Author: Martin Kramer

Apologize to Bernard Lewis

On By Martin Kramer

Bernard Lewis gave a speech at the gala of the American Enterprise Institute on March 7. (He received the Irving Kristol Award on the same occasion.) In it, he borrowed almost verbatim from an article he’d published over five years ago in the Wall Street Journal, where he’d written the following:

“Crusade” still touches a raw nerve in the Middle East, where the Crusades are seen and presented as early medieval precursors of European imperialism—aggressive, expansionist and predatory. I have no wish to defend or excuse the often atrocious behavior of the crusaders, both in their countries of origin and in the countries they invaded, but the imperialist parallel is highly misleading. The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.

The day after the AEI speech, Neil King, Jr., in a blog at the Wall Street Journal, wrote an item entitled “Bernard Lewis Applauds the Crusades.” Lewis had done no such thing, and King ended up running a correction: Lewis, wrote King, “made the point that the Crusades, as atrocious as they were, were nonetheless an understandable response to the Islamic onslaught of the preceding centuries, and that it was ridiculous [for Pope John Paul II] to apologize for them.” That should have been the end of the story.

But it wasn’t. Jacob Weisberg, who attended the gala, did a piece on it for Slate (which he edits), and it also appeared in the Financial Times (where he’s a columnist). There he wrote the following:

What did surprise me was Lewis’ denunciation of Pope John Paul II’s 2000 apology for the Crusades as political correctness run amok. This drew applause. Lewis’ view is that the Muslims started it by invading Europe in the eighth century. The Crusades were merely a failed imitation of Muslim jihad in an endless see-saw of conquest and re-conquest.

Were you to start counting the ironies here, where would you stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticizing the pope for apologizing to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the Crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge them wrong.

The piece was accompanied by a less-than-flattering photo of Lewis. And in a gossipy audio “interview ” with Slate, Weisberg added this further spin: “What a bizarre turn of events, that the Jewish neoconservatives are now applauding a British Jewish intellectual, sort of minimizing the awfulness of the medieval Crusades.”

I suppose Weisberg hasn’t read any of Lewis’ works. If he had, he’d know exactly how Lewis has interpreted the Crusades. And given the nonsense that Weisberg has spread, it’s definitely the moment to reread Lewis on the subject.

Lewis certainly does understand the Crusades as part of a counter-attack or counter-offensive: a Christian attempt to retake those lands that had been lost to Christendom in the waves of Islamic conquest that began in the seventh (not eighth) century. This isn’t a new theme in his writings, but he articulated it best in his Tanner Lectures on “Europe and Islam” (here), delivered in Oxford in 1990:

In recent years it has become the practice, in both western Europe and the Middle East, to see and present the Crusades as an early exercise in Western imperialism—as a wanton and predatory aggression by the European powers of the time against the Muslim or, as some would now say, against the Arab lands.

They were not seen in that light at the time, either by Christians or by Muslims. For contemporary Christians, the Crusades were religious wars, the purpose of which was to recover the lost lands of Christendom and particularly the holy land where Christ had lived, taught, and died. In this connection, it may be recalled that when the Crusaders arrived in the Levant not much more than four centuries had passed since the Arab Muslim conquerors had wrested these lands from Christendom—less than half the time from the Crusades to the present day—and that a substantial proportion of the population of these lands, perhaps even a majority, was still Christian.

Lewis isn’t really interested in whether the Crusaders were more or less “awful” or “terrible” or “wrong” than other conquerors, ancient, medieval or modern. Any hack propagandist, movie maker, or Slate journalist can do that, for people who enjoy moralizing across millennia. Lewis instead seeks to instruct us, from the sources, as to how the Crusades were viewed by their contemporaries. Christians at the time saw them as a reconquest of their own lands, not as an imperialist intrusion into Islam’s privileged domain. (And Lewis goes on to note that Muslims didn’t see the Crusaders as much more than a nuisance, until they began to raid closer to their truly privileged domain, Mecca and Medina.)

As for the absurdity of the papal apology for the Crusades, the view arises quite logically from Lewis’ interpretation of the first millennium of Islamic-Christian relations:

For almost a thousand years, from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam. In the early centuries it was a double threat—not only of invasion and conquest, but also of conversion and assimilation. All but the easternmost provinces of the Islamic realm had been taken from Christian rulers, and the vast majority of the first Muslims west of Iran and Arabia were converts from Christianity. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, even Persian-ruled Iraq, had been Christian countries, in which Christianity was older and more deeply rooted than in most of Europe. Their loss was sorely felt and heightened the fear that a similar fate was in store for Europe.

