[Note: The following is a perceptive review of two recently published books:
FAITH AND POWER: Religion and Politics in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis
(Oxford University Press, 2010) and MUHAMMAD AND THE BELIEVERS At the Origins of Islam by Fred M. Donner (The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2010). The latest same-old stuff by Lewis can be consigned to the dustbin but Donner should be carefully read by a wide audience.]

by Max Rodenbeck, The New York Times, June 27

In the United States, a country saturated with instant punditry, serious scholars rarely attain celebrity as public intellectuals. Yet Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, has long radiated influence far beyond his specialization in Ottoman studies. A friend of Henry Kissinger and a mentor to subsequent cohorts of conservative policy makers, Lewis arguably has done more than any Mideast expert to mold American attitudes to the region.

His latest book, “Faith and Power,” a collection of essays, lectures and speeches from the past two decades loosely linked to the theme of relations between Islam and the state, reminds us why. Lewis is a fine writer, with a commanding authorial voice that sweeps magisterially across the ages. His linkage of diverting historical anecdotes to pressing current issues and his skill at contracting complex ideas into clever apothegms do much to explain his appeal to politicians in search of a punchy quote.

Here, for instance, is Lewis contrasting political structures at home and abroad: “In America one uses money to buy power, while in the Middle East one uses power to acquire money.” Even a subject as vexed as the search for Arab-Israeli peace boils down to this satisfyingly pithy formula: “If the conflict is about the size of Israel, then long and difficult negotiations can eventually resolve the problem. But if the conflict is about the existence of Israel, then serious negotiation is impossible.”

Such distillations can be salutary, but may also prove dangerously reductionist. Take Lewis’s remark that democracies do not make war, and dictatorships do not make peace. This glib elaboration of a neoconservative mantra is easily challenged. The strongmen who ran Grenada, Panama and Iraq may have been bad guys, but there is no disputing that it was the United States that attacked them, not the other way around. The Egyptian dictator Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel, not the democratically elected Hamas party.

Yet Lewis blithely hoists his rhetoric to even more contentious heights. Like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, he asserts, Middle Eastern dictators need war to justify their tyranny. This means peace will come only with their collapse or their defeat. In other words, democracies must clobber every dictator. And that’s not all. Giving a more specific nudge to policy makers, Lewis pretends to have discerned “deep roots” of democratic traditions in Iraq and Iran, of all places. Democracy might easily prevail there, he opines, and inspire others in the region, “given the chance.”

It might be argued that it is hardly Lewis’s fault if some in the Bush administration took such expert advice a little too literally. Yet Lewis himself makes his intentions pretty clear in another essay: “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.”

The quaintly missionary idea of “bringing freedom” to benighted peoples may simply betray Lewis’s age: he was born in England in 1916, in the already waning glory of the British Empire. But the shrill alarmism jars with his repute as a historian whose most notable contribution has been to chronicle the relative decline of Islam in the past three centuries. It is a fair judgment to say that the four-fifths of the world’s people who are not Muslim appear in no immediate or even distant danger of extinction at the point of a scimitar.

If it were only the present that Lewis perceived through a gently distorted mirror, this might not detract from his distinction as a historian. But he gets the past subtly wrong, too, often by omitting vital context. He says that when the Arabs rejected the partition of Palestine in 1947, it was simply because they refused to accept having a Jewish state next door. Yet Arabs were not alone in questioning the United Nations plan to allocate 56 percent of Palestine’s territory to a minority consisting mostly of recent immigrants, which made up barely a third of the population and owned just 7 percent of the land. Greece, India and Cuba, among others, also voted no, while China, Ethiopia, Colombia, Chile and Mexico abstained. The overriding motive of all these doubters was presumably not bigotry, as Lewis implies, but concern about Palestinians’ rights.

Modern history may not be Lewis’s forte. Yet even regarding older eras, his views sometimes seem at odds with those of another distinguished historian. Fred M. Donner is a professor of Near Eastern history at the University of Chicago. His new book, “Muhammad and the Believers,” is a learned and brilliantly original, yet concise and accessible study of Islam’s formative first century.

Western historians have tended to ascribe the astonishing success of the new faith to external factors, like economic and political conditions in seventh-century Arabia. Donner persuasively returns the faith itself to centrality. Equally convincing is his well-documented assertion that Islam, at its origins, was rather different from the religion later understood by either its practitioners or by non-Muslims.

This more sophisticated reading of history explains Islam not as a static doctrine, but as one that evolved from an ecumenical, syncretic, pietist and millenarian cult into a more dogmatic and exclusivist faith. In contrast to Lewis, who depicts Islam as aggressive from the start, Donner shows that contemporary followers of other religions initially, and perhaps even for several generations, regarded Islam as an open-minded and not specially threatening movement with universalist aspirations. A Nestorian Christian patriarch writing to a bishop in A.D. 647 testified not only that his new Muslim rulers were peaceable, but also that they honored priests and bestowed monasteries with gifts. An Armenian bishop recorded around A.D. 660 that the first governor of Muslim Jerusalem was Jewish.

The documentary evidence suggests that the term “Muslim” came into common use only in the eighth century. The earlier word, “Believers,” described a community that embraced many faiths.

gain in contrast to Lewis, Donner shows that while the theocratic leanings of Islam make it seem different from other monotheistic faiths today, at the beginning they merely perpetuated the models of the contemporary great powers, Christian Byzantium and Sasanian Persia. Over time, as Donner shows, doctrinal and dynastic divisions among the Muslims created a need to enforce orthodoxy, rendering Islam more distinct from other faiths and hardening its boundaries.

Indeed, it was Muslim historians themselves, writing only after this process was well under way, who began to portray Islam as having been doctrinally rigid from the start. The Muslim triumphalism that Lewis discerns, it seems, was largely introduced in retrospect, to explain the seemingly miraculous spread of the faith as a result of heavenly favor. Donner’s explanation of the process by which Muslims came to define themselves is both fascinating and enlightening. Surely, this kind of subtle understanding of how history works comes closer to the truth than Lewis’s lapidary pronouncements from on high.

Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.