Tag: Bernard Lewis

What Bernard Lewis saw in Iran

On By Martin Kramer

It is hard to tell whether the Iran war is a masterstroke, a misadventure, or something in between. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” When we do know, it will only be after the fact, so scoring the war now is premature. My own sense, based on no special intelligence, is that if the war were a boxing match, the referee would have stopped it by now.

My thoughts instead turn to my mentors, and the question of what they’d think if they were still among us. One comes especially to mind. 

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) is best known as a historian of the Arab lands, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. But from the very outset, he had a particular interest in Shi‘ite Islam and Islamic Iran. He first visited Iran in 1950. “I traveled extensively around the country for a few weeks and found it a fascinating and hospitable place. The people were most tolerant of my fragmentary Persian.” He made several subsequent visits and attended the 1971 Persepolis celebrations as an official guest. He had a few audiences with the Shah, one in the year or so before the revolution.

Bernard Lewis meets Mohammad Reza Shah, early 1970s.

Lewis meets Mohammad Reza Shah, early 1970s.

Later, he wrote much-discussed articles on the Iranian revolution, particularly for the New York Review of Books in the 1980s and 1990s. (These can be found in his two collections, Islam and History and From Babel to Dragomans.) He never visited the Islamic Republic, despite receiving an invitation to participate in a conference on religious dialogue. “The subject is a very interesting and important one, but I did not feel inclined to discuss it under the auspices of the current regime.”

I was his student at Princeton during the Iranian revolution, and Lewis shares a revealing story about that time, which I remember well. Few in the West knew much about Ayatollah Khomeini, and neither did Lewis, so he went to the university library to see if Khomeini had written anything. There, he found the Arabic and Persian texts of Khomeini’s lectures in exile, now known in English as Islamic Government. This would later be called Khomeini’s Mein Kampf, a fitting comparison according to Lewis. 

It was a work of unrelenting extremism, promising a harsh and purifying Islamic regime. Lewis struggled to get Washington and the New York Times to take it seriously: many wanted to believe that Khomeini would fade away if the monarchy fell. You can see a youngish Lewis on TV here, eloquently warning of what would happen if Khomeini gained power. He was right, and Iran ended up with a clerical dictatorship. The Iranian revolution brought Lewis into the American spotlight for the first time, although it was 9/11 that later catapulted him into the stratosphere.

If Lewis were here, I think the media would ask him the now-ubiquitous question: Is regime change possible, and will foreign military action accelerate it? From time to time, the media did ask him that question, so we have his past answers spanning twenty years.

Lewis repeatedly insisted that the regime couldn’t last. In 1993, he told Le Monde:

The regime is firmly in place, but sooner or later it risks being replaced by a new Reza Khan. Regional centers that have become stronger could emerge, and Tehran’s power could be diminished. Some general might come with his army into the capital to restore the unity of the nation. This may be how the Islamic Revolution in Iran will end; it could happen tomorrow or in fifty years.

This speculation relied on Iran’s own history for a precedent. Reza Khan was the generalissimo who seized power and made himself shah in 1925. But in 1997, Lewis offered a different analogy, from Europe’s repertoire. The “aging and tiring” regime

faces mounting discontent among ever larger sections of the population at home. The Iranian revolutionaries are in many ways following the path of their French and Russian predecessors—the struggle of radicals and pragmatists, the terror, the Thermidorian reaction. It is not impossible that the Iranian Revolution, too, may culminate in a Napoleon or a Stalin. They would be wise to remember that Napoleon’s career ended at Waterloo and St. Helena and that Stalin’s legacy to the Soviet Union was disintegration and chaos.

Yet, while these analogies from the 1990s differed, Lewis anticipated a strongman would rise, centralize power, and break the fever of the revolution. 

After 9/11, Lewis began to speak of a different engine of regime change: not a man on horseback but the Iranian people. In 2001, he was asked if any country in the region was moving toward democracy. He gave a surprising answer:

I would say Iran is moving in that direction. They do have elections of a sort, it’s true, under a whole series of constraints. Nevertheless, it has been possible in Iran for the electorate, the people in general, to express an opinion. It’s indirect, it’s ineffectual, but it’s not unimportant because of that. And what you have, in effect, now in Iran is two governments: an elected government, which has no power, and a ruling government which was never elected and is not answerable. And that sets up tensions, which may well lead to the development of more democratic institutions.

