Kabul and their wives, not a large group at the time. One woman, the wife of an American diplomat and a staunch feminist, thought that having the minister of education at her mercy was too good an opportunity to miss. She cornered him and asked why he didn’t do more for the education of girls. A fair question. I think that most ministers of education in Third World countries, tackled with such a question, would have said something on the order of, we did so much last year, are doing such and such this year and next year we’re going to do so much more. Not in Afghanistan. The minister looked at her in astonishment and said, “Madam, I don’t have enough schools for boys; don’t bother me with girls.” I deplored his sentiments but admired his honesty.

  I began to get used to this frankness and even to operate in the style. The Afghans liked to compare their country to Switzerland as it is surrounded by mountains and shares languages with two of its neighbors, Pakistan and Iran, but has a strong identity of its own. I was on a local flight from Kabul to Herat conversing with the young Afghan sitting next to me when he gave me this line about Afghanistan being the Switzerland of Asia. For me, it was one time too many. I knew by then that I could get away with a not very polite answer. I pointed to my wristwatch and said, “When you can make one like that, I’ll believe you.” Fortunately, he did not take offense at my bad manners and instead, laughed.

  I was provided with a Land Rover and driver to travel around the countryside. One morning as we were driving to the western part of Afghanistan we came to a river which we had to cross. There was no bridge, which was not unusual. The general practice in Afghanistan is to go along the river to a spot where the water is fairly shallow and, with fingers crossed, drive across. We were directed to the nearest “best place” and when we arrived I saw, firmly embedded in the muddy water, an American Jeep and a German Volkswagen. Our British Land Rover drove right across. It was a moment of intense patriotic pride.

  As I was in the country on an official mission, I spent a fair amount of time at the British Embassy. Ambassador de la Mare, who had the same name as the well-known writer Walter de la Mare, was from a Channel Islands family. His wife, unusual for ambassadors, was not British but an American from Boston. She missed no opportunity of repeating that she was of pure English ancestry on both sides. One day just the three of us were having lunch and she went on about this at some length, for my benefit. All her ancestors were English on both sides, all the way back to when they first crossed the Atlantic from England to North America. When she had finished, she turned to her husband, the ambassador, and said, “I’m much more English than you are; after all, you come from the Channel Islands.” He took a slow, deep breath and said, “Yes, my dear, you are more English than I am, but I am more British than you are.”

  My trip lasted several months and appears to have been successful. In the years that followed, cultural relations between Britain and Afghanistan were maintained. Afghan students were awarded scholarships to study in English universities and there were exchanges of experts. At some point Muhammad Shafiq, the deputy minister of justice, came to London on an official visit. Afghanistan had just promulgated a new constitution and the University of London invited him to give a lecture on it. He began by saying, “This is not the first time we’ve had a constitution in Afghanistan. One was promulgated some thirty years ago, but it didn’t work. Neither the government nor the people took any notice of it and it became a dead letter. We decided to try again.”

  He proceeded to describe the new constitution. When he had finished, questions were invited from the audience. One person asked why, since a previous constitution was not taken seriously by either the government or the people, there was reason to believe that the present constitution would be taken seriously. Shafiq, who had the kind of special straightforwardness and directness which at that time was characteristic of the Afghans, looked him straight in the eye and said: “You didn’t listen carefully to what I was saying. I didn’t say that the new constitution would be a success, or that it would be taken seriously. I said we had decided to try again. I hope it will be a success; I hope it will be taken seriously, but I can’t give you any assurance that it will be.”

  The next time I met him was several years later when my daughter and I had gone to Cairo to attend the Millennium of the founding of the city. At the big opening ceremony I suddenly felt a slap on my back. I turned around and there was Shafiq. We greeted each other warmly and then I asked him: “What are you doing here?” He said rather plaintively, “I’m the Afghan ambassador to Egypt.” I congratulated him, and then he was very kind and very helpful and provided a car and driver for Melanie to tour her around the city. When he went back to Afghanistan, he became foreign minister and then Prime Minister. When the Russians came in 1979, he was hanged in his own garden. A sad end of a good and decent man.

  A Conference in Moscow

  It was with some trepidation that most of the Western participants made their way to Moscow in 1960 for the XXV Congress of Orientalists.1 There had been many alarming rumors in circulation of an organized orgy of propaganda and of massed phalanxes of politically selected delegates from Communist countries. It was therefore with more distress than surprise that we found ourselves ushered into a large hall for the opening session where we were addressed at some length and with great vigor by a group of dignitaries on the platform led by Anastas Mikoyan, then Deputy Premier. The keynote discussed the liberation of the peoples of (non-Soviet) Asia and Africa from colonialism, and the corresponding liberation of Oriental scholarship from the yoke of colonialist Orientalists. The speeches formed a well-orchestrated symphony in three movements. In the first, they insulted their Western guests; in the second, they flattered their Eastern guests; and in the third (the synthesis?), they praised themselves with obvious sincerity and relish.

