Fouad Ajami on Bernard Lewis

The Wall Street Journal has a long and brilliant piece by Fouad Ajami on Bernard Lewis, whose 90th birthday approaches and whose contribution to America's understanding of the Middle East Ajami outlines with detail and clarity.

When I got married a quarter-century ago, Fouad Ajami rented my bachelor digs from me before I sold the condo a year later. I also spent a wonderful evening into late night with Bernard Lewis at his home in Princeton in my bachelor days, and I can attest to his largeness of spirit and gregarious nature. I own a dozen of his books, and his encyclopedic knowledge of Islam in its heyday is unparalleled.

Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Christopher Hitchens are all prophets from abroad warning an America rent by civil libertarian quibbles and arcane senseless squabbles and gotcha politics that the U.S. and the West face a decisive crisis.

All analogies limp a bit and Lewis is not quite correct in comparing Britain's struggle with Hitler in 1940 with the current looming confrontation with Islamic civilization [Lewis never meant it as a strict comparison, I'm sure.] But in one sense, the heedless careless academic and MSM belittling of the threat beggars description, and the analogy of a long-term struggle between the Enlightenment and the forces of darkness is appropriate. Ajami's words:

"...an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force. (Note the name given the Western world; it is vintage Lewis, this naming of worlds and drawing of borders--and differences.) It was the time of commerce and globalism; the "modernists" had the run of the decade, and a historian's dark premonitions about a thwarted civilization wishing to avenge the slights and wounds of centuries would not carry the day. Mr. Lewis was the voice of conservatives, a brooding pessimist, in the time of a sublime faith in things new and untried. It was he, in that 1990 article, who gave us the notion of a "clash of civilizations" that Samuel Huntington would popularize, with due attribution to Bernard Lewis."

JFK wrote a Pulitzer-Prize winning book [with help from an anonymous NYT ghost writer] on "Why England Slept." But back in the day, America had not been eviscerated by a postmodern nihilist suicidal pessimism propagated by do-gooders with a bad agenda. Small minds with obscurantist programs for domestic egalitarian utopias shriek for attention, and the MSM and intelligentsia insist that America's foreign problems can be resolved---Jimmy Carter style---with good will and negotiations. The overarching silliness of the American leftist project beggars description, and Mr. Lewis had to resign from the Middle East Studies Association because of postcolonial mindsets that demanded contrition for historical sins.

The time for mea culpas is past and Iran arms itself with nuclear weapons that sooner or later will be another threat to Israel and the values it represents.

Bernard Lewis once told me he spoke or read seventeen [17]languages, including Turkish dialects of Central Asia, and told me of an epic poem he was reading about the "evil bolshebeggi" written by a Central Asian Homer after the Red-White Civil Wars in Russia in the early twenties. His prodigious scholarship and extreme erudition are products of an earlier era of greatness.

Now, in the era of the epigonies, giants like Lewis are reviled. Ajami is right to mourn the loss of a universalist epoch and greet the darkness like Lear, raving but lucid, and warning us that we must struggle to stay free.