Not only were Iranians moving toward democracy. They were moving toward America. In 2002, he noted that “after the events of Sept. 11, great numbers of people came out into the streets in Iranian cities, where, in defiance of the authorities, they lit candles and held vigils in sympathy and solidarity with the victims in New York and Washington. This contrasted markedly with the scenes of rejoicing elsewhere.” 

From this, he developed a thesis he repeated again and again: “While the citizens of supposedly ‘friendly’ Arab nations sometimes harbor deep anti-American resentment, the populations living under fiercely anti-American dictatorships—most notably Iran and Iraq—often hold strongly pro-American sentiments.” Indeed, they saw the United States as potential liberators. “You remember the scenes of rejoicing in Afghanistan,” he told an interviewer in 2002, after the United States brought down the Taliban regime. “I’ve been told by Iranian friends that that would look like a funeral compared with the rejoicing in Iran, if America would step in and help them get rid of their government.”

At about the same time, Lewis participated in an independent study group convened at the Pentagon’s behest. Its report, “Delta of Terrorism,” co-signed by Lewis and twelve other people, is remembered for advocating regime change in Iraq. But it also included a section on Iran. Not surprisingly, the Iran discussion followed lines of argument Lewis made elsewhere: Lewis was the senior figure in the group with knowledge of the Middle East, and the other two were his self-described disciples. 

Iran was presented there as “the most populous, developed, sophisticated society in the Muslim Middle East,” and “the region’s universal joint.” Its people were “increasingly pro-American, seeing the United States as the counterforce to a tired and calcified regime.” Thought of “any deals or accommodations” with the regime should be banished; the American goal should be “to undermine and eventually replace” it.

But this would happen from within. The United States “should begin contingency planning now for a U.S. response to a spontaneous popular revolution in Iran,” encouraged by “a Reagan-style information campaign of the kind we waged successfully in Poland and Serbia. Iran constitutes the new Eastern Europe for us. A liberated Iran—like a liberated Eastern Europe—transforms the regional power equation. ” 

Indeed, so powerful were the internal forces for change that they required only encouragement. “I realize I am sticking my neck out,” Lewis said in 2003, “but I would say that the prospects of a reasonably easy transition to democracy are better in Iran than in Iraq, because the regime in Iran, with all its faults, was not as destructive as that of Saddam Hussein.” Easy? In 2007, he discerned “a level of discontent at home, which could be exploited. I do not think it would be too difficult to bring it to the point when the regime could be overthrown.”

In 2011, he added another element: fracturing within the regime. He told the Wall Street Journal:

There is strong opposition to the regime—two oppositions—the opposition within the regime and the opposition against the regime. And I think that sooner or later the regime in Iran will be overthrown and something more open, more democratic, will emerge. Most Iranian patriots are against the regime. They feel it is defaming and dishonoring their country. And they’re right of course.

Lewis didn’t specify a timeline for this process, but he still framed it as an internal one.

Alas, the nuclear program made waiting problematic. Lewis had a strong view on Iran’s program. “There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons,” he wrote. “This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers.” Famously, he said that for Iran’s regime (under Ahmedinejad in particular), Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was “not a constraint; it is an inducement.” (In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu quoted Lewis before the UN, adding this flourish: “Iran’s apocalyptic leaders believe that a medieval holy man will reappear in the wake of a devastating Holy War, thereby ensuring that their brand of radical Islam will rule the earth.”)

Even so, Lewis repeatedly ruled out a military “invasion” to change the regime. He said this in 2006:

I don’t think it’s a good idea to launch an armed invasion. There is a great deal one can do short of that to indicate displeasure, to make things difficult and to encourage resistance among the subjects of the Iranian government. And there is ample evidence of widespread unhappiness and discontent among the people of Iran. I think we could do more to encourage and help them in a number of ways.

