Bernard Lewis

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Image:Lewis-pre.jpg Bernard Lewis (born May 31, 1916) is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West.

He is one of the most widely read western scholars of the Middle East.

1 Background
2 Partial listing of his books
3 Trivia
4 External links

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Background

Born to middle-class Jewish parents in London, Lewis graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, performed post-graduate studies at the University of Paris, returned in 1938 to the University of London as an assistant lecturer in Islamic History, once again at SOAS.

In 1938 the University of London offered me a position as an assistant lecturer in Islamic History. The first class I taught in 1938 consisted of four students, three Arabs and an Iranian. I remember my father asking me in wonderment at the time why the University of London would pay me a salary to teach Arab history to Arabs. Many others have asked more or less the same question, in a variety of forms. Some also asked why Arab students would come to England to study their own history, and were given—by both the students and their teachers—a variety of answers. For whatever reasons, they continued to come, and for the rest of my teaching career in England a varying number of my undergraduate students and a steady majority of my graduate students were Arabs from Arab countries.

During the Second World War Lewis served in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps, before being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war he returned to SOAS and taught there until 1974, when he accepted a position at Princeton University, becoming an emeritus professor there upon his retirement in 1986. He has been a naturalized citizen of the United States since 1982.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, interest in Lewis's work surged, especially his 1990 essay The Roots of Muslim Rage. Lewis is also known for his literary sparrings with the late Professor Edward Said of Columbia University, who made criticisms of Orientalist scholarship (of which he claimed Lewis's work was a prime example) in his 1978 book, Orientalism.

Bernard Lewis studied and is well versed in numerous classical languages that include Latin, Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, Classical Arabic , Persian and Turkish.

Bernard Lewis, a prolific writter, has authored over twenty books and numerous articles. Among his more recent books are two that were published after 9/11: What Went Wrong? (written before the attacks) and The Crisis of Islam.

He married Ruth Hélène Oppenhejm in 1947 with whom he had a daughter and a son before the marriage was dissolved in 1974.

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Partial listing of his books

The Origins of Ismailism, 1940
The Arabs in History, (London 1950)
The Emergence of Modern Turkey, (London and New York 1961)
The Assassins, (London 1967)
Race and Color in Islam, (1979)
The Muslim Discovery of Europe, (New York 1982)
Semites and Anti-Semites, 1986
The Jews of Islam, (1987)
History Remembered, Recovered, Invented, (1987)
Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, (1987)
The Political Language of Islam, (Chicago 1988)
Istanbul and the Civilizations of the Ottoman Empire,(1989)
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry, (New York 1990)
Islam and the West, (New York, 1993)
Islam in History, (2nd edition, Chicago, 1993)
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East, (New York, 1994)
Cultures in Conflict, (New York, 1994)
The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, (New York, 1995)
The Future of the Middle East, (London, 1997)
The Multiple Identities of the Middle East, (London, 1998)
A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of life, letters and history, (New York, 2000)
Music of a Different Drum, (2001)
The Muslim Discovery of Europe, (2001)
Islam in History, (2001)
What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, (New York, 2002)
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, (New York, 2003)
From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, (2004)

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Trivia

He was fined one franc by a Parisian court after expressing doubt, in a November 1993 Le Monde interview, whether the 1915 Turkish massacre of Armenians qualified as an act of genocide [1]
His book What Went Wrong? became a U.S. bestseller after the September 11 attacks.
He is on the steering committee for the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust [2].
Lewis coined the term "clash of civilizations" to describe the relations between the Muslim world and the West in a 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.