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As for terrorism:
The activities of those who present themselves as terrorists in the name of Islam are not in any sense encouraged or even condoned by Islamic doctrine, tradition or law.
Nor is Islam traditionally anti-Semitic, argues Lewis:
After the death of the Prophet, Christendom was the main rival and enemy; the Jews were unimportant and at times useful. I wouldn’t say [the attitude] was friendly, but it was more tolerant than toward Christians.
Middle Eastern anti-Semitism, Lewis further explains, began with some force after the Dreyfus Affair in the 1870s, when Arab Christians distributed French texts in the region. With the accession of the Nazis, hatred of Jews accelerated in the Arab world, and nowadays ‘an attempt is made to justify [anti-Semitism] in terms of Islam, the Prophet, and the sacred writings and traditions’.
I was fascinated by Lewis’s account of slavery in the Muslim world, a subject he argues that is also unmentioned, out of fear of giving offence. He observes that the study of slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds and the Americas amounts to thousands of titles, while in the Muslim world, ‘despite slavery’s importance in virtually every area and period,’ the list might take up a mere couple of pages. The subject is so sensitive that ‘it is difficult, and sometimes professionally hazardous for a young scholar to turn his attention in this direction.’
He recalls a conference where an African-American was asked why so many African-Americans who were not themselves Muslims gave their children Muslim names, such as Ali and Fatima. The man replied that people like him disliked ‘carrying the names of the people who bought us’. A colleague of Lewis’s asked: ‘But what do you gain by adopting the names of the people who sold you?’ Lewis writes: ‘The identity of those [West African] slave merchants is well known but rarely mentioned.’
I am happy here to correct a misapprehension I shared with others. I knew that Lewis had advocated the first invasion of Iraq after its occupation of Kuwait. But I thought that he had urged the second invasion in 2003 as well. But that, he insists,
was another matter. This is sometimes ascribed to my influence with Vice President Cheney [whom he admired]. But the reverse is true. I did not recommend it. On the contrary, I opposed it. It is, to say the least, annoying to be blamed for something I did not do.
He notes that, ‘I am nowhere mentioned in the 530 pages of Cheney’s memoir, In My Time.’
I learned a lot from Lewis’s reflections on the subjects he mastered, ancient and modern, over many cultures and countries. A bruiser but not a bully, he is a throwback, a creature from the deep lagoon of past grand scholarship, where immersion in sources, well-known and long concealed, whatever their languages, broad acquaintance with the authorities and areas one studied, and even war service in the region, counted for something.
He even asserts that retiring at 70, enabling universities to shuck off dead wood, is a good thing. After all, it was after retirement that he found the wonderfully named widow Buntzie Ellis Churchill — and wrote 15 more books.
Because you read about book review
Also by Jonathan Mirsky
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