The Crusades, Lewis notes, were “no more than an episode…. In the seesaw of attack and counterattack between Christendom and Islam, this venture began with an inconclusive Christian victory and ended with a conclusive Christian defeat.”

Given this context of repeated Muslim expansion, and the futile attempt of the Crusades to reverse it, Pope John Paul II’s apology does indeed appear ridiculous. (By the way, Lewis knew the pope, with whom he’s pictured on right.) If such apologies are in order, the Muslims owe them to Christendom for every Islamic conquest, beginning with the conquest of Christian Jerusalem in 637 and culminating in the conquest of the great Christian capital of Constantinople in 1453. And why shouldn’t Christians also apologize for the religious wars that ended the 700-year Muslim occupation of Spain and the 500-year Muslim occupation of the Balkans? Of course, such apologies would be absurd, but then so is the papal apology for the Crusades.

Lewis says so as the world’s preeminent historian of Islam, not as a “Jewish intellectual” or a “Jewish scholar,” somehow duty-bound to represent a “Jewish” perspective. It’s Weisberg who turns Lewis’ great virtue as a historian—that he views the sweep of history without parochialism—into a moral fault. Lewis, he seems to be arguing, should properly take a Jewish view. This is the sort of thing that people expect in Cairo and Tehran, but it’s a bizarre turn of events to see it echoed in America. If one is going to begin to pillory Jewish scholars for reaching conclusions that contradict some journalistic notion of the Jewish interest, it really would be impossible to count the ironies. Take, for example, Joel Beinin and Norman Finkelstein…

The bottom line here is that apologies for the Crusades are ridiculous, but Jacob Weisberg owes Bernard Lewis an apology. It’s owed not over his criticism of Lewis’ role in the gestation of the Iraq war (which Weisberg exaggerates, I think). All’s fair in politics. But beyond the vapid assumption that the Crusades were “awful,” Weisberg knows zip about their history. Lewis had mastered this subject long before Weisberg was born, and if Weisberg is incapable of acknowledging it, then he’s even more ignorant than he’s made himself appear to be.

And he owes Lewis a second apology for pigeonholing him as a “Jewish scholar” and “Jewish intellectual” in this particular context. I wonder how Weisberg would feel if his critics labeled him a “Jewish journalist” in every discussion of his professional work, and judged him by whether or not he had reached a “Jewish” conclusion. (Any perceived deviation would be marked as “ironic.”) I imagine he wouldn’t like it one bit. Is Weisberg clever enough to see that irony?

And for the record: Lewis is not a “British Jewish intellectual.” He became a naturalized American twenty-five years ago.

Update, March 21: The American Enterprise Institute has published Lewis’ full remarks. Here’s what he said about the Crusades—exactly in line with what he’s always said:

We have seen in our own day the extraordinary spectacle of a pope apologizing to the Muslims for the Crusades. I would not wish to defend the behavior of the Crusaders, which was in many respects atrocious. But let us have a little sense of proportion. We are now expected to believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted act of aggression against a peaceful Muslim world. Hardly. The first papal call for a crusade occurred in 846 C.E., when an Arab expedition from Sicily sailed up the Tiber and sacked St. Peter’s in Rome. A synod in France issued an appeal to Christian sovereigns to rally against “the enemies of Christ,” and the Pope, Leo IV, offered a heavenly reward to those who died fighting the Muslims. A century and a half and many battles later, in 1096, the Crusaders actually arrived in the Middle East. The Crusades were a late, limited, and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad—an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war. It failed, and it was not followed up.

Cole in the bullrushes

On By Martin Kramer

Juan Cole has decided that Muqtada al-Sadr can’t be in Iran. He has no way of knowing that from freezing Ann Arbor, but his method, if it can be called that, is to bring all his superior knowledge to bear, and then surmise the truth. So even though the United States military and an adviser to the Iraqi prime minister have placed Sadr in Iran—presumably on the basis of some intelligence—Cole holds fast to his conviction that Sadr is in Iraq.

