Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  One interesting and perhaps significant detail is that in the paperback edition of Race and Slavery in the Middle East, one of the pictures, a portrayal of a slave market from a thirteenth-century manuscript, was also used by the publishers on the cover. The upper part of the picture shows the merchants, with scales and money. The lower half of the picture shows the merchandise, black slaves and their custodians. Interestingly, this picture was used in a television program about Islam to illustrate the vigor of medieval Islamic trade. But they used only the upper half, showing the merchants. The lower half, showing the merchandise, was omitted.

  Poems in Translation

  No publisher ever asked me for translations of poetry, and it was not always easy to get them into print. Mostly this happened by some fortunate chance. A few were contributed to literary journals, a few more to anthologies of one sort or another. The only translation that actually came out at book length was the Keter Malchut (The Kingly Crown) by the medieval Spanish Jewish poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol. It was a poem which impressed me enormously as a religious statement in itself and as an expression of a whole worldview of a medieval man. There was already a complete English translation by Israel Zangwill. I suppose I was being overly ambitious in trying to compete with a writer of the distinction of Zangwill but I wasn’t happy with his translation. He was a fine novelist but I don’t think he was a poet, and his translation at times seemed to me rather awkward and not true to the original. So I tried my hand at it. My version of The Kingly Crown was published in London in 1961.

  During my first visit to Tel Aviv in 1938 I had a very brief meeting with the Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernikhovsky. I had neither a book for him to inscribe nor did he give me one, and unfortunately I have no recollection of our conversation. I was particularly intrigued by one of his works, a cycle of sonnets, On the Blood. Each one is in the correct European sonnet form, and the fifteenth and last sonnet consists of the first lines of the previous fourteen. This was a challenge I could not resist, and I set to work to do the same in English. I can’t claim it was a great success, but I don’t think it was too bad.

  I should perhaps mention one other not very large group of poetic translations: those included in my various books on history. A poem is also a historical document, a record of a culture, a mood, even an event; no less important, in its way, than the narratives of chroniclers or the files in the archives. In recent years I have been publishing my translations in small batches, as contributions to this or that Festschrift or, latterly, in a memorial volume in honor of one of my colleagues. I still have quite a number in reserve. Many of these translations of poetry were made during the war, that is, more than sixty years ago.

  Translating Turkish poems was almost a vocation and I was pleased that my translations appeared in two anthologies, The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse and An Anthology of Turkish Literature, edited by Kemal Silay. Finally, in 2001, Princeton University Press gave me the opportunity to publish some of my translations in book form. Music of a Distant Drum contains translations from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew. With the exception of the Turkish section, which continues to the eighteenth century, all the poems are from the medieval period. The Hebrew poems are limited to those of poets who lived in Islamic lands, and thus formed part of the Judeo-Islamic tradition.

  While most of my books have been translated into other languages I did not, for obvious reasons, expect this one to be translated. A translation of a translation, especially of verse, does not normally make good sense. To my astonishment, and I must add, delight, the Italian publishing house of Donzelli produced an Italian version, with a different title, Ti Amo di due Amori (I Love You with Two Loves). A few of the texts were translated from the English, but most of them were directly translated from the originals by Italian experts in those languages. The book is illustrated with no fewer than thirty-eight full-page color prints from originals in Turkish, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts. On the title page I am credited with having “chosen and introduced” the poems, but not translated them. This was of course correct for the Italian volume.

  One of my favorite comments about translations is the Italian phrase with two words that sound almost the same, “Traduttore, traditore” (“Translator, traitor”).

  The Encyclopedia of Islam

  One of the major works of reference in the field of Islamic studies is the Encyclopedia of Islam. Edited and published in the Netherlands, under the auspices of the Royal Netherlands Academy and the house of Brill, it had the cooperation of British, French and German institutions and individuals and was published simultaneously in three languages. Sometime after the war it was decided that the time was ripe for a new edition, but with some changes. For obvious reasons, German was omitted, and the new edition was to be published only in English and French. There were three editors—one in England, Sir Hamilton Gibb, one in France and a general editor in the Netherlands. When Gibb accepted an appointment at Harvard and left England for the United States, he and his colleagues felt he could no longer adequately discharge his editorial duties from so far away, and they decided to put a substitute in his place. The choice fell on me and I gladly accepted. I served for a number of years on the editorial board, attending meetings by rotation in London, Leiden and Paris, and participating in various ways in the complex, ongoing editorial process. My own migration to the United States created a similar problem, but this time they decided to keep me on the board and appoint an additional English editor, in England. This second edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam was published in fascicles from 1954 to 2005 with some supplementary materials up to 2007.

