Can One Be Simultaneously a Zionist and a Great Historian of Islam?

Can one be a Zionist and, at the same time, a great historian of Islam and the Arabs? As Martin Kramer’s essay, “The Return of Bernard Lewis,” amply attests, and as its subject’s life and career unambiguously demonstrate, the answer is a resounding yes.

Before going further, we need to pause at the peculiarity of the question itself—a question seldom posed in other contexts. No one normally asks whether a Protestant American scholar living at the time of the cold war could simultaneously be a great historian of Russia or an expert on Soviet foreign policy. By contrast, however, a powerful current of opinion has long held Western and non-Muslim scholars to be disqualified by definition from the objective study of Islam and the Arabs.

In recent decades, the most influential statement of such rejectionism was Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism. There Said argued that, from its beginnings in the 19th century until the present day, Western study of the Middle East has been not only uninformed but manipulative of historical fact, infected by patronizing arrogance, and a willing accomplice of imperialist designs on Muslim lands and peoples.