Today he relays a report that, he claims, substantiates his thesis:

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Muqtada al-Sadr and several leaders of his movement as well as commanders of his Mahdi Army are present in the southern marshlands of Iraq, a place in which dissidents in the former Baath regime used to hide out… The Marsh Arab inhabitants of the swamps have largely become followers of Sadr, and so would protect him. They are in an area of Iraq that borders Iran and which serves as a smuggling route between the two countries, which may have given rise to the idea that Muqtada was on his way to Iran. He more likely is holed up in the marshes. This is the most plausible story I have seen yet on Muqtada’s disappearance.

But Al-Hayat in Arabic does not report that Sadr and his deputies “are present in the southern marshlands of Iraq.” The press report Cole references says that, according to informed sources, Sadr et al. are “on the Iraqi-Iranian border in the area of the marshes” (see Arabic below). Some marshes are in Iraq, but there are vast trans-border marshes (e.g., Hawizah) that are shared by Iraq and Iran. Al-Hayat‘s sources are therefore very careful to leave open the question of whether Sadr is in Iran or Iraq, by placing him on the border.

Cole, however, distorts the report, citing it as evidence that Sadr remains in Iraq. There are only two possibilities. Perhaps Cole didn’t read the Arabic text carefully; it wouldn’t be the first time his Arabic, which he claims to “command,” failed to obey. Or perhaps he understood the Arabic but deliberately twisted the report. I don’t know which it is in this instance, but the bottom line is the same: don’t trust Cole to relay the content of an Arabic source. Check it yourself.

Is Sadr in Iran or Iraq? I don’t know, and Cole doesn’t have a clue either.

وعلمت «الحياة» من مصادر مطلعة ان الصدر وعدداً كبيراً من قادة «جيش المهدي» موجودون على الحدود العراقية – الايرانية، في منطقة الأهوار، التي كانت ملجأ الجهات المعارضة للنظام السابق

Know Thy Enemy (or an Approximation Thereof)

On By Martin Kramer

On Monday, January 22, I gave this address to the Herzliya Conference, an annual Israeli gathering for high-level soul-searching. The title of the panel (not of my choosing): “Knowing Thy Enemy: Decision-Making Processes of Regional Adversaries.”

My role here this morning is to serve as a proxy for “the enemy.” Now it might have been more interesting to invite “the enemy” and have him speak for himself. But Israel has so many enemies that one wouldn’t know quite where to start. And once one goes beyond “enemy” to include “regional adversaries,” as our panel title does, the list grows long. Then if I define these adversaries from a dual perspective, American and Israeli, the list becomes a who’s who. It includes states like Iran and Syria, an array of Islamist movements, Sunni and Shiite, and insurgents and terrorists of all stripes. As someone once said, friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.

In a mere ten minutes, then, all I can do is give you a flavor of how Israel and the United States might look to a composite enemy, someone you couldn’t invite because he doesn’t exist. And to get you in the proper mood, I’ll do it in first person. I know it’s hard, but imagine me as some sort of composite of Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Osama bin Laden, Bashar Asad, Muqtada as-Sadr, and Khalid Mash’al. You’ll admit it’s a good disguise; good enough to get me through the security cordon outside this hall.

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. I’m flattered that you wish to know me better. As it happens, the phrase “know thy enemy” isn’t in our Holy Quran, but it comes from the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu. The full quote goes like this: “Know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.”

Now it’s true that your societies are self-critical. The purpose of your famous conference is to look hard at yourselves. We follow it most closely, for what it tells us of your strengths and weaknesses. This self-knowledge works in your favor. But fortunately for us, your knowledge of us is deeply flawed. That’s the prime reason why you’ve been losing every other battle.

It’s not that you don’t understand our decision-making processes. Your intelligence agencies probably have a good idea of who answers to whom in Damascus and Tehran, and among our brothers in Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sunni mujahidin in Iraq, and Al-Qaeda. What you don’t begin to understand is how we see the world.

To summarize your problem in a sentence: you don’t give us credit for having what you have, which is vision. In America and Israel, you keep your greatest thinkers in tanks, where they come up with grand visions and strategies. These minds produce fresh ideas of how to engineer a “new Middle East” to your liking. Then you give these ideas imposing names: the peace process, globalization, democratization. Your ideas usually fail, but you keep generating them, because you have a sense of destiny. And your destiny, so you think, is to remake the world in your image.

