Studying the Other: Different Ways of Looking at the Middle East and Africa.

Zubrod, Gordon A.D.

Studying the Other: Different Ways of Looking at the Middle East and Africa

By Bernard Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

Reviewed by Gordon A.D. Zubrod, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Middle District of Pennsylvania

Video: http://www.asmeascholars.org/Conference/2008ConferenceHighlights/tabid/820/Default.aspx

On April 25, 2008, Bernard Lewis, the pre-eminent Princeton historian on Islam, spoke to the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) on the topic of "Studying the Other: Different Ways of Looking at the Middle East and Africa." Dr. Lewis began with an observation by Samuel Johnson: "A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity. Nor is that curiosity ever more agreeably or usefully employed than in examining the laws and customs of foreign nations."

Professor Lewis first addressed the modern polemic, employed both by Islamists and some American academics, that the only reason the West has shown any interest in "Orientalism" is its imperial design to subjugate and oppress the people falling within that definition. He characterized the "imperialism" theory with the question, "Where does ignorance end and falsehood begin?"

Lewis attacked the underpinnings of the "imperialist" theory by pointing out that the interest in Arabic history, literature, and language preceded the colonial era by several centuries. At both Oxford and Cambridge, chairs of Arabic studies were established in the sixteenth century. (The colonial era in the Middle East commenced in the eighteenth century.) Rather than taking the imperial offensive, Lewis noted, Europe was "threatened, not threatening," from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the West showed an interest in Islamic culture that the Muslim world itself lacked. The record faithfully records the great service that the West performed by preserving what would most certainly have been lost by Islamic lack of curiosity and neglect. It was an intellectual interest composed of philosophical, philological, and theological elements.

The reason for the West's interest lay in Europe's own cultural underpinnings. First and foremost, Christianity, particularly after the Reformation, was interested in evangelism, thus mastering the language as part of a larger apologetic directed at the Islamic world. Moreover, there were significant numbers of Arab Christians in the Islamic world that drew the attention of both Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders. Second, the Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Arabic--even though at the time Turkish (a modern language) was the lingua franca of the Islamic world--was seen as one of the ancient languages, and worthy of study on that basis alone. Third, Europe was a continent of many countries, many languages. Mastering languages was a part of European life. Thus, the primary impulse behind Western interest in the Islamic world was, from the beginning, theological, philosophical, literary, and historical, that is to say, intellectual. Indeed, the West introduced scholarship to the Islamic world and prepared the critical texts for Arabic religious and literary writings.

Dr. Lewis stressed that an intellectual interest in "the Other" is a uniquely Western phenomenon. Non-Western cultures (such as Islam) have shown little interest in studying other nations beyond the purely pragmatic: medicine, engineering, economic models, etc.

The West's greatest challenge in relation to free intellectual inquiry into Islamic ideas, practices, and cultural assumptions is political correctness and multiculturalism, which Professor Lewis characterized as "thought control," "a limitation on free speech," "an imposed orthodoxy," where Islamic values are immune from criticism or even critical analysis. This post-modern challenge to the spirit of free inquiry must be resolutely met by the members of ASMEA and by all who believe that Western civilization is worth defending