Bernard Lewis
OrientalismBernard Lewis occupies a central place in Edward Said’s critique of modern Orientalism: a scholar whose standing in the Anglo-American Middle Eastern establishment gives his writing an authority that, in Said’s reading, can make polemic appear disinterested. Said examines Lewis’s accounts of revolution and Islam not as isolated errors but as examples of a durable way of describing Arab and Muslim societies as static, irrational, and governed by inherited religious essence. The criticism connects particular choices of vocabulary and historical presentation to a broader political effect: narrowing how readers can understand Muslim action and political change.
Scholarly standing and political argument
Said presents Lewis as a learned Orientalist whose work carries the authority of an established field. He argues that, for at least fifteen years before his discussion, Lewis’s writing had become aggressively ideological despite its gestures toward subtlety and irony. The central problem is not simply that Said disagrees with Lewis’s conclusions; it is that writing presented as liberal, objective scholarship can, in Said’s view, function as propaganda against the people and societies it describes. He places this charge within Orientalism’s history, where scholarly authority has often made political assumptions seem like neutral knowledge.
Said’s later account returns to this dispute through Lewis’s essays collected in Islam and the West. He describes a section of the book as an attack on his own work, surrounded by generalizations about Muslims being enraged by modernity and Islam never having separated church and state. Said objects that these claims give scant attention to differences among individual Muslims, societies, traditions, and historical periods. Lewis’s self-appointed position as a spokesman for Orientalists matters, in this account, because the formulas do not remain private academic opinions: they circulate among imitators and help alert Western readers to an allegedly violent, congenitally undemocratic Islamic world.
Revolution and the interpretation of Arabic
Said’s close examination of Lewis’s essay “Islamic Concepts of Revolution” turns on a question of order as much as definition. Arabic speakers know thawra as the word for revolution, and Lewis’s essay eventually addresses that meaning. But, Said notes, Lewis delays the discussion until the article’s end, first treating dawla, fitna, and bughat largely through historical and religious contexts. The sequence directs attention away from contemporary political usage and toward a history of terms. Lewis’s conclusion, as Said presents it, is that the Western doctrine of a right to resist bad government is alien to Islamic thought, producing political attitudes he characterizes as defeatist and quietist.
When Lewis finally explains thawra, he traces the root th-w-r to rising, stirring, or excitement, including the rising of a camel, and follows usages associated with rebellion, petty sovereignty, and sedition. He cites the term’s application to the party kings of eleventh-century Spain, a medieval dictionary example advising that excitement be allowed to subside, and later uses for the French Revolution and other revolutions. Said argues that this historical account makes the Arabic word’s association with struggle for political values recede behind a vocabulary of agitation and excitement. In his reading, the article’s careful appearance of philological learning helps naturalize a diminished picture of Arab political agency.
Said makes explicit the gendered implications he finds in this vocabulary. Terms such as “stirred,” “excited,” and “rising up,” he argues, gather a sexualized meaning that casts Arab action as nervous arousal rather than serious political purpose. Revolution becomes, in this interpretation, not a struggle for values but a lesser, disordered substitute for action. Said’s point is not that a dictionary’s etymologies alone prove Lewis’s intent; he insists that a scholar attentive to linguistic nuance should also be answerable for the nuances created by his own language. The argument shows how apparently technical description can carry a political judgment without announcing itself as one.
Recasting revolt as religious threat
Said traces a related argument through two versions of Lewis’s writing. Lewis published a chapter called “The Revolt of Islam” in 1964 and republished much of its material twelve years later as “The Return of Islam,” with alterations for its new venue, Commentary. Said treats the change from revolt to return as significant: the later title presents Muslim political activity as a recurring condition that needs explanation for readers who, in Said’s account, are being encouraged to expect Muslims to accept Israeli hegemony in the Near East.
