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Lewis of Arabia

(Wall Street Journal) - Tunku Varadarajan Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, is an old-fashioned, assiduous scholar, now retired from formal academic tenure. He's 87, and could so easily have slumped into comfortable retirement in his spacious Princeton home. But he's busier, in the sense of meeting public demands on his time - "oh, conferences, dinners, interviews, op-eds," plus calls from the White House and calls from Baghdad - than he's ever been in his career. Of all the scholars of Islam, Mr. Lewis is the one whom Muslims would do best to heed. "If they can abandon grievance and victimhood," he wrote in What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, "they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization."
2003-09-26 00:00:00
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