Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis, (31 May 1916 – 19 May 2018) was a British American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis's expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West.

Lewis served as a soldier in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps during the Second World War before being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war, he returned to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern history.

In 2007 Lewis was called "the West's leading interpreter of the Middle East". Others have argued Lewis's approach is essentialist and generalizing to the Muslim world, as well as his tendency to restate hypotheses that were challenged by more recent research. On a political level, Lewis is accused by his detractors with having revived the image of the cultural inferiority of Islam and of emphasizing the dangers of jihad. His advice was frequently sought by neoconservative policymakers, including the Bush administration. His active support of the Iraq War and neoconservative ideals have since come under scrutiny.

Lewis was notable for his public debates with Edward Said, who accused Lewis of being a Zionist apologist and an Orientalist who "demeaned" Arabs, misrepresented Islam, and promoted Western imperialism, to which Lewis responded by defending Orientalism as a facet of humanism and accusing Said of politicizing the subject.

Lewis was also known for Armenian genocide denial. His argument that there was no evidence for a deliberate genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian people is rejected by mainstream historians. He argued that the mass killings resulted from a mutual struggle between two nationalistic movements, a view that has been criticized as "ahistorical." Provided by Wikipedia