Middle East Pundits and their Mainly Worthless Prophecies

First, through the good offices of Mosaic, let me wish Bernard Lewis, my former thesis supervisor, a happy one-hundredth birthday! Next, let me commend Martin Kramer’s “The Return of Bernard Lewis” to readers present and future.

A great historian, Bernard Lewis has written on a wide range of subjects with learning, wit, and what his enemies might term “repressively authoritarian lucidity.” Kramer’s title is calqued upon the title of one particular essay by Lewis, “The Return of Islam,” published in 1976: a ground-breaking and premonitory work. At the time, Lewis’s was, if not the sole voice articulating the argument that religion was “still the most effective form of consensus in Muslim countries,” then certainly a lonely one.

Thus, only two years earlier, to take one prominent example, the British international-relations expert Fred Halliday, in Arabia Without Sultans, was confidently looking forward to the triumph of secular left-wing revolutionary movements in the Arabian peninsula (admittedly, “after a difficult and protracted struggle”). As for the regime of the shah of Iran, Halliday foresaw, in Iran: Dictatorship and Development (1979), four possible futures: (a) continuance of the dictatorship; (b) the regime’s survival after token concessions to democratic pressures; (c) the removal of the shah by a coup and the installation of a military dictatorship; (d) a bourgeois democracy under a purely constitutional monarchy. Nowhere in the cards, evidently, was the triumph of Islamic theocracy (let alone Halliday’s own favored outcome, a socialist revolution).