  The proceedings of the Congress developed in the usual feckless and inefficient way, bringing a welcome air of familiarity to the otherwise strange and alien setting in which we found ourselves. Sections dealing with adjoining subjects were placed at great distances from one another with perhaps half a mile of uncharted country between them, thus making it impossible for us to move with any ease from one to another. Timetables were changed with little or no notice, some papers canceled, and some others, unannounced, inserted in the program. There were some interesting changes in the program, notably the division into sections. Islam, which was a separate section since these congresses started, disappeared entirely and those papers which would have come in the Islamic section were, as a result of this act of disestablishment, distributed among sections dealing with Arab, Persian, Turkish, etc., language, literature and history. In compensation an entirely new section appeared devoted to Afghan studies. These had in previous years been included in the Iranian or Indian sections and it was understood that this new section had been inserted in the program after representations from the Afghan Embassy in Moscow. Members of this section had plenty of free time.

  The vast number of papers submitted to the Congress varied greatly in theme and still more greatly in quality. A matter of considerable interest to Western visitors was the very large number of papers submitted by Soviet Orientalists. There seemed to be general agreement that those on language subjects were good and often of considerable importance, that those dealing with archaeology contained useful and interesting material, but that those on history, social science and other subjects liable to political pressure were on the whole poor. Many of these were not only strongly propagandist in character but on a very crude and primitive level. It seems likely that any Russian scholar with a real historical sense, still more any non-Russian Soviet scholar, would take up some subject other than history. Some of the papers, as for example one on Soviet-Turkish friendship during the Turkish war of independence, were read in an atmosphere more reminiscent of a religious ceremony than of an academic session.


  The main political effort of our hosts was concentrated on the committee dealing with the crucial questions of the venue of the next Congress, and some of us acquired a sudden flash of insight and a sudden gust of sympathy for those whose task it was to negotiate with Soviet officials.

  One of the primary benefits that scholars derive from these gatherings is the opportunities they give for the making and renewal of personal contacts with scholars from other countries. This time, opportunities for personal contacts were limited. No list of participants was circulated until the very end of the Congress, no general reception for all participants was held until the eve of our departure, and no common place of meeting was available except for the hall and exhibition rooms of the university. At that time cafés and bars seemed to be unknown in Moscow, where drinking was a secret vice and eating a distasteful chore. Even communication with my colleagues in the SOAS delegation staying at the same hotel was difficult as no alphabetical list of hotel visitors with room numbers appeared to exist. There was, however, at the sections and at the university generally, some possibility of meeting, and it was with our Soviet colleagues that we were naturally most eager to make some form of contact. The Russians on the whole tended to be correct but rather distant and few of us had the chance of entering even into that kind of shoptalk laced with gossip that is normal between colleagues in the same field. For those of us who were able to speak to scholars from the Soviet Oriental territories in their own languages, this did provide an opportunity for frank and friendly conversation, albeit chiefly limited to scholarly matters. There were however some revealing remarks. One scholar from a Soviet Asian republic, when asked whether he really believed that, in accordance with Marxist dogma, there had been a feudal regime in his country in the Middle Ages, replied, “No, but there is now.” Another, asked why he had taken up a particularly remote and obscure topic of research, replied, “Because there is no one in the Soviet Union who can tell me how to do it.”

  The practical arrangements for our accommodations, transport, etc., were lamentable. As one visitor put it, the first few days at the Hotel Ukraina were very much like one’s first few days in the army with the difference that there were no clues at all as to the sense and purpose of it all. Intourist, with the alternating indolence and insolence of its staff and the monstrous and intricate lunacy of its organization, was a nightmare straight out of Kafka.

  Perhaps the final comment can be given in the words of an English visitor with considerable knowledge of Soviet affairs. When asked whether our Soviet colleagues didn’t care at all what kind of impression they were making on us, he replied, “The really terrifying thing is that they think they are making a good impression.”

  5.

  Why Study History?

  When I was still actively involved in teaching, I would assemble each new batch of graduate students around the seminar table and invite them, one by one, to introduce themselves, to say on what subject they proposed to conduct their research, and then, a question which never failed to disconcert them, why? Why did they want to study history? Why did they choose to do their research on this particular topic?

  Their answers fell into fairly well-defined categories. A common answer, especially from students coming from Third World countries, was that they wanted to serve their country. This is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable answer, provided of course that it not proceed on the assumption that one serves one’s country best by presenting a version of history favorable to whatever happens to be the prevailing ideology or ruling leadership in that country. That, as I see it, is not serving one’s country. A discussion of this leads to interesting questions about truth, integrity and objectivity, which of course is not the same as detachment or neutrality. I never asked students to be detached or neutral in matters of profound concern to them. It would be unreasonable to expect this of them. But I did ask them to be honest. The point I often made was that if you look back at the history of your country, your party, your class, your church or whichever group with which you identify for the purposes of the history you are reading or writing—if you look back and find that in every single dispute between your group and other groups, yours has been right and the others have been wrong—then you should reexamine the hypotheses on the basis of which you are conducting your researches, because it is not in the nature of human entities to be always right.

