European interest in Islam derived from fear of a monotheistic, culturally and militarily formidable competitor to Christianity. Lewis’s tactic here is blatantly to suppress a significant amount of history. On the one hand Lewis wishes to reduce Islamic Orientalism to the status of an innocent and enthusiastic department of scholarship on the other he wishes to pretend that Orientalism is too complex, various and technical to exist in a form for any non-Orientalist (like myself and many others) to criticize.
To imply as he does that the branch of Orientalism dealing with Islam and the Arabs is a learned discipline that can be compared with classical philology is as appropriate as comparing Professor Menachem Milson, Israeli Orientalist and civilian governor of the West Bank, with Wilamowitz. The fact is that the present political moment allows him to deliver ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism. He proceeds in his usual mode by suppressing or distorting the truth and by innuendo, methods to which he adds that veneer of omniscient tranquil authority which he supposes is the way scholars talk. Of course, these are familiar attributes of the Orientalists’ breed, some of whom have at least had the courage to be honest in their active denigration of Islamic, as well as other non-European peoples. Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong. It is edifying to note that between Lewis and his Princeton co-luminary Clifford Geertz, whose rather trivial arguments against me were presented only a few weeks before, they seem to have unlimited indulgence to display their attitudes in The New York Review of Books (given that Orientalism was already reviewed in its pages three years ago).
Yet despite these protestations, the sheer length of his diatribe and the four years of gestation he needed to produce it suggest that he takes what I say quite seriously, non-Orientalist though I may be. Insouciant, outrageous, arbitrary, false, absurd, astonishing, reckless-these are some of the words Bernard Lewis uses to characterize what he interprets me as saying in Orientalism (1978).
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