  Rewriting One’s Own Words

  During the last few weeks of 1992, at age seventy-six, I spent most of my time reading and rereading three of my earlier works, which were all sent to me at about the same time and for the same purpose—the preparation of new and revised editions. No doubt the publishers who sent them had been aiming at the Christmas vacation, when I was deemed to be free and available. The result of this was that for a period of something like six weeks, I had an almost unrelieved diet of eating my own words, a diet which I found neither tasty nor nourishing. I had, after all, read it all before. This provoked a number of reflections, some of which I incorporated and published in a new preface; others I will share with my readers now.

  The most important, which I shall discuss here, was the oldest of the three books, The Arabs in History, first published in 1950, whose genesis I have already described. As time passed, I became less and less satisfied with what I had written in the last months of 1946 and the early months of 1947. The publisher, Hutchinson, brought it out again and again, and for each reprint invited me to make some changes. The changes that I could make were very limited. They insisted on maintaining the type, so that any omission had to be compensated by an addition, and vice versa, and any change affecting the length of a line had to be compensated before the end of the paragraph. One line more or less would have been a disaster, I was told, reverberating to the end of the chapter. Obviously there are limits to what one can do while maintaining the existing type. It gave me the opportunity to correct a few statements which, for one reason or another, were no longer true. I could for example switch from one Yemen to two Yemens and then back to one Yemen, and adjust the number of member states of the Arab League as required—such changes were fairly easy. I was even able to make a few more substantial changes by careful juggling with the number of words in a line and to do some scholarly updating; but all that was very limited. I could cope with simple updates—for example to record, in successive editions, the 1958 creation and 1961 dissolution of the United Arab Republic, but no more.

  After the sixth edition, in the early 1990s, the original publisher, Hutchinson of London, decided that they had had enough; and as part of a general restructuring of their activities, in which the whole series to which my book belonged was abandoned, they said that they would let it go out of print. Oxford University Press became interested;
they said they would like to take my book over, but they wanted me to do a thorough revision. They were prepared to reset the whole thing from scratch, so I was no longer bound in the chains of type, and had a chance to reexamine the book more thoroughly and undertake a more comprehensive overhaul.

  Their intention, and initially mine too, was to revise principally the last part. After all, we agreed, the earlier history hadn’t changed very much. It was the most recent part which would be most in need of revision, as quite a lot had happened in the Middle East since the early months of 1947. At first, I shared this view. But the idea that the earlier history hadn’t changed was deeply flawed, as I should have seen from the start. Rereading the text that I wrote almost forty-five years earlier, I soon realized that many more changes would be needed before I could in honesty present it as a “revised and updated” edition. The publishers would not be satisfied with anything less. Understandably, they wanted to market this by now old book as a revised and updated edition, and I would have to honor those words. The result was a whole series of changes, on virtually every page of the book—an interesting indication of the scholarly, intellectual and even verbal changes that take place over almost half a century.

  Many of the changes were purely verbal. There were even a number of places in the book where I had to change the text in order to retain the original sense, because the English language had developed in the meantime, and many words had changed their connotation or even their meaning. One example is the use of the words “race” and “racial.” In England in 1946 and 1947, these words were almost invariably used where nowadays one would use such words as “ethnicity” or “ethnic.” When I joined the British Army in 1940, I was given a form to fill in and one line said “Race.” This was the first time I had ever encountered the word “race” in an official document, and I didn’t know what they wanted. If I had been joining the German Army, I would have known what they meant, but I was joining the British, not the German, Army. I went to the sergeant in charge and asked him if he could explain to me what “race” meant, and he gave me the sort of pitying look that sergeants had for the raw recruits with whom they had to cope. He tried to explain, but I didn’t really get much from his explanation. So I asked, “Well, am I supposed to put ‘Jewish’ here?” “No,” he said, “that’s your religion. They don’t ask you two different questions with the same answer. We’ve already got a line for that. This is your race.” So I said, “Well, what?” Nowadays I suppose I would say “white” or “Caucasian,” but that wouldn’t have entered my mind at that time. White was a color—or the lack of one; Caucasian meant people from the Caucasus with names like Djugashvili. So he explained to me, slowly and carefully, that as far as the British Army was concerned, there were four races, and I had a free choice among the four: English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish.

  To use the word “race” in a book published in 1993 in this sense would be offensive and, what is more important, misleading. In most places where I had used the words “race” or “racial” in the original edition, I substituted “ethnic.” The word “race” has virtually disappeared from the book since I was not talking about differences of race in the modern Americanized sense of the word, actually the old anthropological meaning which has now become general.

  Another word, “class,” has also changed in content and significance, both in the common usage of our time and in my own perception of it. In the first edition, I frequently used “class” in ways that now seem to be loose and inaccurate, and at times even tendentious. I retained it where it seemed appropriate but in most places where I had used the word “class” I replaced it with other terms, more precise where the evidence permitted, less specific where the evidence did not permit.

