Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  In the spring of 1967 a dramatic example of this new religious fervor occurred in Syria, at that time governed by a very secular military regime. On April 25 a young officer published an article in the army magazine setting forth a secularist, even in a sense an antireligious, view. Syria was and had been for some time ruled by a ruthless dictatorship in which the suppression of free speech, the confiscation of property and other misdeeds evoked no response. But the denial of God and religion in an officially sponsored journal revealed the limits of acquiescence, the point at which Muslim people were ready to stand up and resist. Protests erupted across the country. The government responded in various ways. The first was to arrest a number of religious leaders. That didn’t help. They then proceeded to confiscate copies of the magazine containing the offending article and to arrest the author and the members of the editorial board. Finally, they resorted to what became in time the standard solution to all such difficulties. On May 7 Radio Damascus announced that “the sinful and insidious article published in the magazine Jaysh al-Sha‘b came as a link in the chain of an American-Israeli reactionary conspiracy . . . investigation by the authorities has proved that the article and its author were merely tools of the CIA which has been able to infiltrate most basely and squalidly and to attain its sinful aims of creating confusion among the ranks of the citizens.” Later, additional, equally authentic, details were provided. During the three years following this incident, more mosques were built in Syria than in the previous thirty years. The plot, they said, had been concerted with the Americans, the British, the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Zionists and a Druze opponent of the regime. On May 11 the author and editors were sentenced by a military court to life imprisonment.

  From this time onward public expression of secularism of this kind virtually disappears. Even in Egypt, where the regime had its own problems with the militant religious opposition, Islam continued to serve as a main focus of identity and loyalty. Thus for example in a manual issued by the supreme command of the Egyptian forces in 1965, the wars against Israel and, surprisingly, in Yemen, are presented as a jihad, a holy war for God against the unbelievers. In reply to questions from the troops as to whether the classical Islamic obligation of jihad has lapsed or is still in force, orientation officers were instructed in the manual to reply that the jihad for God is still in force at the present time and is to be interpreted in our own day in terms of a striving for social justice and human betterment. The enemies against whom the jihad is to be waged are those who oppose or resist the achievement of these aims, that is to say, imperialism, Zionism, and the Arab reactionaries. “In accordance with this interpretation of the mission of Islam and in accordance with this understanding of the jihad, we must always maintain that our military duty in Yemen is a jihad and our military duty against Israel is a jihad for God. And for those who fight in this war there is the reward of fighters in the holy war for God . . . Our duty is the holy war for God. ‘Kill them wherever you come upon them and drive them from the places from which they drove you’ ” (Koran 2:191). Similar ideas were found in the manual of orientation issued to Egyptian troops in June 1973 and it is surely significant that the code name for the military operation of crossing the Canal was Badr, the name of one of the battles fought by the Prophet Muhammad against his infidel enemies. Curiously, the enemy named in the manual is not Zionism or Israel, but simply “the Jews.”

  Islam and Anti-Semitism

  As I was born to a Jewish family in England, I was brought up in what has come to be known as the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of civilization. The term is a modern one; in earlier times it would have been equally resented on both sides of the hyphen. But the reality is an ancient one, going back to the first appearance of Christianity as a Jewish sect in the Holy Land. Though Christianity parted from Judaism and was often involved in bitter conflicts with its parent religion, the two nevertheless retained much in common, notably the Hebrew Bible which Christians renamed the Old Testament and to which they added a New Testament embodying their own revelations and doctrines.

  Though the term is not commonly used, one might also speak of a Judeo-Islamic tradition of civilization. From the destruction of the ancient Jewish state to the creation of the modern Jewish state Jews have everywhere been a minority, principally, indeed overwhelmingly, among Christians and Muslims. There have been Jewish communities elsewhere, for example in India and China, but it is surely significant that they appear to have played no role of any importance in the history or culture of those countries or of the Jewish people. Perhaps this is because those communities were small or perhaps because for Jewishness to flourish it needs to receive some attention, some recognition.

  The Judeo-Islamic tradition differs from the Judeo-Christian tradition in several important respects. The Muslims, of course, retain neither the Old nor the New Testament, regarding both as superseded by their own final revelation, the Koran. But the Muslims have much in common with the Jews that Christians either neglected or rejected. Notable among these is the idea of a holy law regulating every aspect of public and personal life. Some of the regulations are indeed strikingly similar, for example, the rejection by both Judaism and Islam of pork.

  Both Jews and Muslims were aware of these and other affinities. In the Middle Ages, when Jews in both the Islamic and Christian worlds were sometimes persecuted to the point of martyrdom, a rabbi decreed that it was permissible to feign conversion to Islam in order to survive, but not to Christianity. Believing neither, it was less blasphemous to say that Muhammad was a prophet of God than to say that Jesus was the son of God. On another level, when the first Muslim students were sent by their governments to Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were told that they might eat Jewish, but not Christian, food. Jews observe the same basic rules as Muslims; Christians will eat anything.

