At the age of 95, Bernard Lewis has written (with the help of his partner) a fascinating account of his extraordinary life and the events and influences that have made him the world’s most eminent historian on the Middle East.
His admirably terse style and the freshness of his recollections could be the work of a man 30 years his junior but we are fortunate that he has waited until now to write his autobiography, for he can place the past 30 tumultuous years, with the rise of militant Islam and the Middle East in constant turmoil, in their historical context. He is, for instance, pessimistic about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamic movements.
Lewis was born into a middle-class, Jewish family in London and, although not religious, insisted on continuing with Hebrew after his barmitzvah, which was the start of his lifelong devotion to the study of all things Middle Eastern, including a mastery or at least working knowledge of some 15 languages.
Yet the fact of his being Jewish was a severe obstacle to his ability to carry out his researches in the region itself, after London University and wartime service in British Intelligence; he could work only in Turkey, Iran and Israel. Fortunately, Istanbul housed the hitherto closed Ottoman Empire archives, which, to Lewis’s surprise, were made available to him. Their precise cataloguing of everyday life over many centuries laid the foundation for Lewis’s richly deserved reputation for meticulous scholarship.
