Historian Bernard Lewis, whose influential books shaped generations of scholars on the West Asian region but whose views stirred fierce passions, died at an assisted living facility on Saturday, The Washington Post reported. He was 101.
Mr. Lewis, who was born in London and was a long-time professor at Princeton University, was a Cold War hawk, a strong pro-Israel Jew, and influential among White House and Pentagon planners of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. His books included The Arabs in History (1950), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), and The Crisis of Islam (2003).
Critics, however, derided what they said was his Eurocentric “clash of civilisations” view of West Asia.
Edward Said slammed Mr. Lewis as “active policy scientist, lobbyist and propagandist” in a 1982 reply to Mr. Lewis in the New York Review of Books . Mr. Lewis in turn accused Mr. Said — author of the influential book Orientalism (1978)— of unleashing an “unsavoury mixture of sneer and smear, bluster and innuendo.”
