Bernard Lewis
Dec. 9th, 2007 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerI had to write an essay this week on passages from Bernard Lewis's "Islam and the West". While I think it would be injudicious of me to express my personal views fully (at least, if I want to retain a good grade in the class), I simply cannot pass by without letting off some steam. So you, dear readers, get to enjoy the force of my venting.
I have had occasion to read a number of Lewis’s works over the last few years, and I never fail to be astonished that a man of such impressive scholarship and experience can produce such a farrago of half-truths, distortions, and outright falsehoods about Islam, Christianity, and the history of the relationship between the two. His sweeping pronouncements ignore the gaping cracks in his overbroad assertions and sometimes founder confusingly with other, contradictory assertions he has made. He ignores or waves away details that if paid proper attention to would wholly confound his arguments, and he makes leaps of inference (I cannot call it logic) that any undergraduate would be excoriated for. Given his unquestioned credentials and undoubted intelligence, I cannot imagine that it is foolishness or misunderstanding—-I can only assume it is a purposeful activity. And since his work seems devoted to depicting the Islamic world as socially and culturally moribund, politically backward, and unquestionably dangerous and hostile to the West, his agenda seems fairly clear.
I have had occasion to read a number of Lewis’s works over the last few years, and I never fail to be astonished that a man of such impressive scholarship and experience can produce such a farrago of half-truths, distortions, and outright falsehoods about Islam, Christianity, and the history of the relationship between the two. His sweeping pronouncements ignore the gaping cracks in his overbroad assertions and sometimes founder confusingly with other, contradictory assertions he has made. He ignores or waves away details that if paid proper attention to would wholly confound his arguments, and he makes leaps of inference (I cannot call it logic) that any undergraduate would be excoriated for. Given his unquestioned credentials and undoubted intelligence, I cannot imagine that it is foolishness or misunderstanding—-I can only assume it is a purposeful activity. And since his work seems devoted to depicting the Islamic world as socially and culturally moribund, politically backward, and unquestionably dangerous and hostile to the West, his agenda seems fairly clear.
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no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 11:23 am (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lewis
For example
His advice is frequently sought by Republican policymakers, including the current Bush administration.
and
Most recently Lewis has been called "perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq", who urged regime change in Iraq to provide a jolt that — he argued — would "modernize the Middle East". [31] Critics of Lewis have suggested that Lewis' allegedly 'Orientalist' theories about "What Went Wrong" in the Middle East, and other important works, formed the intellectual basis of the push towards war in Iraq.[32]
no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 12:45 pm (UTC)Now, those facts may cause you to dislike him (as they do me), but they are not a sign of the Wikipedia authors' dislike of him. In fact, most of the discussion on Wikipedia's page suggests that many readers find the article too favourable!
no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 04:03 pm (UTC)