In 2007, he reiterated his objection. What Iranians wanted was “not a military invasion. My Iranian friends and various groups are unanimous on that point. They feel a military invasion would be counterproductive.”

He also hesitated about military action short of invasion. In a lecture given sometime between 2009 and 2011, he insisted that other options hadn’t been exhausted.

What are the possibilities in dealing with this threat from Iran? I think one can divide them into two: one is the obvious military one. It may reach a point when there is no other; I do not personally believe that we have reached that point yet, and I believe that, even in talking about it, it is very important not to give the regime a free gift of something that they do not at present enjoy, that is, the support of Iranian patriotism…. I think one has to handle this very carefully and before deciding that the military option is the only one that remains. There are possibilities internally within Iran, opportunities which I think have been underused or totally neglected.… It seems to me that, for the moment, one should aim at disruption rather than a military action.

He immediately followed this with a caveat: “I must, in concluding, admit the possibility that one may, at some time, reach a situation when there is no other option available.” But for the rest of his life—he died in 2018 just shy of age 102—he never publicly stated that such a “point” or “situation” had been reached. In 2012, when asked whether he supported military action against Iran, Lewis said: “I don’t think it’s the right answer…. We should do what we can to help the Iranian opposition. We could do a lot to help them and we’re not doing a damn thing, as far as I know.” “It may come to [military action],” he added, but it hadn’t yet. 

So Lewis didn’t completely rule out using force, but he viewed it as a last resort that, if mishandled, could spark a patriotic outpouring and turn into a “free gift” to the regime. 

Would he have made the same argument today? It’s a question that cannot be answered, as events since his death would have shaped his perspective. The most significant of these are progress in Iran’s nuclear program, which was less advanced in the 2010s, and the regime’s growing ruthlessness. Lewis lived a very long life and saw historic shifts in power. He stayed relevant for so long because he understood and explained change. So we don’t know how he would have responded to changing conditions in Iran, and we can only regret that no one of his caliber has replaced him.

Still, revisiting Lewis helps us frame the questions that will occupy us moving forward. Is there a foundation for democracy beneath the battered shell of the Islamic Republic? If so, can foreign military and clandestine actions help expand it? If there are two oppositions, inside and outside the regime, could they unite? Or will the war only strengthen the regime? It’s probably fair to say that the threat posed by Iran’s regime has been diminished. The key question now is, will the promise of Iran’s people also be fulfilled?


Header image: An official travel permit issued to Lewis in April 1965 for a trip across Iranian Azerbaijan starting in Tabriz. This followed a lecture series delivered by Lewis in Tehran, organized by the British Council.


Below: covers of Lewis’s books in Persian translation. Left to right, top row: The Origins of Isma‘ilism; The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam; What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Middle row: The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; The End of Modern History in the Middle East; The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. Bottom row: The Muslim Discovery of Europe; Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East; The Jews of Islam.

Bernard Lewis: remade in America

On By Martin Kramer

Bernard Lewis: London years

“When newly-appointed Professor of Near Eastern Studies Bernard Lewis arrives in Princeton next Wednesday, his presence will make the university ‘the strongest school in Near East history in the country.’” Thus did the Daily Princetonian report Lewis’s arrival, expected on Wednesday, September 11, 1974, fifty years ago today.

The migration of historian Bernard Lewis from London to Princeton, and from Britain to America, changed the lives of many students, myself included. By some accounts, it changed the role of the United States in the Middle East. Whether it did so is a larger question for another time. But how the move came about is a smaller story worth telling in its own right, and on this anniversary, I’ll share just a bit of it.

Brain drain and gain

In the years following the Second World War, many British academics made the transatlantic move, accepting positions at American colleges and universities. It was a case of both push and pull. The war had left British higher education strapped for funds, while American academia was booming, fueled by the federal government and major foundations. The resources of Oxford or London paled in comparison to those of Harvard or Yale.

