Use your imagination

I’ve told this story before, but please bear with me. Bernard Lewis has long been one of the most celebrated scholars of all things Middle East (he’s literally been called the “doyen of Middle East studies” by a NYT reviewer who apparently meant it sincerely), but he’s got a problematic record. His career has included some incredibly well-done academic research, particularly his work in the vast Ottoman archives, but he has also personified some of the worst characteristics of the most pejorative connotation of the term “Orientalist.” He, not Samuel Huntington, coined the term “clash of civilizations” in reference to his “us vs. them” view of relations between the West and the Islamic world, in a 1990 Atlantic piece called, seriously, “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” He’s the intellectual grandpappy of neocons and Islamophobes everywhere, though it would probably be unfair to paint him as an Islamophobe himself (and I should note that he doesn’t go far enough for the true believers in that regard). Anyway, if you’re not familiar with the guy, it’s worth Googling to learn more about the man who’s also, and less flatteringly, been called “Bush’s historian.”

Lewis is 99 years old now, so he doesn’t have much of a public life anymore. But he used to be in high demand for talks, lectures, etc., as you might expect of a widely acclaimed expert academic. One of his go-to lectures was on “Media and Techniques of Propaganda in Islam,” and as part of that lecture he would situate the phrase Allahu Akbar alongside other “battle rallying cry”-type phrases that would be more familiar to a Western audience, like, and yes this is true, Sieg Heil and Il Duce. I know this second-hand from my grad school days and professors who had actually seen him give this lecture, but you can also get some confirmation that he used to do this from this NYRB exchange Lewis had with Edward Said way back in 1982.

Now, you might be thinking that equating Allahu Akbar to Sieg Heil (or, by analogy, Muslims to Nazis) is bound to offend some listeners, mostly because it is offensive, and you would be right. But when confronted about this comparison, Lewis would sidestep gracefully. He hadn’t equated the two phrases or said that they were similar at all, no sir, he’d simply placed them alongside one another as examples of a particular form. If you, the listener, are drawing analogies between those two phrases, well, that’s your own prejudicial baggage at work, not Bernard Lewis’s, and he can hardly be blamed for your internal bigotry, can he? That Lewis could have chosen any of countless less-inflammatory examples of the same form throughout history in order to make the same point, well, that was just beside the point.

Of course, this was bullshit; Lewis was too smart not to know exactly how his audience would react to hearing Allahu Akbar placed in the same category as Sieg Heil by someone they believed to be an expert on such matters. But he was able to formulate the analogy in such a way as to deflect criticism back on to the critic, which works quite well provided that your critic isn’t clever enough to pick up on what you’re doing. And so when Some Guy at the National Review calls Bernie Sanders a “national socialist,” and then just in case that’s too subtle for his readers follows it up by writing that this “is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust,” and then spends the night on Twitter vigorously denying that he ever called Sanders a Nazi, you know what’s going on there. The execution may be less elegant, but this is the same thing Lewis was doing in those lectures back in his heyday.

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