DIVIDED LOYALTIES?:

LOST IN TRANSLATION: The two minds of Bernard Lewis. (IAN BURUMA, 2004-06-14, The New Yorker)

Why did Bernard Lewis ignore his own counsel that the West should proceed with caution in the Middle East, that democracy cannot be a quick fix, and that our proposed solutions, however good, are “discredited by the very fact of our having suggested them”? Some put it down to Zionism: he is said to be part of the Israeli lobby, and his aim is to make Israel safe. Lewis does not hide that he is sympathetic to Israel, not only because he happens to be Jewish but because he thinks Israel is a relatively civilized, democratic country in a very rough neighborhood. Rather touchingly, Lewis, who has always admired the Ottoman Empire at its best, writes that “the Ottoman heritage is more perfectly preserved in Israel . . . than in any of the other countries of the region.” But then, judging from Lewis’s own writings, I would rather have been a Jewish subject of the Ottoman Empire than an Arab in territories occupied by Israel.

I doubt, in any case, that Zionism quite explains Lewis’s role as a cheerleader for the war in Iraq. Nor does his supposed contempt for the Arab world do so. On the contrary, perhaps he loves it too much. It is a common phenomenon among Western students of the Orient to fall in love with a civilization. Such love often ends in bitter impatience when reality fails to conform to the ideal. The rage, in this instance, is that of the Western scholar. His beloved civilization is sick. And what would be more heartwarming to an old Orientalist than to see the greatest Western democracy cure the benighted Muslim? It is either that or something less charitable: if a final showdown between the great religions is indeed the inevitable result of a millennial clash, then we had better make sure that we win.

Lewis did say, in his Jerusalem Post interview, that he saw “the possibility of a genuinely enlightened and progressive and—yes, I will say the word—democratic regime arising in a post-Saddam Iraq.” But, as has become increasingly obvious, an invasion by foreign armies is not the ideal way to bring this about. Here, Rashid Khalidi appears to be more clearheaded when he says that “unwanted foreign military occupation, or even the threat of it, is incompatible with democratization.” Let us hope that he is wrong and Lewis is right. But it looks as though Arabs are crawling through yet another ring of Hell, prompted in part by the zeal of a man who claimed to wish them well.

Comforting as it is to know that Mr. Buruma doesn't think that Mr. Lewis is just motivated by loyalty to Israel, the rest doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. Iraq has just been handed a representative government as the result of a war and, if anything, its people think it should be more democratic faster. Where then the incompatibility of military action with eventual democratization?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2004 11:11 PM