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. But I have lived for a very long time, and many changes have taken place within the Muslim world.’

They most certainly have. For the first few decades of his life, Islam was a very positive influence in Lewis’s life. In 1937 he took the top first in his year at London University and, having already mastered Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, moved to Paris to learn Turkish and Persian. ‘The teacher was Turkish, we communicated in French, and the only textbook was in Italian,’ he chuckles. ‘That’s how I learned Persian.’ Then in 1950 he was one of the first non-Turks to be allowed into the Ottoman archives — ‘I was utterly delighted, it was like an Aladdin’s cave.’ But about recent changes, Lewis is very worried indeed. In his new book, Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East, the odd sentence suddenly jolts the reader out of the glories of Islam’s past and into a more sinister present: ‘Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us,’ he writes.