Both versions refer to an anti-imperialist demonstration or riot in Cairo in 1945, which Lewis describes as anti-Jewish. Said challenges the evidentiary presentation. The account says that Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox churches were attacked and damaged, but, he notes, does not explain how this establishes that the riot was anti-Jewish. He also points to differences between the versions: the later account makes the demonstration sound less clearly the responsibility of political leaders and refers more broadly to churches of three kinds, whereas the earlier account is more specific about three churches. For Said, these alterations are not incidental. They change how responsibility and the character of the crowd appear to the reader while leaving the claim of anti-Jewishness insufficiently demonstrated.
Said interprets the anecdote as serving a larger polemical claim: that Islam is an anti-Semitic ideology rather than merely a religion. He identifies a tension between describing Islam as a fearful mass phenomenon and saying that it is not genuinely popular. In his account, the tension does not slow the argument; instead, Muslims are represented as ruled by instinct, passion, and unreflecting hatred. Said says that Lewis often avoids stating the most inflammatory version of this position outright, while maintaining that Islam can readily accommodate anti-Semitism and has done so. The result, as Said reads it, is a portrait of a religion and its adherents as essentially unchanged, with historical and political interpretation made to begin and end with the assertion that Muslims are Muslims.
Said also objects to the explanatory framework that such writing displaces. He argues that contemporary Muslim political life cannot be understood simply by importing Western labels such as left and right, progressive and conservative; he compares that mismatch to describing a cricket match through the assumptions of a baseball correspondent. In his analysis, Lewis’s broad religious explanation and the inadequate political categories offered in its place work together: one fixes Muslims in an unchanging identity, while the other fails to account for the particular circumstances in which political action takes place.
Publication, authority, and contestation
Said’s criticism of Lewis extends beyond individual essays to the authority and circulation of his scholarship. The notes associated with the discussion list Lewis’s works on Islamic revolution, race and color, and Islam in history, including Race and Color in Islam (1971) and Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East (1973). The bibliography establishes a sustained body of writing around the subjects Said scrutinizes; in the article’s argument, the significance of that body lies partly in how learned authority can reinforce claims that are politically consequential.
The dispute also forms part of the contested reception of Orientalism. Said describes Lewis, fifteen years after the book appeared, as making a sustained attempt to portray a critique of Orientalism as meaningless and as a violation of disinterested scholarship. Said rejects that framing. He argues that scholarship cannot be assessed apart from the institutions and political circumstances in which it is produced, and that a critique of Orientalist authority is not equivalent to an attack on learning itself. The issue is whether the conventions of scholarly objectivity are being used to examine assumptions—or to shield them from scrutiny.
In 1994, the dispute acquired a legal dimension. According to reports in Libération and The Guardian, Armenian and human-rights organizations brought criminal and civil suits against Lewis in France under the statute that criminalizes denial of the Nazi Holocaust. The charge was that he had denied, in French newspapers, that a genocide of Armenians took place under the Ottoman Empire. The evidence establishes the existence of the reported suits and the nature of the allegation; it does not establish their outcome. Their mention extends Said’s account of tendentious generalization into a public controversy over historical representation and the consequences of denying a people’s experience.
The reach and limits of Said’s judgment
Said treats Lewis as a particularly visible example of how Orientalist description can convert a complex, changing society into an essentialized object of knowledge. The case is persuasive in his analysis because it connects several scales of representation: the delayed definition of a politically charged word, the sexualized coloring of its synonyms, the revision of a historical anecdote, and the larger assertion that Islam does not change. Each move constrains the reader’s view of Muslim political life, making evidence of action easier to recast as instinct or recurrence than as a response to specific historical conditions.
The portrayal remains Said’s critical judgment, not an independent adjudication of every claim Lewis made. Its force comes from the close attention Said gives to arrangement, terminology, and revision, and from his insistence that scholarly authority does not make those choices politically innocent. Lewis’s importance in the account is therefore double: he is an individual intellectual opponent, and a test case for Said’s wider argument that the language of expertise can preserve an imperial frame even when it speaks in the calm register of objective study.
