Best of a Breed - Review

National Review, Sept 27, 1999 by David Pryce-Jones

The Multiple Identities of the Middle East, by Bernard Lewis (Schocken, 176 pp., $21)

Bernard Lewis is today the doyen of historians of the Middle East. In this age of specialists and area studies, of sociological models, of prose dangling dead on the barbed wire of jargon, he seems like a survivor from the past, when scholarship was accessible to the general reader. His sentences are simple but lapidary. Familiar with the major languages and literatures of the Middle East, he knows most of those of Europe as well. The thoroughness of his footnotes is matched only by their linguistic range. For him, as for the other great historians, the facts must be right and then understanding will follow.

After the Second World War, when Lewis began his career, nationalism was sweeping the Middle East. Turkey and Iran were in the hands of nationalist modernizers. Israel came into being. In hitherto-colonized Arab countries, a handful of leaders in the manner of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt mobilized nationalist mass movements in order to gain their independence.

The record has proven mixed. In the face of sustained challenges to their ethnic and national cohesion, Turkey and Israel have adopted Western political and social models. Nationalism in Iran has veered into Islamic fundamentalism. In Arab countries the experience of nationalism has been an almost unrelieved tragedy. The promise of democracy culminated instead in dictatorship. Arabs everywhere have had to endure half a century now of war and civil war, corruption and waste, the militarization of society, and the degradation of human relationships and customs.

With startling unanimity, Western academics and commentators greeted Nasser-type nationalist rulers and their work of destruction as progressive. This was a betrayal of ideals and intellect comparable to that of the Soviet fellow travelers who, at much the same time and in the same way, were pretending that the Soviet Union was all sweetness and light. In both cases, it would have helped the unfortunate masses if these influential and supposedly informed Westerners had come to their defense in the hour of need.

From such apologists for violence Bernard Lewis stood apart, strong-minded enough to reject fashion and propaganda. For him, contemporary developments are best assessed in historical context. Not some sudden panacea, nationalism was the latest twist in the complicated interaction between the world of Islam and the West. In the past, Christians and Muslims had met on equal terms. The Ottoman Empire, in the days of its power and glory, had colonized the fringe of Europe and might well have conquered more. Instead, Europeans colonized most of the Islamic world, establishing an unequal relationship with Muslims and provoking all sorts of emotional reactions that remain disturbing to this day.

The Emergence of Modern Turkey became a classic as soon as Lewis published it in 1961. He described minutely how the old Ottoman state transformed itself into contemporary Turkey in a fraught process that redefined heritage and identity, so that now a majority of Turks perceive themselves to be something new-Westernized contemporary Muslims. In elegant and often short books that followed, Lewis has described the place that Arabs and other Muslims have occupied in history, and the kinds of society they created down the centuries. He has carefully researched the three determining relations in Islam: between believer and unbeliever, between free man and slave, and between man and woman. Jews in the Islamic world used to suffer the sort of persecution and hostility that Lewis calls "normal." Murderous anti-Semitism was a late import from Europe, with potentially dire consequences for Israel. Even on so controversial a subject, Lewis has retained a scholarly objectivity.

For a long time, Muslims did not analyze why and how power had passed from them to Westerners. In The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), Lewis explored this crucial aspect of the East-West encounter with a mass of vivid detail taken from chronicles, official dispatches, and letters-all of it material before then hardly known. In general terms, there was a failure of imagination. Even at the highest level, Muslims believed that the West had little to offer and that its values and its technology could be safely spurned.

When they did perceive how the Age of Enlightenment had transformed and empowered Europe, it was too late for reform and rectification. Muslims everywhere then saw themselves doomed to powerlessness, and this generated further resentments and anxieties carrying through to the present.

The Multiple Identities of the Middle East is the latest of his elegant long essays. Lucid and expository, with only seven footnotes-taken from four languages-it is a guided tour to the socio-psycho-historical region that Lewis has made his own, where Muslims are coming to terms with the West. It is also an instructive account of the failure of nationalism, or more accurately, its inappropriateness.