  I recall a student who came to me from a certain country which had a territorial dispute with a neighboring country, a quite minor territorial dispute about one small piece of territory that had been an issue between them for a very long time. He wanted to do his doctoral dissertation on this little area, and, he said, show that for thousands of years this little area had always been part of his country and not the other’s. I asked how he knew. He replied, “It’s well known.” I said, “You don’t get a Ph.D. for stating what is well known. For a Ph.D. you have to establish something that is unknown.” To which he responded, “But, it’s never been proven scientifically. I want to prove it scientifically.” “If you set out to do a piece of scientific research, you go where it leads you,” I said. “What will you do if you discover that it belonged to the other people, and not to yours?” This was a possibility he simply refused to consider, and he went elsewhere for his doctorate.

  This was a very simple example; there are others where the pitfalls are better concealed. The problem is a universal one. Feuding tribes have opposing sagas, sung by rival bards, and the same tradition underlies much modern national historiography. Its religious equivalent is sectarian historiography.

  There is a sense in which an Arab or an Indian, or for that matter anyone else, will know his own culture as no foreigner, however learned, could ever know it. Obviously they don’t come west for that. They come for some quite practical things. One of them is an approach to the study of history that is free from both inherited attitudes and imposed constraints, where one follows the evidence wherever it leads, where one may start a piece of research without a prescribed or in any way predetermined result. This freedom has been significantly diminished in the modern West by political correctness, but not entirely ended.

  Today, the historical researcher has at his disposal a range of new and sophisticated techniques for critical scholarship. Part of this is technical, even mechanical. We have devices now which make it possible to read previously unreadable manuscripts and decipher previously indecipherable inscriptions. A fragment of writing in this library can be matched with a fragment at that university thousands of miles away. In a palimpsest, for example, that is to say a manuscript which has been written over more than once, we can now read each version separately by the use of infrared scanners. The amount of information that one can collect, process, and use in a limited time has increased exponentially. The collection of data that in the past might have taken an experienced scholar months or even years can sometimes be done now by a novice in half an hour.

  But even more important than the growing technology of research is the greater sophistication of method. Historical research means going to your evidence and asking questions. You ask questions of the evidence, and then, preferably without the use of torture, you extract answers. Our methods of examining and questioning the evidence have become much more sophisticated, and we are using evidence of a kind that was previously just thrown aside. For example, in a catalog of manuscripts in a major Western library, published almost seventy-five years ago, some early medieval documents from Egypt were briefly dismissed as “business letters, and therefore valueless.” For the compilers of the catalog, only literary or historical manuscripts were of value. If a manuscript stated that this was the history of such and such kings from this date to that date, it was valuable historical evidence. Business and private correspondence was simply brushed aside. Who was interested in the business files of a merchant who lived in Cairo a thousand years ago?

  Modern historians have become very interested in such documents. They have found ways of throwing
light on matters about which nothing at all was known previously, by examining what one might call the contents of wastepaper baskets, documents which were discarded because they were no longer needed. They included letters, accounts, and jottings of all kinds. The use of this kind of material has enormously enriched historical scholarship. First developed by Western students of Western history, it has been extended by them and their disciples to other societies, wherever such documentation has survived.

  An important example of this is the collection known as “Genizah.” I have not worked on this material; I know it only secondhand from books and monographs by scholars who have worked on it. The foremost among them by far, standing head and shoulders above everyone else, was the late Professor S. D. Goitein who was for many years my neighbor and friend at Princeton. He was a truly great scholar, and I would regard his Mediterranean Society as the single most important work that has been written in modern times about the medieval Islamic world. I can think of nothing comparable in scope and depth and importance.

  Imagine trying to write the history of your university at some future date. What you would need would be the files in the various offices. Now imagine that in some conflagration the files were destroyed and all that was left was an accumulation of wastepaper baskets. What Goitein did was to write a history of the Middle East from randomly surviving miscellaneous wastepaper baskets. He began with the discards of the Jews of Cairo, one minority community in one Middle Eastern country. But because members of this community were engaged in all sorts of activities—personal, public, private, family, business, dealings with government, dealings with other countries, dealings with other communities in the same country, and so on—he was able to extract, from these scattered remnants of this minority community, a comprehensive picture of life in the medieval Islamic world over the centuries covered by these documents. It is profoundly illuminating; far better than anyone else has ever done or is likely to do.