A Prescience of the Past

My old paperback copy of Bernard Lewis’s The Arabs in History (1950) has long since fallen to tatters, its individual signatures now detached, its margins festooned with comments, its pages dog-eared and smudged. It was the first work on Arab history that I read as a student, and if I cling to my battered copy to this day, it is not solely for sentimental reasons or because it remains unmatched as a concise account of a distant culture. The book enshrines an authorial passion that communicates itself to the reader. And my own clumsy annotations reflect that passion.

It seems to me that this same fascination with his subject has characterized all of Bernard Lewis’s many books on the Near East and on Islam. He takes a serious delight in history; there is a pleasurable momentum in his narratives; he carries his readers along with him. At the same time, there is nothing breezy or glib about his writing. Each sentence is laden with hard-won fact or, when facts are in doubt, with sensible and reasoned speculation.

In responding to my old friend and classmate Martin Kramer’s superb tribute, “The Return of Bernard Lewis,” I would add only a word or two about what strikes me as one of Lewis’s most impressive, yet least noted, accomplishments as a historian: his prose style. A master of English prose, he stands squarely in the great English tradition of historical writing; it is no accident that sly echoes of Edward Gibbon, as well as of other classic historians, may be discerned in his writing. These echoes are unobtrusive but palpable.