In 1961, an official British inquiry into the state of area studies (the Hayter Committee) painted a grim picture of “the drain of manpower to America”:

Scholars overseas are already receiving tempting offers from American universities…. The pressure on Great Britain has started and several key university teachers have now left for America. Recently 12 members of the staff of the School of Oriental and African Studies were under offer from American universities… At present the lure of posts in America arises as much from the better amenities, the larger libraries and the more generous funds for travel as from the cash salaries.

During these years, American universities expected their foreign recruits to be institution-builders, since so much had to be constructed from scratch. A prime example was Sir Hamilton Gibb, Lewis’s teacher, who in 1955 traded a chair of Arabic at Oxford for one at Harvard. At the age of 60, he assumed a heavy burden of teaching, administration, and fundraising. The general consensus was that Gibb did not succeed at Harvard; even an admirer admitted that “his administrative arrangements did not always have the results he intended.” While he mentored some notable students, he built nothing lasting and his research agenda suffered. “His own work had to be done in the intervals of teaching, administration, and acting as elder statesman.”

Lewis may have inferred from this precedent that an American appointment could lead to frustration. Or he may have had other commitments he was unwilling to stretch or sever. Regardless, while others left, he stayed. “The drain of key people to America,” noted the 1961 report, “is already severe in some places, particularly at the School of Oriental and African Studies” (SOAS), where Lewis taught. But it didn’t include him. Yes, he received feelers from American universities, but he only pursued them for the occasional visiting professorship. In Britain, researchers coined a term for this: “brain circulation” (as opposed to outright “brain drain”). Lewis completed stints at UCLA, Columbia, and Indiana.

Lewis likely never would have migrated to America if not for his own specific push and pull factors. The push was a difficult divorce that left him demoralized and financially strained. (He wrote about this in some detail in his memoirs.) The pull was the deal that brought him over. Unlike Harvard’s arrangement with Gibb, the agreement with Lewis set him up for success, by supercharging his productivity.

That’s because the offer to Lewis came not only from the university, but also from the Institute for Advanced Study. Although located in Princeton, the Institute is entirely separate from the university, with a distinct mission: to encourage a small number of scholars to focus exclusively on pure, undistracted research. The Institute has no students, classes, or degree programs.

After some maneuvering by academic allies, Lewis received offers from both the university and the Institute, each for a half-time position. It was a major coup for Avrom Udovitch, new chairman of the Near Eastern Studies department at the university, and Carl Kaysen, director of the Institute. They faced a question evocative of quantum physics, a field in which the Institute excelled: could someone be in two places at once? Some Institute faculty had their doubts. In the past, such dual appointments, though rare, had been “more advantageous to the University than to the Institute,” according to skeptics.

But the deal went through. Lewis’s supporters at the Institute reassured the doubters, and Philip Klutznick, a Chicago real estate developer, stepped in to fund the Institute’s share. One of the peculiarities of the dual arrangement was Lewis’s title at the Institute: “Long-term Member.” Had he been full-time, he would have held the title of professor. At the university, however, he became the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies.

In his memoirs, Lewis explained the advantages of the arrangement:

Thanks to my joint appointment I had to teach only one semester; the rest of my time was free of teaching responsibilities, except of course for the supervision of graduate students preparing dissertations…. A second advantage was that being a newcomer from another country, I was free from the kind of administrative and bureaucratic entanglements that had built up, over decades, in England. This was a most welcome relief.

The late Robert Irwin, one of Lewis’s London students, recalled that his position at SOAS “necessarily also involved him in teaching, supervising, editing, seeking funds, launching programs, and so forth.” The Princeton arrangement dramatically reduced that burden. Lewis emphasized that it gave him “more free time” to focus on research and writing.

In the month after Lewis arrived in Princeton, he spoke to the Daily Princetonian, describing his dual arrangement as “a way of having one’s cake and eating it too.”

Leisure, space, privacy

I was an undergraduate senior when Lewis arrived that September. He wasn’t offering a course at my level, and I only recall glimpsing him in Jones Hall, home of the Near Eastern Studies department. In retrospect, I’m surprised I didn’t seek him out. But at the time, the department didn’t accept its own undergraduates for graduate study, so I planned to leave. It was Udovitch who pulled me aside and told me that if I left for a year, I’d be eligible to return.

