In his memoir Notes on a Century, Bernard Lewis observes that it has become “fashionable to assume that everything Western is bad”. Lewis, nonetheless, allows himself to make one “blatantly chauvinistic statement” by claiming that “the quest for knowledge” is a “peculiarly Western feature”. Throughout the past half-millennium, from the time of the earliest European Orientalists, the intellectual curiosity of Western philologists, adventurers and scholars has transcended provincialism, religion, sentiment and compliance. Notes on a Century goes a long way towards explaining why this phenomenon appears to be under threat, dwelling as we do in an era of “intellectual conformism unknown for centuries”.
Bernard Lewis, speaker of some thirteen languages, has been a leading Western authority on the Middle East for an astonishing seven decades, since the publication of The Origins of Ismailism in 1940: a colossus in his field, impossibly brilliant and an intellect of the highest order. The late Edward Said, one-time professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, described Lewis in 2003 as “a tireless mediocrity”. This says more about the founder of post-colonial studies than it does about his adversary. A more accurate description of Lewis was made by a Muslim critic in 1966: “[He is] either a candid friend or an honest enemy and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.” Lewis, now ninety-five years old, wants to be regarded as a dedicated and single-minded scholar who successfully avoided the pitfalls of both polemics and apologetics. Despite (or perhaps because of) bouts of celebrity, and interludes as an adviser to various heads of state including the United States of America and Turkey, Lewis has his Western critics. Most—but certainly not all—hail from the ranks of post-colonial studies.
