Bernard Lewis

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Bernard Lewis (2012)

Bernard Lewis (born May 31, 1916 in the former Borough of Stoke Newington in London , † May 19, 2018 in Voorhees Township , New Jersey ) was a British - American publicist and historian specializing in Oriental studies and the history of Islam. He was also active as a political advisor, most recently for former American President George W. Bush .

Life

Lewis was the child of a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated from the University of London in 1936 with a degree in history with a focus on the Near and Middle East . Then he went to Paris to the Sorbonne and returned in 1938 to the University of London, where he was assistant lecturer for Islamic history. During World War II he first served in the army, married the then 18-year-old later cryptanalyst Regene Lewis , with whom he only stayed briefly, and worked for the remainder of the war in a branch in Bletchley Park for the British Foreign Office in London .

After the war he returned to the University of London, where he held the Chair of History of the Near and Middle East until 1974. From 1974 to 1986 he taught as Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in the USA, where he was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study , and became a member of the British Academy in 1963 , the American Philosophical Society in 1973 and the American Academy of 1983 Arts and Sciences . Since 1994 he has been an external corresponding member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres .

Lewis was the author of numerous books and studies on the Arab world . He was considered by many to be one of the best experts on the Middle East . His theses are also very controversial, most recently Lewis' support for the Iraq war in 2003 was criticized. One of Lewis' main critics was the literary theorist Edward Said .

Positions

Lewis warned for a long time about the dangers of backward- looking anti-democratic Islamism for Western societies. According to an article published on March 26, 2007 in New Perspectives Quarterly , he saw a "third wave of Muslim attacks" rolling towards Europe (after the first conquest of Arabia and North Africa by the Arabs and the second by the Ottomans at the beginning of modern times):

“The combination of natural reproduction and immigration, which brings about enormous shifts in the population structure, could in the foreseeable future lead to significant population majorities in at least some European cities, perhaps even countries [...] But the western democracies also have a few advantages - the most important of them are knowledge and freedom. The attraction of modern knowledge to a society which has a more distant past with a genuine tradition of scholarly achievement is obvious. Muslims are clearly and painfully aware of the fact that they have lagged behind in relation to us, and they welcome the chance to correct that. "

In his 1961 book The Emergence of Modern Turkey , Lewis stated on the " Armenian Question " that the Armenian independence movement was the most serious of all threats to the Ottoman Empire. While the Turks were reluctantly able to forego the conquered lands of the Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians and the Greeks, as they ultimately gave up distant provinces and the borders of the empire "moved closer to home", the Armenians would have settled across the heart of the Turkish homeland. Giving up these countries would not have meant a downsizing of the Turkish state, but its dissolution. The "desperate struggle between two peoples" for the same homeland began, which ended with the terrible Holocaust of 1915 on 1.5 million Armenians. Lewis later changed his mind. In a 1993 interview with the French newspaper Le Monde , Lewis reiterated that it had been a struggle between two peoples over the same homeland, but added that it was doubtful that it was genocide against the Armenians, because there was no plan to exterminate the Armenians. Turkish documents would prove an intention to evict, not an intention to exterminate. On January 1, 1994, in a letter to Le Monde , he repeated his position that there was no reliable evidence that the Ottoman government intended to exterminate the Armenian people. In the third edition of his book The Emergence of Modern Turkey from 2002, Lewis changed his statement about the "terrible Holocaust" and his information on the number of victims. The sentence now speaks of " slaughter " instead of " Holocaust ", estimates of more than one million Armenian deaths (instead of 1.5 million deaths) and an unknown number of Turkish deaths.

Criticism of Lewis

On the political level, in addition to his support for the Iraq war, Lewis is also accused of being too close to official Turkish politics. In an interview, British historian Donald Bloxham pointed out that the Ataturk Chair in Turkic Studies at Princeton, owned by Lewis, and the Institute for Turkish Studies in Washington DC were funded by the Turkish state and the US defense industry. In his opinion, the proximity to the Turkish state and the fear of not gaining access to Turkish archives influenced Lewis in his publications. Lewis denies that the massacres of Armenians committed by the Turks between 1915 and 1917 were genocide (see Denial of the Armenian Genocide ). Besides Bloxham, other well-known historians and social scientists have sharply criticized Lewis' portrayal of Turkish history. These critics include Pierre Vidal-Naquet , Albert Memmi and Alain Finkielkraut .

According to the literary theorist Edward Said , Lewis' portrayal of the Orient is characterized by arbitrary attributions and definitions. Other scientists, such as SM Stern, criticize the fact that Lewis repeatedly published the same theses over the years in different publications without taking sufficient account of the scientific debate. The position of Lewis is also criticized that the Ottoman Empire was never reached by the European Enlightenment. On the contrary, this led to the flexible construction of the empire based on the balance between groups, regions and religions under European influence, sometimes also under European pressure, being replaced by bureaucratic, centralistic and nation-state concepts, which often remained vague and led to nationalism led.

