Right Voices

For years the US Government has listened to and learnt from the 90-year-old Professor Bernard Lewis

But his impact upon American leaders has focused less on particular policy recommendations than on how to think about the problem. As the leading historian of modern Turkey, he argues that late Ottoman decline was self-inflicted rather than due to Western expansion. It resulted from an outdated cultural superiority complex, which held that infidels had little to teach them.

Similarly, Lewis contends that the West cannot be blamed for the ills of modern Muslim societies: it is up to Muslim elites to make the right choices that will be bring their societies into the 21st century ” just as Ataturk did in the ruins of the Ottoman empire in the first half of the 20th century (Lewis is one of the last Westerners actually to have seen the founder of the Turkish Republic).

Not all of Lewis’s views have been accepted. How democracy is implemented is critical to him: unlike much of the Administration, he believes that free elections should be the culmination of the reform process, rather than the starting point (as shown by the ballots in Egypt and Palestine that have strengthened anti-democratic Islamists). Democracy, he contends, needs to be introduced “like an antibiotic ” drip-drip, or else it kills the patient”.

But as he enters his tenth decade, Lewis is most alarmed not by the Arab world ” where he detects signs of hope ” but by what is happening in the EU and specifically in his native land. “The very composition of society is at stake,” he warned me. “The rate of immigration from parts of the Muslim world is altering the way in which society is run. And the Muslim populations of the EU, many of whom started out as quite moderate in their native lands, seem to be indoctrinated by some of the worst elements of their own co-religionists. Central to this is the oil money of Saudi Arabia, funding extreme Wahhabite doctrines.”

If the Saudi-friendly house of Bush listens to this message, then Lewis’s 100th will be an even more joyous occasion than was his 90th.