Bernard Lewis, who just celebrated his centennial, is the Middle East’s most venerated scholar, and a voice of clarity among the region’s distorted facts and fabrications,100 Years in the Making,Bernard Lewis, who just celebrated his centennial, is the Middle East’s most venerated scholar, and a voice of clarity among the region’s distorted facts and fabrications
Photos: flash90 Lior Mizrachi Bernard Lewis archives
On September 11 2001 Bernard Lewis was 85 years old and 11 years past “retirement.”
As three commercial airliners crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on the orders of Osama bin Laden Lewis’s What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East was in galleys almost ready for press. It became a major best seller.
With the publication the next year of The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror Lewis had two number-one best sellers on the New York Times nonfiction list — one in hardcover and one in paperback.
“My historical studies suddenly became relevant” he writes in his 2012 memoir Notes on a Century. He was interviewed endlessly and was invited to Washington D.C. to educate politicians and to lecture at think tanks.
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