Before Bernard Lewis Lost His Mind

Before Bernard Lewis lost his mind and became the darling of Neo-Con Neo-Imperialists--indeed, before he became one himself--he was quite a creditable scholar. One can read Lewis's writings from the late 1950's to the early 1970's and even occasional pieces into the 1980's with great profit and pleasure. But then something happened.

A friend of mine (since deceased), a professor of rhetoric and communications at a state university in Pennsylvania, once did a study of Lewis's writings and concluded that the change in his thinking began to occur in the aftermath of the 1967 war. His theory was that Lewis, like many Jews living in Europe and the United States at the time, had dismissed the state of Israel as the pipe-dream of left-wing idealists and was certain that it had no real chance of survival--not because of Arab opposition necessarily, but because Utopian experiments always fail. The '67 war turned the heads of many Jewish doubters, and Lewis may have been one whose head was turned. For in the wake of the '67 war, Israel appeared to be, in reality, not a Utopian experiment at all, but a Western-financed base of military muscle in an oil-rich region. Geo-politically speaking, Israel made a lot of sense.

Whether or not this was or is Lewis's reasoning is really known only to Lewis himself. It is truly baffling however to read his 1958 essay "On Writing the Modern History of the Middle East" and then compare it to his productions on what-went-wrong-with-Islam of the last decade or so. The former is a measured and scholarly study; the latter reads as if the scholar enlisted Paul Wolfowitz as his ghost writer.

As the late Edward Said asked in his review of Lewis's What Went Wrong With Islam?: What went wrong with Bernard Lewis?

We may never know for sure.