BALA CYNWYD, Pennsylvania (Press Release) — Scholars for Peace in the Middle East has issued a statement mourning the passing of Professor Bernard Lewis who died on May 19th in Voorhees, New Jersey at 101.
Lewis was born in London, and served in the British army in World War II. He devoted his entire career to the study of Middle Eastern languages, religion and history, with a particular focus on the interaction of Islam and the West. He was the first Western scholar permitted access to the archives of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul and was the foremost expert on Turkey.
Lewis influenced countless generations of students, diplomats, and intelligence analysts who all learned from his writings. He famously warned of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islam and the West, a term he coined before it was popularized by the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington.
Our colleague ,Martin Kramer who was one of Lewis’s students and worked as a cataloguer when he was his doctoral adviser stated that, “Professor Lewis had an encyclopedic knowledge of source materials, and an astonishing range of languages: Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Hebrew, and all the Romance languages, plus Danish and Russian,” Kramer recalled. “One thing I quickly learned is that it did not matter what source a language might be in. As one of his students, you were expected to access it and figure out what it said. So you found yourself plowing through dictionaries, trying to decipher languages you never properly studied, in order to read some article he flagged.”
Lewis’s departure represents an end of era for sure, but his writing and influence will live on and not forgotten.
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Preceding provided by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)