  There are other words that have changed or lost their meaning, and words that have simply become unacceptable. Sometimes, as I said, even where I had no desire to change the meaning of words that I used in 1948, I found it necessary to change the words themselves in order to convey the same meaning more accurately to the present-day reader.

  Rereading the old text, I was also jarred in a number of places by the use of what now struck me (though obviously it didn’t then) as ideologically slanted language; terms, forms of words which were fashionable and acceptable at that time but are no longer in accord with contemporary opinion, including, more especially, my own.

  All these were verbal changes. Of far greater importance were those that affected the substance. These were of several kinds. One kind might reasonably be described as corrections, that is, changes, the purpose of which is to bring the text into line with the current state of knowledge and climate of opinion among scholars. Since the book was originally published in 1950 many scholars in many countries had worked on most of the subjects and periods discussed in it and, to quote the University of London requirements for a Ph.D., they had contributed to knowledge “through the discovery of new evidence and the achievement of new insights,” and thus in significant respects transformed our perception of the Arab past. Obviously I had to take account of this in a book marketed as “revised and updated.”

  The progress of research in history, as in other fields, has as at least part of its general purpose to make clear what was obscure. But students of medieval Islamic history will recognize what I mean when I say that very often its result is to make obscure what was once clear. In certain subjects our knowledge diminishes from year to year with the progress of scholarship and research, as one generally accepted view after another is attacked, leaving a terrain strewn with demolished or endangered hypotheses and assumptions.

  When I wrote my chapter on the Prophet in 1947 (a book on Arab history obviously has to have a chapter on the Prophet), there were many disagreements among scholars as to the authenticity of this or that tradition, of this or that narrative, but the broad outline of the Prophet’s career, as also the actions and achievements of his companions and successors, was generally accepted. Writing at the time, I was able to present the advent of Islam in the form of a narrative of events and then try to interpret its significance in the framework of Arab, Muslim and general history. I was at that time blissfully unaware of a group of iconoclast scholars in the Soviet Union (Klimovitch, Belayev, Tolstov and others) who already, before the outbreak of World War II, had begun to question the historical authenticity of the Koran and the historicity of the prophetic biography, some of them even the historicity of the Prophet himself. Later, of course, similar and even more radical criticism developed in the Western world, and while one need not go all the way with the more radical critics, obviously one can no longer proceed blithely with the kind of narrative which was normal until that time.

  Radical, critical scholarship has called one source after another, one narrative after another, into question. In a brief but broad-ranging historical essay of this type, it would not be possible, nor indeed would it be appropriate, to examine the arguments of the radical critics of early Islamic history, but neither is it possible to disregard them. Matters previously presented as simple statements of fact must now be presented in a more tentative, a more hypothetical, form. Nor can they simply be omitted, which would be the easy way of handling it, because their importance, their influence, still remains. The past as remembered, the past as perceived, the past as narrated, is still a powerful, at times a determining, force in the self-image of a society and in the shaping of its institutions and laws, even if the factual base on which this image rests is shown by historians, centuries later in distant countries, to contain more fantasy than fact.

  This is probably the most important of the major changes due to historical scholarship of which I had to take account, and probably the most difficult—to preserve a chapter on the Prophet, retaining as much of the traditional narrative as was necessary in order to make the Muslims’ own perception of their past intelligible, without committing myself as narrator to too many simple declaratory statements.

  Another view that needed modification was of the ro
le of the half-Arabs in the early Islamic empire. The tendency at one time was to divide the Muslim population of the early empire into the Arabs and the non-Arab converts to Islam, known as the Mawali. In 1947 I, like others at the time, gave far too little importance to another group—the half-Arabs, that initially small but rapidly growing population who were the children of an Arab father and a non-Arab mother. The exercise by the conquerors of the rights of conquest had rapidly created a considerable number of such people. These, belonging on their father’s side to the ruling conquistador aristocracy, and on their mother’s side to a conquered and subjugated population, formed an extremely important intermediate social group. By the mid-eighth century the distinction between these and the “pure” Arabs was ceasing to matter, and even the Caliphs were now the sons, not of free Arab ladies, but of foreign slave concubines. In the period of the Conquests, the half-Arabs played a role of some significance, which was underestimated by earlier historians, including myself.

  It is hardly necessary for me to add to this list of subsequent research and revision the extensive work that has been done on the Arab world in the Ottoman period—a subject which had been barely touched upon at the time when I was writing, before the opening of the Ottoman archives.

  A second category of changes derived not so much from the advancement of scholarship as from something of a more personal character—the evolution of my own views, my own interests, my own concerns. This was, after all, my book—I wrote it, it had my name on the title page and it was shaped inevitably by my own preoccupations then and my different preoccupations now.