By the time I returned in the fall of 1976, Lewis had become a fixture at the university, and I enrolled in his graduate course on Arabic political vocabulary. At some point, he invited me to visit him at his Institute office, where I witnessed the great advantage he enjoyed through his dual appointment.

Lewis sat atop Olympus. The Institute, removed from the university, sat within an 800-acre park with its own woods. He occupied a gleaming white office the size of a large studio apartment, housed in a striking modernist building. The office featured a work area and a lounge, with windows running its length. Much of his enormous library lined the walls. The Institute, Lewis wrote in his memoirs, “gave me leisure, space, and privacy, all three of them, especially the latter, in ample measure.” Privacy, indeed: here he could work completely undisturbed, far from the nosy faculty, noisy students, and annoying tourists who crowded the campus.

I came to know that office very well. Not only did I visit Lewis, who became my dissertation adviser, for afternoon tea and walks in the woods. He also hired me to catalog incoming offprints and gave me the office key. I spent many evenings and weekends there while he was elsewhere, sitting at his desk, organizing the offprints, doing my own research in his library, and occasionally sneaking a glance at his opened mail.

It was at this desk that he wrote a famous series of Commentary articles that transformed him into a major public intellectual. They included “The Palestinians and the PLO” (1975) and “The Return of Islam” (1976). It was also here that he wrote “The Anti-Zionist Resolution” for Foreign Affairs (1976), and “The Question of Orientalism,” his rejoinder to Edward Said, for the New York Review of Books (1982).

His scholarship also flourished. In quick succession, he authored History—Remembered, Recovered, Invented (1975), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (his major work of this period, 1982), The Jews of Islam (1984), Semites and Anti-Semites (1986), The Political Language of Islam (1988), and Race and Slavery in the Middle East (1990). Each article, book, and controversy propelled Lewis still further into the American limelight, paving the way for his eventual emergence as a post-9/11 sage.

Decade after decade

The university had a mandatory retirement age of 70, and Lewis’s retirement in 1986 automatically triggered his departure from the Institute. Had he done nothing more, his brief American epilogue would still have been considered a stunning success.

But two other factors came into play, neither of them predictable. First, Lewis defied the actuarial tables, remaining healthy and energized well into his nineties. Second, the Middle East continued to produce new surprises every decade, pulling America ever deeper into the region. This began with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, before Lewis’s retirement, and continued afterward with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. After each shock, American policymakers and the public sought context and guidance, which Lewis provided in abundance.

Had Lewis not made the crossing in 1974, his voice might still have been heard in America, but it would have been distant and faint. His decade-plus in that splendid Princeton office transformed him from a British don into an American public intellectual, with a reach extending from network studios to the White House.

Small decisions often have outsized and unintended consequences, affecting both the careers of individuals and the history of nations. I submit that this one, made by the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in late 1973, deserves far more recognition than it has received:

The Faculty takes note of the proposal of the School of Historical Studies concerning Bernard Lewis as forwarded to it in the letter of the Director and will welcome the presence of Bernard Lewis at the Institute.

The motion was seconded and passed unanimously.

Header image: Fuld Hall, The Institute for Advanced Study, Wikimedia Commons.

Golda Meir’s filtration system

On By Martin Kramer

The film Golda, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, has sharply focused attention on how Prime Minister Golda Meir made critical decisions in the lead-up to and during the fateful days of October 1973. Here I offer some evidence and insights from the late Bernard Lewis, the most acclaimed historian of the Middle East in our time. Lewis was an astute observer who frequently traveled between Cairo and Jerusalem prior to the war. He has left us a valuable account of his experience in his memoirs.

Lewis was well-acquainted with a wide range of Israel’s leaders from his generation and those that followed. They included Abba Eban, whom he knew from an early age, as well as Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Benjamin Netanyahu. However, apart from Eban, Golda Meir was the first Israeli leader he got to know well, and he approached her as a man on a mission.

