World-renowned scholar Bernard Lewis visited U of T this week, presenting his theories on the interplay between politics and religion in the Middle East to a packed lecture hall and a free-wheeling seminar.
Lewis, the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, has been in the news recently for his theories on modernization in Muslim-majority nations. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the octogenarian Lewis has been sought-after for comment on American foreign policy in the Middle East and for his insights into America’s principal enemies in the region, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Bin Laden “refers…to history. Not only recent history, but very ancient history,” Lewis said, launching into an explanation of bin Laden’s popularity with some segments of the Muslim world. His remarks, delivered before a full house at the MacMillan Theatre on April 1, focused on the struggles between fundamentalism and modernism in the Middle East.
The fall of the Ottoman empire in 1918, he said, “seemed the low point, the nadir, the final defeat” of the Muslim empires that had ruled much of West and South Asia and North Africa since the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.
But nationalism and socialism, two dominant Western ideologies at the sunset of the Ottoman empire, failed to live up to their promise when introduced to the Middle East. “Constitutions and parliaments have been dismal failures” in much of the region, he said, noting the exception of Turkey.
Today’s Middle East, Lewis argued, is caught between two ideologies, modernization and religious traditionalism, that compete for adherents in the wake of the failures of nationalism and socialism.
The Baath party, which rules Syria and Iraq today, “has no roots in the Arab or Islamic past,” he said. Instead, Baathism is a descendent of fascism, introduced to the region by Vichy France via its colonies, Syria and Lebanon, during WWII.
The rise of religion in politics, which Lewis identified as being part of the traditionalist current of thought, was aided by Middle Eastern tyrants who “eliminated the competing opposition”—democratic politics—leaving religion as the only critic of dictatorship in many Arab countries.
Lewis went on to offer his explanation of Jihad, or “striving in the path of God” in a literal translation.
“An incredible amount of nonsense has been talked” about the concept, Lewis charged. Some Western commentators falsely claim violence is inherent in Muslim thought, he said. Others view Muslims as “rather like the Quakers, but without their aggressiveness,” Lewis joked.
Lewis concluded his lecture by assessing the prospects for democracy in the Arab Middle East.
He said he was cautiously optimistic because of liberal strains of thought in Islamic history. The Ottoman empire had “a system of limited government, a system of responsible government,” Lewis said, noting that the power of the Sultan was constrained by the need to consult with his advisors and ministers.
“The idea of despotism, of unlimited rule, was totally alien” to Islamic society “until modernization,” he observed.
“There is a tradition of limited, responsible government” in the Middle East, Lewis added.
In his seminar, held yesterday at Massey College, Lewis told a standing-room-only crowd that in the case of removing Saddam Hussein, “the hazards of doing nothing are probably greater” than the risks of intervention. “It is fairly clear where Saddam and his regime are going,” he said.
Comparing the current Mideast crisis to the Second World War in which he served, Lewis argued the removal of the Baathists might lead to a restoration of the parliamentary government which ruled Iraq until a coup in 1958.
Lewis also took shots at peace protesters, saying he was glad they were not listened to during WWII and is glad they are not influential with U.S. President George W. Bush. “European policies are motivated by oil, not American.”
Photography by Simon Turnbull
