View Lewis's lecture
Christopher DeMuth
President, AEI
In recent weeks we have been in essentially continuous mourning over the deaths of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gerald Ford, Seymour Martin Lipset, Roberta Wohlstetter, Nelson Polsby, and Rosalie Silberman. As Charles Murray reminds us, we are all beneficiaries of the achievements of individuals of exceptional brilliance, drive, and character. When Milton Friedman died in November, my first thought was that it was scary to be living in a world that he was not part of. So too for those who have followed. But so long as we in this hall continue to congregate and collaborate and emulate, not only their memories but their wisdom and their spirits may live on.
On behalf of everyone at AEI, I offer hearty thanks to Pfizer, Inc., for once again underwriting our annual dinner, and to all of the men and women, business firms, law firms, and associations who are on our Dinner Committee and are patrons and sponsors for the evening. I wish to emphasize our gratitude and pride for the support of many leading corporations for AEI’s work throughout the year--for your financial support and intellectual support as well. There is a movement afoot to treat the political views and interests of corporations as inherently suspect and in need of official supervision. Senators are warning firms not to advance incorrect views; pension funds, the accounting profession, and the plaintiffs bar are being deputized in various efforts to bring the corporation to political heel. This is a pernicious development. The corporation is the transmission belt of much of our saving, prosperity, and progress. It is the place where many Americans pursue their vocations and spend most of their lives. And it is the locus-point of tremendously valuable social intelligence--information about society, economy, and technology that is to a unique degree generated by reality and analyzed with an eye towards something other than politics.
Those who objurgate the corporation as an independent source of ideas and activism include the major media--themselves corporations--and political representatives--themselves eager for corporate funding. But the Constitution affords them no monopoly on policy debate, and for them to acquire one would be dangerous to our social climate and political health. The corporation is a vital, reality-based counterweight to those for whom politics is primary. We all depend on you not just for our stuff but for our freedom, and we’re counting on you to hold your ground.
Bernard Lewis has done AEI the great honor of accepting our Irving Kristol Award for 2007. We will first hear a tribute from resident fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, who studied under Professor Lewis at Princeton and then spent a decade with the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East, where he was what is discreetly called a clandestine specialist. Then James Q. Wilson--premier political scientist, emeritus professor at Harvard and UCLA, currently Ronald Reagan Professor at Pepperdine, for twenty years chairman of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers--will offer remarks and introduce our lecturer.
In the past five years, Bernard Lewis and his works have both become well known to the general public, and both have circulated widely in the senior councils of our government. Let me say this: To the extent his advice has been followed, things have gone well, and to the extent his advice has not been followed, things have gone badly. That pattern, although not exactly pleasing in its proportions, is at least gratifying for AEI--it demonstrates our operating premise that free inquiry and serious scholarship can have large practical consequences. Much more important, free inquiry and serious scholarship are singular, defining virtues of Western civilization--so the utility of Bernard Lewis’s scholarship is reason for hope in what is still the beginning, learning-curve phase of our conflict with Islamic fascism.
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Resident Fellow, AEI
I'm honored to give this tribute to Bernard Lewis, because with the exception of my grandfather and my father, no man has done more for me.
My relationship with Bernard really begins in 1985 when I entered the Clandestine Service and quickly discovered that with just a little ingenuity and deceit I could get more or less unfettered access to the CIA's archives. And the first thing I did was to trace and pull the files on my former teachers, and the first file I pulled was Bernard's.
When I opened it, I found one sheet of paper, an FBI trace from late 1955 or early 1956 if memory serves, that essentially stated, if I may summarize, that Bernard Lewis was a communist. This was news to Bernard.
Both he and I had hoped that there would be juicier material--something about all of the people who've encountered him, about all those indebted to the man, about the many circles through which he's crossed.
Many great scholars have no children: no disciples, no students who advance their teacher's wisdom and insights. Bernard Lewis has hundreds of children. If we count those who have been profoundly influenced by the man, perhaps thousands. And we his students are united in our love of the old man because he has given us the most precious gift of all, the gift of sight. He has taught us how to time travel. Whether we are in Washington, New York, Los Angeles or London, we really are in Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Isfahan, or Samarkand. And when we are there, we are at home. Bernard Lewis has taught us many things, but among the most important, he has told us to learn the languages that Muslims speak, to listen, and to respect what we observe.
When I was in the CIA, a senior operations officer in the Near East Division once asked me what I thought was the most important thing a case officer working the Middle Eastern target should know. Without hesitation, I answered he or she should read The Muslim Discovery of Europe, Bernard Lewis's greatest book. For The Muslim Discovery of Europe shows the reader how Muslims through the centuries have looked at us, the West, and, as important, how they have seen themselves. This book is the most effective antidote to mirror-imaging, the debilitating disease that often strikes statesmen, scholars, and spooks.
In Bernard Lewis's long life, many in the West and the Islamic world have sought Bernard's company and counsel. Presidents, prime ministers, kings, popes, Muslim fundamentalists, Iranian clerics, and most recently, the Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhdhafi. One of the reasons they have done so is because they know how serious a student of Islam Bernard is, how he has learned to see Islamic societies from the inside out. They know that Bernard has always allowed Muslims to speak for themselves, and that he has always shown respect.
There were many times in the CIA, when I was face to face with a total stranger whom I had to open up in a short period of time, or after the Agency, when I was traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, visiting mosques, religious schools and kabab joints, trying to make sense of it all, and I could hear Bernard's words, and I could stay afloat and sometimes even make new friends.
If Bernard's CIA file had had one sheet of paper in it that said, "The West's greatest scholar of Islam who has allowed history's two most provocative civilizations to see each other clearly, and who has allowed Muslim, Jew, and Christian to have a real dialogue of civilizations," that would have been sufficient. It would have been accurate.
So from me to you, Bernard, Tâ abad ol-âbâd, az ostâd-o-dûstam, kheli tashakkor, kheli qadardâni mikonam. Thank you, Bernard. Cheers.
James Q. Wilson
Chairman, AEI Council of Academic Advisers
Bernard Lewis's career is a testimony to the great strength, and associated risks, of great scholarship put in service of important issues. For decades he has been the world's most distinguished student of Muslim history. In accordance with the general rule that no good deed goes unpunished, he has paid a price for this achievement.
Being a Jew he was denied access to many Muslim countries. This meant that he had to do much of his work in Turkey, the most Western of all Muslim nations, where he devoured the archives of the Ottoman Empire that enabled him to write about Muslim experiences throughout the world and helped him produce his magnificent history of Turkey.
These achievements led him to be an "Orientalist" and thus to be attacked by certain professors for whom scholarship ought to be valued, not for its intrinsic benefit, but in order to advance a political cause.
When in France, he remarked to an interviewer that the tragic death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Turkey, though a terrible human loss, was not quite the same as the Nazi Holocaust. For that offense he was put on trial in a French court and fined one franc.
The award that we give him tonight is not meant to compensate for these indignities but to honor him for the extraordinary achievements that made them inevitable, namely, his exceptional scholarship.
On behalf of the Council of Academic Advisers, I am pleased to present him with the Kristol Award. Though Professor Lewis has learned Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Latin, Greek, Farsi, and Turkish, I am happy to report that his lecture tonight will be in English.
AEI’s Irving Kristol Award for 2007 is inscribed:
To Bernard Lewis
Who has stood at the Bosporus for seventy years
Historian and interpreter across the great divide
Sage of our pasts, presage of our future.