  These affinities, and my growing awareness of them, certainly helped me to achieve some understanding, even a sympathetic understanding, of Islam, despite the growing tension between Jews and Muslims over the issue of Palestine. It has helped me within my studies of Islamic literature and history and my personal dealings with Muslims, both at home and abroad. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have had much effect in creating better relations between Israelis and Palestinians. One may still hope that it may do so at some time in the future.

  The Jewish population of Israel and indeed of the world is traditionally divided into main groups, Ashkenazi and Sefardi. Ashkenaz and Sefarad are two place-names mentioned in the Bible, but of uncertain identity. I am inclined to think that the biblical Ashkenaz refers to the Black Sea region, and may be related to the Greek name Euxinos. But conventionally, from the early Middle Ages, Jewish usage identified these names with Germany and Spain, the two most important Jewish communities in Europe. The Jews of Spain, after a period of persecution, were finally expelled in 1492, and the great majority of them found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. The Jews of Ashkenaz migrated eastward, and formed what later became the large and important Jewish communities of Poland, Lithuania and Russia. In Israel at the present time the term Ashkenazi is applied principally to Jews of European origin, whether from eastern or western Europe or beyond. The term Sefardic is applied not only to the descendants of the émigrés of Spain, but also to the native Jews of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Yemen, whose ancestors had never been anywhere near Spain.

  Looking at both groups, at the differences and encounters between them, and at the traditions and attitudes they had brought with them from their countries of origin, I came to realize that the real division was not geographic or sectarian or communal; it was a meeting, and resulting clash of civilizations between what one might call the Christian Jews and the Muslim Jews.

  This is obviously an absurd statement, so let me explain what I mean. Judaism is a religion, a culture, a way of life. It is not a civilization; Jews never had either the numbers or the freedom to create a civilization of their own. But they were an importan
t component in two other civilizations, the one Christian, the other Islamic. Christians and Jews share many things, starting with the Old Testament, and the whole religious culture that is based on it. Even when outlawed and persecuted, Jews were an important part of Western civilization to which they made a significant contribution.

  There has been quite a lot of argument of late about whether or not there is a tradition of anti-Semitism in the Islamic Middle East. Some say it is there, right from the beginnings of Islam; others say that it is a modern innovation introduced from the West, more specifically from Christendom. In discussing this it might be useful to begin with a definition of anti-Semitism. It is not sufficient to define anti-Semitism as hating Jews. Hating people who are different is normal. Hating and, where convenient, persecuting people who are different is the normal pattern of human nature and behavior. We find it in every society and every place. Some historians talk for example about anti-Semitism in the Greco-Roman world, and adduce various Greek and Roman texts attacking Jews. I do not think one can call that anti-Semitism. They are no different and in some respects not as bad as some of the texts in Latin and Greek attacking other groups of people who are different. A choice example is when the historian Ammianus Marcellinus remarked about the Saracens that they are desirable neither as friends nor as enemies. I do not recall any classical remark about Jews as nasty as that. Anti-Semitism is a different hostility. It is one which attributes a quality of innate and cosmic evil to the Jews.

  That is distinctively Christian, and is obviously connected with the narrative of the crucifixion. This approach developed in medieval Christian Europe and went through a number of transformations, the most notable one being in the late Middle Ages, when numbers of Jews were converted or pretended to be converted and the Inquisition was set up to detect false converts. That introduced a racial element, examining a convert’s ancestors in order to determine whether he was or was not Jewish, even if he claimed to be Christian. That was again transformed in nineteenth-century Germany, when the term anti-Semitism was first used and the attack on Jews was defined quite explicitly in racial terms.

  In the Muslim world, and more specifically in the Arab world, the history is quite different. Obviously Jews were not the equals of Muslims; they were regarded, as were Christians, as inferiors to the true believers, and the holy law of Islam discriminates against Jews and Christians in various ways. In most of medieval and early modern Islamic history, Jews seemed to have fared rather better than Christians. It is true that in the Koran and in the narrative of the life of the Prophet, the tone is more favorable to Christians than to Jews. That’s because the Prophet had few if any dealings with Christians, but did have a number of quarrels with Jews. In the subsequent development of Islam, after the death of the Prophet, Christendom was the main rival and enemy, and Jews were unimportant and at times even useful. So the attitude to Jews was different. I wouldn’t say it was friendly but it was more tolerant than toward Christians. This continued into the Ottoman period, when Jews were found to be extremely useful—a valuable, revenue-producing asset.

  The change came in phases. One was the introduction of European-style anti-Semitism into the Middle East, mainly by Arab Christians who translated anti-Semitic texts, especially from French, and distributed them. This happened particularly at the time of the Dreyfus affair in the 1870s, though there are signs of it earlier, and of course it continued after.

  This process was enormously accelerated after the accession to power of the Nazis, who won considerable support among the Arabs and were able to disseminate the Nazi version of anti-Semitism very widely in the Arab world. The third phase came with what one might call the Islamization of anti-Semitism. In the second phase it was more or less secular, national, or perhaps what we nowadays call “racist.” In this latest phase, it is given a religious coloration and the attempt is made to justify it in terms of Islam, the Prophet, and the sacred writings and traditions.

