BERNARD LEWIS TO RECEIVE AEI'S IRVING KRISTOL AWARD FOR 2007
The renowned historian Bernard Lewis has been selected to receive the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award for 2007. He will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at the Institute’s annual dinner on March 7, 2007.
Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London in 1939 and taught there until 1974, when he moved to the United States to accept his initial appointment at Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study. His long academic career has so far been interrupted only by his service during World War II in the British Army (Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Service) and subsequently in the Foreign Office. He became an American citizen in 1982.
From 1940 through 2000, Professor Lewis published twenty landmark books including The Origins of Ismailism (1940), The Arabs in History (1950), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), The Political Language of Islam (1988), and The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (1994). Through these books and innumerable essays, he emerged as the West’s preeminent student and interpreter of Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and the modern Middle East.
Following the terrorist attacks of September 2001, Professor Lewis’s works suddenly attracted intense interest from a wider public seeking to understand the turmoil in the Muslim world that had exploded with such ferocity into the West. His prescient essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” published in the September 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, was widely reprinted and discussed. He lectured widely, consulted with top government officials, was interviewed on television, and wrote two new books. In What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Modern Middle East (2002), he analyzed the fall of Islamic civilization from superiority in almost every area of human knowledge to a “poor, weak, and ignorant” backwater dominated by “shabby tyrannies . . . modern only in their apparatus of repression and terror.” In The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003), he assessed the prospects for liberal political institutions in the Middle East. “If freedom fails and terror triumphs, the peoples of Islam will be the first and greatest victims,” he writes. “They will not be alone and many others will suffer with them.”
Professor Lewis celebrated his ninetieth birthday in 2006 and continues to pursue an energetic schedule of study, writing, lecturing, and travel throughout the Middle East. He is, in the words of his student Reuel Marc Gerecht (borrowing a term from Shiite legal scholarship), “the marja-e-taqlid—‘the source of emulation,’ the scholar to whom on the great questions one must make reference.”
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The Irving Kristol Award, awarded annually by AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers, recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy, social welfare, or political understanding. The award was established in 2002 in honor of AEI senior fellow Irving Kristol, replacing the Institute’s Francis Boyer Award which had been awarded during the previous twenty-five years. A list of recipients appears below. Most of the Irving Kristols and Francis Boyer Lectures are posted at www.aei.org/kristolaward.