“Egypt was ready for peace”

In 1969, Lewis visited Egypt to attend a conference. Gamal Abdul Nasser still held power, and Egypt struggled to rebound from its defeat in the Six-Day War two years prior. Lewis briefly met Nasser, but they did not have a conversation. Still, he recalled, “I saw a lot of people, including old friends, and I was very much struck by the change in mood. I came away with a very clear impression that Egypt was ready for peace. I was sure of it. I had no doubts whatsoever.”

Over the next two years, Lewis’s conviction deepened. He returned to Cairo in 1970 and again in 1971, after Nasser’s death. While he did not meet Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, he met his advisers, and he became “convinced that a direct approach to Egypt would produce results.”

In 1971, he reiterated his view in US Senate testimony: “I am quite convinced that there is in Egypt a genuine desire for peace. I have no doubt about that at all. It was there before the death of Nasser, and it has become more open since the death of Nasser.” In fact, Sadat’s adviser, Tahseen Bashir, seems to have asked Lewis to convey to Golda that Sadat wished to negotiate an interim agreement.

But the Israelis were not interested. During one of Lewis’s visits to Israel, Golda invited him into her kitchen and offered him tea and cake. Lewis made his case for a direct approach to Egypt, but Golda summarily dismissed it. Lewis tells the story:

She didn’t believe me. She indicated that I had allowed myself to be duped by the Egyptians and that it was all nonsense. I tried the same on Moshe Dayan. I think he did believe me, but he didn’t like it. He just didn’t want to negotiate…. I also put it to Rabin. I even wrote Rabin a letter to that effect. But it fell on deaf ears; they didn’t believe me or didn’t want to believe me.

Did the Yom Kippur War occur because Golda thought Lewis had been misled? She missed many more signals in far more important channels. But Golda’s dismissal of Lewis sheds light on why those other messages got lost in transmission.

“Only what she wanted to hear”

Lewis had another encounter with Golda Meir a few years later, on the Palestinian question. In 1974, Lewis prepared a piece that eventually would be published by Commentary under the title “The Palestinians and the PLO.” Lewis began by demonstrating how the concept of a Palestinian people arose only after the First World War. “The emergence of a distinctive Palestinian entity,” he wrote, “is a product of the last decades and may be seen as the joint creation of Israel and the Arab states — the one by extruding the Arabs of Palestine, the others by refusing to accept them.”

Golda distributed Lewis’s article to the entire cabinet, and she summoned him to a meeting. According to one participant, “they spoke for hours. Her aides tried to end it, but Golda kept going, and Bernard didn’t want to be rude.” Golda latched onto Lewis’s historical point about the recent origin of Palestinian identity. In 1969, she had said that “there was no such thing as Palestinians,” perhaps her most famous (or infamous) remark. Now she believed she had found scholarly support to validate her claim.

But she completely ignored the rest of the article, where Lewis had urged Israel to “test the willingness or ability” of the PLO to negotiate a two-state solution — this, at a time when Israel regarded the PLO as a terrorist organization utterly beyond the pale. Golda simply ignored that part of Lewis’s argument.

Lewis later identified Meir’s problem. She was admirably tough, but overly rigid:

Golda was fitted with a kind of personal filtration system — she only heard what she wanted to hear. If she picked up anything in what I was saying to her that fit within her pattern of thought, she would immediately grasp and use it. Anything that didn’t fit just went straight past her.

The same might be said of the entire political and security establishment over which she presided in 1973.

The question of whether historians have valuable insights to offer policymakers is always up for debate. No historical circumstance perfectly mirrors the current moment. However, one abiding truth taught by historians is irrefutable: in human affairs, nothing remains static. Israel learned that the hard way in 1973. This 50th anniversary should remind us once more that Israel must never rest.

This is based on a lecture I delivered about Bernard Lewis and world leaders at Tel Aviv University in June. View the entire lecture at this link.

Header image: Prime Minister Golda Meir shaking hands with Chief of Staff Haim Bar Lev, standing between Supreme Court Justice Shlomo Agranat and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, before departing for the United States at Lod Airport, September 24, 1969. Photographer: Moshe Milner, Israel Government Press Office.