Understanding Islam

Among the many scholars who have tried to explain Islam to the Western world, few are as influential as Bernard Lewis. He has engaged in public disputations with Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, and he was a go-to guy during the Bush administration. Two of his recent books, “What Went Wrong?” and “The Crisis of Islam,” were best sellers. At the age of 94, Lewis is still a commanding and compelling commentator and critic, as we discover in “Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East” (Oxford University Press: $24.95), a newly published collection of his articles, essays and speeches.

The point that Bernard Lewis wants to make is that we are mistaken when we regard Judaism, Christianity and Islam as three roughly comparable strains of monotheism. “Until comparatively modern times,” he insists, the notion that church and state are two separate things “was not only non-existent but would have been meaningless” in the classical Islamic world. It was only “Western influence and example” that introduced the idea to the modern Middle East, and that’s why Western democratic institutions are seen by some Muslims as alien and unacceptable. The consequences of what Samuel Huntington has called “the clash of civilizations,” of course, can be read in the headlines every day.

“Perhaps the most important and far-reaching of these effects is that for most Muslims, Islam rather than anything else is the ultimate basis of identity, loyalty, and therefore authority,” he writes in a new foreword to “Faith and Power.” “In their view, it is religion that marks the distinction between insider and outsider, between brother and stranger, and at times between friend and enemy.”

Of course, we can find the same distinctions at work throughout the world and even in the West. The conflicts in Northern Ireland, after all, are still driven by distinctions between Catholics and Protestants, and Israel itself is struggling to define the role of religion in its democracy.  But Lewis knows that Islamic “triumphalism” is perceived as the kind of existential threat that we used to see in the nuclear arms race, and he addresses our urgent interest in understanding why we seem to be at the mercy of militants. But he also warns us against “forgetting or distorting history,” each of which holds its own dangers.

Thus, for example, he titles an essay on Osama bin Laden with an ironic reference to James Bond — “License to Kill” — but it’s actually an effort to parse out bin Laden’s notorious 1998 tract, “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders,” which was faxed to fellow terrorists around the world and signaled the terrible events of 9/11. Lewis insists that the document is a “grotesque travesty of the nature of Islam and even of its doctrine of jihad,” but he also warns that “some Muslims are ready to approve, and a few of them to apply, the declaration’s extreme interpretation of their religion.”

Lewis also seeks to put our current woes into historical context. He points out, for example, that bitterness in the Islamic world has been building for at least a couple of centuries, and the long, slow, but tumultuous decline of the West as the dominant world power — including what he calls “the growth of Western self-doubt and self-criticism” and “the new and powerful weapon placed in the hands of Muslims by the Western discovery and exploitation of oil” — has “brought these resentments to a head and provided them with the means and opportunity to express them.”

He wants us to see that the history of Islam casts a long shadow over Judaism, but in ways that we may not always discern. “One hears a great deal in Israel at the present time of the encounter — I choose my words carefully — between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. That isn’t really the point.” Ashkenaz refers to Germany, and Sephard refers to Spain, as Lewis points out, and the Jews from Muslim countries represent an entirely different cultural divide. “The encounter is, if you will forgive me for putting it this way, between the Christian Jews and the Muslim Jews, using these terms not in a religious but in a civilizational sense.”

The point, however, is not merely a matter of historical interest. “[T]he Jews in Israel, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, face the same choice between a religiously dominated state and a secular state as do the Turks and the Persians and the rest of the peoples of Islam,” he warns. “In the past, separation of church and state was seen as a Christian solution for a Christian problem, irrelevant to both Muslims and Jews — especially to Jews; separation between church and state meant nothing to people who had neither a state nor a church. Today they have a state, and they are rapidly acquiring a church,” by which Lewis means the institutionalized rabbinical authorities in Israel who are empowered to decide who is a Jew, whom a Jew may marry, and whether one is Jewish enough to be buried in sanctified ground.

To his credit, Bernard Lewis refuses to condescend to Islam as some scholars do, and he holds all of us, regardless of our religious beliefs and practices, to the same high standards. He approaches Islam with a measure of respect that grows out of his scholarship, but also owes something to the values that he embraces. He suggests, for example, that the West defines good government in terms of freedom and the Islamic world in terms of justice, but he aspires toward a convergence rather than a clash of civilizations. “Now,” he concludes, “I think it is time to join forces against the common enemy — ignorance and bigotry, poverty and underdevelopment, tyranny and terror.” l

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs at jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve and can be reached at {encode=”books@jewishjournal.com” title=”books@jewishjournal.com”}