Is monarchy the answer in the Middle East?

The name Bernard Lewis provokes very different reactions in different people. For some he is the world’s foremost historian of Islam and the Middle East, the English academic who originally coined the term ‘clash of civilisations’ (as Samuel Huntingdon, who popularised it, freely acknowledged). For some he is a Princeton man, a neocon who celebrated his 90th birthday (four years ago) with Cheney and Kissinger; whose ‘Lewis Doctrine’ was said to have inspired the invasion of Iraq and botched the war on terror. For still others he is an international sage, who saw the threat of both Khomeini and bin Laden before most people had even heard of them. Or, if you believe the late Edward Said, Lewis is ‘an old-fashioned colonialist’ with ‘an extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong’. ‘As long as I am accused by both sides, I feel justly confident,’ says Lewis laughing. ‘Edward Said’s ideas on orientalism were totally ahistorical, and some of his mistakes were so absurd I had to put them down to honest impartial ignorance.