Works

  • Islam from its beginnings to the conquest of Constantinople. Volume I: Political Events and Warfare. Artemis, Zurich and Munich 1981. ISBN 3-7608-4523-1
  • The New Anti-Semitism. First religion, then race, then what? In The American Scholar (magazine) , online December 1, 2005
  • The Jews in the Islamic world. From the early Middle Ages to the 20th century . CH Beck, Munich 2004 ISBN 978-3-406-51074-8 (first edition 1987)
  • The anger of the Arab world. Why the centuries-long conflict between Islam and the West continues to escalate. Campus, Frankfurt 2003
  • The fall of the Orient: why the Islamic world lost its supremacy. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 2002
  • The Arabs. Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag dtv, Munich 2002
  • Culture and Modernization in the Middle East. Passages, Vienna 2001
  • Star, Cross and Crescent: 2000 Years of Middle Eastern History. Piper, Munich 1997
  • Emperors and caliphs: Christianity and Islam in the struggle for power and supremacy. Europe, Vienna 1996
  • The Breath of Allah: the Islamic World and the West: Clash of Cultures? Europe, Vienna 1994
  • The assassins: on the tradition of religious murder in radical Islam. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn 1989, The Other Library series , also Piper, Munich 1993
  • The political language of Islam . Rotbuch, Berlin 1991; European publishing house again , Hamburg 2002
  • “Drive them into the sea!” The story of anti-Semitism. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1989
  • The world of the unbelievers. How Islam discovered Europe. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1987
  • The Muslim Discovery of Europe Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982; again Phoenix, London 2000
  • Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The Functioning of a Plural Society. Holmes & Meier, New York 1982 ISBN 0-8419-0519-3 (Vol. 1), ISBN 0-8419-0520-7 (Vol. 2) Metasearch - search that requires login
  • World of islam. History and culture under the sign of the prophet . Westermann, Braunschweig 1976
  • To the UN resolution against Zionism , engl. in Foreign Affairs , Oct. 1976 (online on the publisher's website); German in John Bunzl (Ed.): The Middle East Conflict. Analyzes and documents , Braumüller, Vienna 1981 3700302738 and Campus, Frankfurt 1981 ISBN 3593329093 pp. 48–59
  • The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Oxford University Press , London 1961
  • The Origins of Ismāʿīlism: a study of the historical background of the Fāṭimid Caliphate. Heffer, Cambridge 1940

literature

Web links

Commons : Bernard Lewis  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roll of Honor Mrs Regene "Jean" Lewis (Nissan) (English), accessed on June 13 of 2019.
  2. ↑ https://nes.princeton.edu/search/site/Bernard%20Lewis
  3. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed June 29, 2020 .
  4. ^ Member History: Bernard Lewis. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 5, 2019 (with biographical notes).
  5. ^ Members: Lewis, Bernard. Académie des Inscritions et Belles-Lettres, accessed on January 5, 2019 (French).
  6. ↑ Michael Hirsh: Bernard Lewis revisited. In: Washington Monthly. November 2004, archived from the original on January 8, 2014 ; accessed on May 20, 2018 (English).
  7. ^ Edward W. Said: Orientalism . New York 1979, pp. 314-320.
  8. ↑ Bernard Lewis: For Fanatical Muslims, Migration is Part of 'Third Wave' Attack on Europe. digitalnpq.org, March 26, 2007, accessed June 5, 2012 .
  9. ^ Die Welt : Attack on Europe ( Memento of September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) April 17, 2007; Direct link: [1]
  10. ^ Bernard Lewis The Emergence of Modern Turkey , New York 1966, p. 350
  11. ^ Bernard Lewis The Emergence of Modern Turkey , 3rd Edition, New York 2002
  12. ↑ Urs Bruderer: Sorted out and killed. The Armenian Genocide and its denial . Interview by Donald Bloxham in the magazine (supplement to the Tages-Anzeiger , Basler Zeitung ), No. 43, October 28, 2006, pages 16-27.
  13. ↑ condamnation judiciaire de Bernard Lewis
  14. ↑ See Ya'ir Oron: The banality of denial. Israel and the Armenian genocide . New Brunswick et al. a. 2003, p. 235.
    See Leslie A Davis, Yves Ternon : La province de la mort. Archives américaines concernant le genocide des Arméniens . Brussels 1994, p. 9.
  15. ^ E. Said: Orientalism , New York 1979, pp. 314-320.
  16. ↑ SM Stern: Introduction . In: I. Goldziher: Muslim Studies . New Brunswick 2006, p. 7.
  17. ↑ Christoph Herzog: Enlightenment and the Ottoman Empire. In: History and Society. Special issue 23: The Enlightenment and its World Effect, 2010, pp. 291–321.
  18. ↑ Incorrect spelling "Bernhard" instead of Bernard
personal data
SURNAME Lewis, Bernard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British scholar of Islam
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 19th May 2018
Place of death Voorhees Township , New Jersey