Nobody who wants to win the war against terror should have to take anything Lewis says at face value.
Update: here's something he told the New York Sun a year and a half ago that I find flawed:
Mr. Lewis said a great deal of material exists - from Arabs, from Persians, and from Turks - that can form the basis for democracies in the region. He quoted from a 1786 letter to the king's court in France from the French ambassador to Istanbul explaining why the Ottoman Empire was slow in making decisions. The ambassador reported that unlike in France, where the king made a decision and that was it, "here the sultan has to consult" and so it "takes time to get things done."Let me get this straight. The king of France didn't have a council to discuss many issues with? Actually, the problem here is that Lewis is ambiguously referring to king Louis XVI, who together with his queen, Marie Antoinette, ran an absolute dictatorship that led to the French Revolution and the subsequent overthrow of the terrible twosome for their crimes against the people of France. The way in which Lewis cites this, it's as though he were implying that ALL monarchs, whether in France or other parts of Europe, were total autocrats. Not so, and many of them did have councils. Of course, even with a council, there can still be corruption, and many of these political ruling councils, both in Europe AND the middle east, were as bad as the monarchs under whom they worked. This was certainly so even for the Ottoman empire, and whether or not things worked slowly under the Turkish sultan of the time, he and they were still a bad lot. Lewis is really blowing it by looking at all these details in such a superficial way.
2 comments:
Huh? Actually, historically the Muslims treated their Jewish millet far more generously than most European "Christian" polities. Lewis knows more about the Arabs, Ottomans, Persians, and Jews in the Middle East than anyone else.
I myself was in the party that "discovered" around 4000 Jews in North Yemen in 1976 & talked to them for a long time in Arabic. They were unmolested by the government, they insisted. They told me they were happy & able to practice their religion.
By the way, the Israeli govt was insisting at the time that all Jews had been "driven out" of Yemen.
I reported the event to the State Dept and the event was on google for a while. It may still be, though I looked for it recently & it had disappeared.
Oh, by the way. King Louis XVI was an absolutist monarch, but hardly autocratic. It was his dithering and compromises as much as anything that led to the Fall of the Bastille.
It's regrettable that you accept the myth of Muslim tolerance for Jews. Did not Muhammed lead a slaughter of the Jews in Medina in his time? There's also Article 7 of the Hamas covenant that quotes a medieval Muslim fable as follows: at Judgement Day, the Muslims will fight the Jews who will hide behind rocks and trees. The rocks and trees will cry out, O Muslim! A Jew is hiding behind me. Come kill him.
As far as how they treated Jews, Maimonides (Rambam) wrote in his Letter to Yemen (Igerret Teyman) that no people had ever oppressed the Jews as severely as the Arabs did. That's a clear contradiction of what you believe. This letter is available in a translation by A.S. Halkin, recently reprinted in a book edited by David Hartman and published by the Jewish Publication Society.
The Yemenite Jews that you met may have been too afraid to tell you the truth about their being oppressed. In any case, more recently, Jews there in Yemen have been persecuted and sometimes kidnapped by rebels, and this has been reported in the world press.
Two books that show the reality of how bad Jews were treated in the Muslim world include Norman Stillman's The Jews of Arab Lands, and Bat Ye'or's The Dhimmi, also her The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam. If you read these books, let me know your reaction.
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