  For many years Jews could not visit most Arab countries. An amusing story is that in the early 1970s Henry Kissinger, as part of his shuttle diplomacy, went to Saudi Arabia. Of course they knew he was Jewish but he was the Secretary of State of the United States and they had to let him in to see the King. King Faisal just could not let it pass that a Jew came to Saudi Arabia and his welcoming sentence to Kissinger was, “Secretary Kissinger, we receive you here as a human being.” Kissinger, never short of a response, said, “Some of my best friends are human beings.”

  The Return of Islam

  In the early 1970s I was in India as a visiting professor when I was informed by the University of London that a decision had been made to appoint me as its representative to a conference in Australia. The reason I was chosen was very simple: I was in India. It would cost less to send me from India than to send someone from home. I looked into the ways of getting from India to Australia, and found that the most convenient way was to change flights in Singapore, where I had never been. I decided to spend several days there. A former student from SOAS was teaching at the University of Singapore. I got in touch with him, told him I’d be stopping in Singapore and asked that he book a hotel room for me. He replied that he had booked a room and would meet me at my flight. I thought that was very nice of him.

  On the day of my arrival he picked me up, took me to the hotel and said, “By the way, you have an appointment at ten o’clock tomorrow morning with the Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew.” You can imagine that I was more than a little startled. I asked, “But why?” “We thought he’d be interested to meet you,” he said. “We asked him, and he was.”

  The next morning, with some apprehension, I turned up at Lee Kwan Yew’s office at ten o’clock and he got straight down to business, without any ceremonies or politeness. He said, “I understand you’re a specialist on Islam. We have a problem. In Singapore we have a Muslim minority, partly Malay, partly from South Asia. We do everything we can to help them. We give them preferential treatment in school and in the university, in government employment, and for businesspeople in the awarding of government contracts. We do everything we can to help them. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m no bleeding-heart liberal, but the last thing we need here, between two large Muslim countries, Indonesia and Malaysia, is a discontented Muslim minority. Now,” he said, “despite everything we do to help them, they keep sinking to the bottom of the pile. I have two questions for you, Why are they like that, and what can we do about it?” I provided an inadequate answer to the first question and none at all to the second.

  From the 1970s onward, to anyone following events in the Muslim world and reading or listening to what Muslims were saying in their own languages, the surge in religious passion was increasingly obvious. In January 1976 I tried to draw attention to this in an article entitled “The Return of Islam,” published in the monthly magazine Commentary. I shall take the liberty of quoting from it at some length here, as it has held up to the test of time:

  If . . . we are to understand anything at all about what is happening in the Muslim world at the present time and what has happened in the past, there are two essential points which need to be grasped. One is the universality of religion as a factor in the lives of the Muslim peoples, and the other is its centrality . . . For the Muslim, religion traditionally was not only universal but also central in the sense that it constituted the essential basis and focus of identity and loyalty. It was religion which distinguished those who belonged to the group and marked them off from those outside the group. A Muslim Iraqi would feel far closer bonds with a non-Iraqi Muslim than with a non-Muslim Iraqi . . .

  Islam from its inception is a religion of power, and in the Muslim world view it is right and proper that power should be wielded by Muslims and Muslims alone. Others may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy. That Muslims should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal. That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God
and nature, and this is true whether in Kashmir, Palestine, Lebanon, or Cyprus. Here again, it must be recalled that Islam is not conceived as a religion in the limited Western sense, but as a community, a loyalty, and a way of life—and that the Islamic community is still recovering from the traumatic era when Muslim governments and empires were overthrown and Muslim peoples forcibly subjected to alien, infidel rule. Both the Saturday people and the Sunday people are now suffering the consequences.

  In the late 1970s I visited Córdoba, in Spain, to attend a conference of Islamic studies. A number of my Turkish colleagues and friends attended the same conference. I was delighted to see them and was standing and chatting with them, in Turkish, when someone came and said he would like to speak to us. He explained that he was from the local Islamic center and would like to invite us, if we were willing, to visit that center. His invitation included me, obviously on the mistaken assumption that I also was a Turk. This seemed too good an opportunity to miss. I went along with my Turkish colleagues and we had an extremely interesting visit. At the Islamic center our hosts explained their perception of the situation and their own role in dealing with it. This place (i.e., Spain), they said with some passion, was for centuries part of the lands of Islam. It is an ancient Islamic country but it was captured by the infidels and its people forcibly converted to Christianity. All these people around us, they said, are the descendants of Muslims whom they conquered and forced to betray their faith. It is now our duty to restore these people to the true faith and to bring this country back into the House of Islam where it belongs.

  They were not alone in this perception. When I was working on my book The Muslim Discovery of Europe I read a number of Moroccan Embassy reports from Spain, mainly from the eighteenth century. When the Moroccans mentioned the name of a place, a city or district, they usually added the formula, “May God speedily restore it to Islam.”