Too often, you aren’t prepared to give us credit for having visions of our own. And when you overhear snippets of our own big ideas—a map without Israel, a resurrected caliphate, and so on—you say: oh, that’s not really serious. No, you assure yourselves, all that the Muslims want is that we address some of their grievances and accommodate a few of their interests. A gesture by you here, a concession by you there, and before you know it, you think you’ve turned us into your servants.

We find it amusing how you persuade yourselves that just one more gesture, just one more concession, is all that’s needed to impose your will.

Here are some examples we’ve collected from your press, mostly from Haaretz. If only Israel would give up the Shebaa Farms, our brethren in Hezbollah would surrender their weapons. If only our imprisoned fighters were released by Israel, we would allow your “peace process” to be renewed. If only the United States would wink at Syria over the Golan, our brother Assad would ditch Iran. If only Iran were given economic incentives, it would ditch its nuclear program. If only Hamas were recognized, it would recognize Israel in return. If only Israel acknowledged responsibility for the plight of the refugees, the Palestinians would shelve the “right of return.”

And on and on. There’s even someone at Harvard who claims that Al-Qaeda “is likely to bring an end to the war it declared in return for some degree of satisfaction regarding its grievances.” Our brothers in Al-Qaeda felt insulted: just what do they have to do to be regarded as visionaries, and not as angry Arabs with so-called “grievances”?

Not a single one of these “if-thens” is true; time and again, we’ve told you so. Yet still you’re disappointed when your “generous offers” are spurned. The offers are generous, so you think; but to us, such “generosity” is a mark of weakness, a signpost reassuring us that we’re on the road to realizing our grand vision.

And we do have a grand vision. It’s as deeply rooted in our hearts as the idea of liberty and freedom is rooted in yours. Our leaders, thinkers, intellectuals, and clerics have spread it to millions of people. Untold numbers are prepared to fight for it. It exists in several versions—Islamist, Arabist, nationalist. But in the end, all of these versions revolve around the same idea, and it’s this:

We Arabs and Muslims can and must seize control of our destiny. This means wresting the Middle East away from America and its extension, Israel. Every move we make thus has the ultimate purpose of pushing you back, out, and away. We have no interest whatsoever in “final settlements” or a “new Middle East” that would fortify the status quo. We’re out to defeat you—and to replace your vision with our own.

You may think this is impossible. We admit it: the Arab and Muslim world isn’t a seat of great technological achievement. It struggles with poverty, illiteracy, and ignorance on a daunting scale. But our cadres have taken Sun Tzu to heart. We know ourselves, and we’ve made a careful study of you, from Bint Jbeil to Baghdad. We demand of our followers sacrifice, but we promise them victory, and we prepare for it. Of course we make mistakes; we’re human too. But on balance, we’ve played a weak hand with skill, while you’ve played a strong hand ineptly.

Now you may enjoy a brief respite from us, because Sunnis and Shia are regrettably at each other’s throats. Your diplomats whisper to you that this is an opportunity. Don’t rejoice. If Sunnis and Shia can demonize and massacre one another—fellow Muslims who profess the same faith, speak the same language, share the same culture—what does this portend for you? The Sunni-Shia strife is a warning to you: our visions, our history don’t ever go away, they always come back.

Let’s set aside the Chinese general, and end with a quote from our own Bin Laden. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” He’s right. We sense, not that you’re weak, but that you’re weakening. We see America’s “wise men” produce an alternative plan for Iraq comprised of gestures to us, disguised under the thin euphemism of a “new diplomatic offensive.” We hear America’s best-placed foreign policy analyst declare that “the American era in the Middle East has ended.” And Israel, defeated in the summer, now debates concessions and initiatives toward us, all of which suggest that Israel is anxious to forestall further defeats.

We know you will launch more offensives, to reverse your decline, or at least create the illusion of its reversal. We expect many “surges.” We can’t defeat you yet in a straight confrontation. But you are already defeating yourselves, in your think tanks, in your universities, in your editorial boardrooms, in the conclaves of your “wise men.”

Finally, you ask us about the place of Iran’s nuclear program in our vision. It’s an excellent question. Unfortunately for you, Martin Kramer’s time is up. We return him to you—unharmed.